The international Salvadorian gang MS-13 is akin to a beer-guzzling college fraternity, not a criminal racket based on murder and violence, defense attorney Michael Montemarano argued in his closing argument Wednesday in the trial of two alleged gang members from Montgomery County.
Montemarano said his client, Santo Garcia, 30, of Silver Spring, joined the gang “to drink beer and be with his friends, to drink beer and be with people from El Salvador.”
Garcia and Israel Cruz, 30, also of Silver Spring, are charged with running a fearsome local outpost of the gang that prosecutors say was responsible for eight homicides in Maryland and Virginia. The charges also include conspiring in the assault of juvenile women, rival gang members and an MS-13 member from El Salvador.
Cruz’s attorney, John Chamble, gave his closing arguments Tuesday in the U.S. District Court of Maryland in Greenbelt.
Prosecutors allege that Garcia kept the gang’s books, holding onto cash collected from dues and doling it out for the purchase of guns and drugs that kept the gang’s business operating. Cruz has been indicted as the group’s leader.
Neither man is alleged to have pulled the trigger in any murder. Instead, it was their leadership that made the murders happen, prosecutors argued.
Montemarano agreed that Garcia was a gang member, but disputed the role he played. “Associating with bad people does not mean you’re committing bad acts,” he said.
But in the government’s rebuttal, U.S. Attorney Jim Trusty said Garcia and Cruz continued to remain part of the gang even as the deaths piled up around them. Prosecutors say they have recordings of the defendants implicitly discussing gang murders.
“Yes, they’ll drink beers, but the meetings, the gang, it’s all about turf and death,” Trusty said.
The case is in the hands of the 12-member jury, which will have to sort through testimony and evidence presented in the five-week trial.
