GUILTY IN GANG SLAY
Queens MS-13 leaders ordered rubout of 16-year-old boy
A Queens MS-13 gangbanger has been found guilty of ordering the grisly murder of a 16-year-old boy and overseeing several other violent crimes as a leader in the notorious criminal organization.
After a two-week trial in Brooklyn Federal Court, a jury found Melvi Amador-Rios guilty of 17 out of 18 counts including murder in aid of racketeering, which carries a mandatory life sentence. The jury made its decision after a day of deliberations.
Prosecutors accused Amador-Rios, 32, of heading the international gang’s Centrales Locos Salvatruchas, or CLS, clique, which operated mostly out of Jamaica, Queens.
As the clique’s “corredor,” he lorded over a group of low-level teenage “chequeos,” sending them on missions to kill so they could rise to the rank of “homeboy” within the bloodthirsty gang, the feds argued.
His defense lawyers admitted he was a member of MS-13, but contended that membership alone isn’t a crime, and that the government built its case on the testimony of former gang members who turned snitch to get out of prison and get visas to stay in the U.S.
Amador-Rios’ brother and four other cooperating witnesses testified against him during the trial, linking him to the murder of 16-year-old Julio “Bad Boy” Vasquez on May 16, 2017, and the near-fatal shooting of Luis Serrano, also 16, on Oct. 22, 2016.
Vasquez’s murder was particularly horrific — he was lured to Alley Pond Park and repeatedly stabbed by two other gang members, Josue “Colocho” Leiva and Luis “Inquieto” Rivas. The duo stabbed him 34 times, hacking at him with such force that they nearly decapitated him and left marks on his skull and his neck bones.
Both men pleaded guilty days before the trial.
Amador-Rios marked Vasquez for death because the gang suspected him of cooperating with authorities and he failed to prove his loyalty by killing another teen on the outs with the gang, prosecutors said.
One member of the gang, Jose Gonzalez, testified that Amador-Rios pulled him aside in October 2016 and told him it was his turn “to go do a killing.” Gonzalez, who was 18 years old at the time, enlisted two friends, and Amador-Rios told him to get a gun from his brother, he said.
Gonzalez said he went hunting for the leader of the 18th St. Gang, but wound up settling for Serrano, who he’d clashed with before and he believed was a member of the gang. They beat the teen and Gonzalez’s friend, Kevin “Stomper” Paniagua shot him, paralyzing him.
In a recorded prison phone call, Amador-Rios told Gonzalez and his cohorts they could now become full-fledged members of MS-13, the feds said.
“You guys already have the pass, you know, to be homeboys,” he said in Spanish, in a call played several times for the jury.
Prosecutors also linked Amador-Rios to stick-ups at four Queens businesses that specialized in helping immigrants send money home to their families.
Amador-Rios’ lawyer, Murray Singer, said the cooperating witnesses couldn’t be trusted, and without them, “There’s absolutely no support for the claim that Melvi said, ‘Go do it.’ ”
Several of the cooperators are looking to be released from prison with time served and to be allowed to stay in the U.S., he said. “What better way than to testify against MS-13?”
Amador-Rios kept up a brave face, grinning and laughing with his attorneys after the jury handed down his fate. He shook their hands and they patted him on the back as he readied himself to be led away.
“We’ll be filing an appeal,” Singer said outside the courtroom, declining further comment.
Amador-Rios’s sentencing date has not yet been set.
“With today’s verdict, an extremely dangerous MS-13 gang leader aptly nicknamed ‘Letal,’ or ‘Lethal,’ has been brought to justice for his murderous racketeering crimes and now faces a mandatory life sentence,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Tuesday.
The verdict is the latest blow to the international street gang, which got its start in Los Angeles’ El Salvadoran immigrant community, then rose to power after the U.S. deported thousands of Salvadorans in the early 1990s.
MS-13’s members have been linked to dozens of murders in Long Island and Queens in the mid 2010s, often using machetes to chop up their victims, leading to a series of crackdowns that netted scores of suspects in recent years.
In June, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged 15 more members of MS-13 as part of their probe into a string of brutal murders in Queens.