A founder of an MS-13 street gang has been sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to racketeering charges and murdering a fellow gang member, according to the U.S. attorney for Maryland.
The arrest of 32-year-old Juan Carlos Moreira and nearly two dozen other members of the Mara Salvatrucha in 2005 was the first use of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization law — designed in 1970 to take down the Mafia — against a street gang in Maryland.
Moreira, of Silver Spring, pleaded guilty last month and in exchange prosecutors pulled the possibility of the death penalty off the table, prosecutors said.
According to court documents, Moreira and three other Salvadorans founded the violent Sailor Locos Salvatruchos Westside in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties and left a wake of violence around the D.C. region, court documents said.
On Nov. 22, 2003, two of Moreira’s henchmen, Nelson Bernal and Randy Calderon, repeatedly stabbed and killed a suspected rival gang member in the living room of Moreira’s apartment.
The killing inside his home angered Moreira, who ordered Bernal and Calderon to remove the body and clean up the murder scene, court documents said.
Moreira went with Calderon to paint graffiti behind a 7-Eleven store in Mount Rainier to “celebrate” Calderon’s killing of the rival gang member, prosecutors said. Calderon was given a can of blue spray paint, then Moreira pulled out a handgun and fired a single shot into Calderon’s head and killed him.
Moreira later told members that Calderon had to be killed because he would not have been tough enough to keep the slaying a secret from police if he were ever questioned, authorities said.
Two years later, after Moreira and another gang member lost a fight to members of a rival gang at a McDonald’s restaurant in Alexandria, he and another gang member shot into a group of youths that they believed to be in the rival gang, killing a teenage boy and wounding two others.
In 2005, Moreira was arrested along with 18 other gang members in Maryland and Virginia in what authorities at the time called the largest coordinated use of federal organized crime law against the MS-13 gang. About 320 police officers from federal, state and local agencies were used in the early morning roundup, and prosecutors in Maryland said that the RICO arrests could help turn the tide against the Hispanic gang.
To date, federal prosecutors in Maryland have charged 51 MS-13 members with various gang-related crimes; 26 members have been convicted. Five people, including Moreira, have been sentenced to life in prison.
