Feds don’t fear ‘Reaper,’ send top goon to L.I. jail
THE MS-13 GANG’S top East Coast overlord faces life in prison on charges of peddling heroin from Texas to the Bronx while orchestrating murders to the tiniest detail.
Reputed top echelon boss Miguel Angel Corea Diaz, known simply as “Reaper” to his bloodthirsty cohorts, was busted in Maryland last year and shipped back to Long Island on Thursday for trial.
“We now have the highestranking MS-13 member on the East Coast in custody,” said Nassau County District Attorney Madeline Singas.
“This was a massive investigation that yielded a very notorious and high-ranking gang member. It’s not going to be easy for them to recover from this.”
Diaz, 35, of Laurel, Md., served as the intermediary between MS-13 higher-ups and a street crew known as the “Sailors Clique,” with dozens of gangsters under his command, officials said.
His reach extended from El Salvador to Texas and throughout the eastern United States, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland, officials said.
Gang members needed his permission to commit assorted crimes — including murder, according to authorities. Diaz was in direct contact with the gang’s top leadership in El Salvador.
Among his deadly duties: Delivering orders on whether targets should be strangled, stabbed or shot, and even “getting down to the details of how deep to dig a hole” for burying bodies, said Singas.
The investigation actually spared two people targeted for death by MS-13 killers in Elizabeth, N.J., and Prince Georges County, Md.
Two defendants were arrested in the Garden State plot, and a third man was arrested while recruiting extra firepower to off the target in Maryland.
The burly, bearded and baldheaded Diaz — who pleaded not guilty — was accused of heroin trafficking in Texas, Maryland and the Bronx, along with five counts of conspiracy.
He was arrested last October in Maryland on heroin-selling charges and held pending his extradition to Nassau County.
A total of 22 agencies were involved in the arrest, including the attorney general’s officer in El Salvador, said James Hunt, special agent in charge of the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“The leader is known as ‘The Reaper,’ appropriate for the murder and mayhem left in his wake throughout the East Coast,” said Hunt.
Two DEA agents marched a manacled Diaz into the hearing, with the suspect wearing black jeans and a black Adidas T-shirt.
Officials said an elaborate wiretapping operation led them to Diaz, who returns to court May 10. If convicted, the accused gangbanger faces life in prison.
The deadly street gang was blamed for more than 30 murders on Long Island in the last five years, including the brutal executions of two teenage girls hacked to death with machetes in September 2016.
In the April 2017 murders of four young men, one of the killers sent a video showing the butchered bodies to one victim’s girlfriend.
This past December, Suffolk County detectives thwarted another killing with the arrest of five bat-wielding MS-13 associates as they moved to kidnap a 16-year-old boy.
Many of the gang members are immigrants with ties to Central American nations, including El Salvador and Honduras. THE NOTORIOUS MS-13 gang recently told its membership to randomly murder a Long Island cop as payback for an ongoing law enforcement crackdown. An informant recounted his chilling conversation with a gang member to the Hempstead police on Wednesday, according to an NYPD memo warning its officers of the threat. The gangbanger declared “the police have been making too many arrests … it’s time to take the streets back and take out a cop like we do in El Salvador,” the memo said. The NYPD sent a memo to its 35,000 officers advising them all to take the threats seriously both on and off the job.