The Wire

by Edward Humes

The four phone calls that put Alex Sanchez in jail—and in the middle of a massive federal racketeering and conspiracy case—were angry, profane, and seemingly illuminating. They opened a rare window not only onto the brutal, secretive, backstabbing world of one of America's most notorious street gangs, but also on the life of Sanchez himself, a nationally prominent anti-gang activist in Los Angeles credited with steering hundreds of young people away from lives of crime and violence.

What Sanchez didn't know in 2006 when he participated in those calls was that the FBI was listening in. Nor could he have guessed that the words he spoke would help convince a federal-local investigative task force that Sanchez was leading a double life, publicly opposing gangs in his day job, then moonlighting after hours as a leader or "shot-caller" of the Los Angeles street-gang-turned-international-crime-syndicate known as Mara Salvatrucha—MS-13.

The feds characterized one conversation in particular as a smoking gun. It was a conference call with several known members of MS-13, who continually referred to Sanchez as Rebelde, Spanish for rebel, his old nickname from the gang life he'd supposedly left behind 15 years before. The men on the tape debated what to do about an El Salvador – based gangster known as Camarón (the Shrimp), whom Sanchez accused of falsely branding him a police informant—a veritable death sentence in these circles. Sanchez wanted to turn the tables: "He has to face the consequences," he urged. "We have said it, we go to war."

Little more than a week after that exchange, the lifeless corpse of Camarón, whose real name was Walter Lacinos, was found shot through the head in La Libertad, El Salvador, a hotbed of MS-13 activity.

Had the FBI just heard Sanchez's alter ego, Rebelde, order a hit on Camarón? That was the story the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles offered at a press conference in June 2009 to announce a historic racketeering indictment against Sanchez and 23 named MS-13 members.

"Today in Los Angeles, where the MS-13 gang was formed, we are holding its leaders accountable for the violence and intimidation they have used to bring terror to the citizens living and working within the gang's territory," then-U.S. Attorney Thomas P. O'Brien told reporters. The indictments marked the latest assault in a nine-year war on MS-13 by the FBI, which had used 21 court-ordered wiretaps to monitor thousands of phone conversations.

The wiretaps had already helped build an earlier state case against the alleged top shot-caller for MS-13 in Los Angeles. (It also appears that the FBI had made informants out of the alleged "CEO" of MS-13's worldwide operations, as well as his second-in-command.) Now the recordings were being used in an effort to bring down Sanchez, a poster boy for the gang-prevention efforts that many law enforcement officials reflexively distrusted.

The latest indictments charged that the defendants had conspired to engage in extortion, drug dealing, robbery, witness intimidation, and seven murders. The complaint also described a failed conspiracy to assassinate one of the government's top gang experts, Detective Frank Flores of the Los Angeles Police Department.

This was a major breakthrough in the fight against MS-13, proclaimed then-LAPD Chief William Bratton, speaking at O'Brien's press conference. He branded the gang "a cancer ... that lacks a single redeeming quality." And yet no aspect of the story drew as much attention as the charges against Sanchez.

Over the years, Sanchez—who is now 39 years old, a father of three, and executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of Homies Unidos, an organization devoted to reducing gang violence—had skillfully used his "street cred" to persuade hundreds of young people to steer clear of gang life. Local politicians, including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, sang his praises and tasked him with helping to write Los Angeles's gang-intervention policy, adopted by the city council in 2008. Inner-city principals begged Sanchez to speak at their schools. The California Wellness Foundation supported his gang-intervention efforts with a $240,000 grant. And he had been honored with both the Lottie Wexler Peace and Justice Award (joining Phil Donahue and Congresswoman Maxine Waters, among others) and the Martin Luther King Legacy Association's Drum Major award for community service.

But now police and prosecutors were saying that it was all just an elaborate front. And, they said, they had the recorded phone conversations to prove it.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case. But in the weeks and months that followed the indictments, new questions threatened to undermine the prosecution's pat narrative. These were questions about missing government witnesses, mistaken identities, overlooked evidence, the qualifications of reputed gang experts, and the gray areas that anti-gang activists such as Sanchez must, of necessity, operate in.

Meanwhile, community leaders who had known Sanchez for years rallied to his defense. Among them was former state Sen. Tom Hayden, who went so far as to offer up his home as collateral to bail Sanchez out of jail. Also, Thomas Parker, a former FBI field office manager, sent a letter to the court: "I felt, and still feel strongly," he wrote, "that Alex was destined for greater things and a life dedicated to anti-violence leadership."

Then, in response to some prodding from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the trial judge in the case, U.S. District Court Judge Manuel Real, reversed his initial rulings that kept Sanchez jailed and—over the vociferous objections of prosecutors—set bail at $2 million. Sanchez's supporters had raised more than that already, so he was subsequently released after spending seven months in jail.

His trial was supposed to begin this month. But now, as a result of another Ninth Circuit ruling, it probably won't happen until summer. And so the central conundrum remains: Just who exactly is this guy they call Rebelde?

A short, husky fellow with a trim goatee and mustache, Sanchez usually wears a neat suit and tie to court, hiding what is left of the gang tattoos he has tried to erase through a series of long, painful laser treatments. He tends to be soft-spoken. But on occasion his voice will slip into edgier, more commanding tones, as it did during the calls that the FBI recorded.

Sanchez was born in El Salvador in 1971. His parents came to Los Angeles when he was three, leaving him and his one-year-old brother with neighbors. When Sanchez was seven, shortly before a coup plunged his violence-wracked country into civil war, the two boys joined their parents in the United States as undocumented immigrants.

From the start, Sanchez had difficulty fitting in; even Spanish-speaking kids had trouble understanding his Salvadoran dialect. In middle school he began hanging out with the children of gang members, and soon he fell in with Mara Salvatrucha, or MS, founded by Salvadoran immigrants seeking protection from the more numerous gangs dominated by Mexican Americans. The new gang more than held its own, soon becoming notorious for the kind of unrestrained violence found in El Salvador. But eventually MS struck an alliance with the powerful Mexican Mafia prison gang, agreeing to pay a hefty monthly tribute from its drug-dealing proceeds. It also agreed, as another form of tribute, to change its name from MS to MS-13, since the Mexican Mafia often refers to itself as la eme, Spanish for the letter m-the 13th letter in the alphabet.

Sanchez was in the eighth grade in 1985 when he joined one of Los Angeles's eight MS-13 factions, the Normandie clique in the Pico-Union district west of downtown. His adolescence followed an all-too-typical pattern of failing grades, truancy, and increasingly serious run-ins with the law. He ran away from home in 1986 after his mother tried to make him go to school, and later he got caught stealing cheese and ham from a market. That same year he served nine months at a juvenile detention center for attacking another youth with a deadly weapon in a fight over a skateboard. At age 17 he was back in detention on a firearms charge, and within the year a dispute over a car led to a grand theft charge and his first adult conviction. Next came three years' probation for a witness intimidation charge involving a man that Sanchez's girlfriend was said to have assaulted.

In 1992 Sanchez pleaded guilty to illegal possession of a gun and spent his first year in prison. A parole violation earned him several more months of prison time. Then in April 1994, on the day of his release, immigration agents arrested him, and three months later deported him back to El Salvador—just as he learned he was about to become a father. He illegally returned to the states in 1995, only this time, he says, his intention was to quit gang life for good and become a responsible parent.

Sanchez began working at his father's glass-blowing shop. He also volunteered to help get Homies Unidos off the ground in Los Angeles, and within a decade he became its executive director.

Early on, much of his work with Homies Unidos involved negotiating gang truces and tamping down violence. (Once, he said, he engineered a three-way conference call to help stop a gang war.) But this work also brought him into conflict with the LAPD's anti-gang efforts in the Rampart Division, where scandal erupted in the 1990s over abuses by its since-disbanded gang detail. Officers in that detail had accused Homies Unidos and similar groups of using gang truces as a ruse to try to unite rival groups of thugs into a "super gang." Sanchez, in turn, testified about the alleged police harassment of young Latinos during a 1999 meeting of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, and at a subsequent legislative subcommittee hearing chaired by then–state Senator Hayden at a city church. A few months later, just as Sanchez was about to testify as an alibi witness in a drive-by shooting case, LAPD officers arrested him for an immigration violation, even though city policy prohibited the police department from enforcing immigration laws. Given his criminal record, his prospects looked grim.

Yet remarkably, after a two-year legal battle, Sanchez managed to secure a grant of asylum and permanent U.S. residency. This occurred after credible threats coming out of El Salvador strongly suggested that gang members would try to kill Sanchez if he ever went back. Also cited as a contributing factor was the exemplary life Sanchez had led since his return to the United States. Various local luminaries championed his cause, including defense attorney Mark Geragos, who represented Sanchez pro bono, and Villaraigosa, then running for his first term as mayor.

In the racketeering case now before Judge Real, this rough chronology essentially stands undisputed—except for one glaring detail: Sanchez insists that when he re-entered the states in 1995, his transformation into an anti-gang activist was both sincere and unwavering. The prosecution tells a very different story.

"[Sanchez] has, in fact, continued to maintain his position in MS-13," Elizabeth Carpenter, an assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the case, said during a bail hearing. "He has not changed. He has not left his old life. ... His supporters do not know about Alex Sanchez's double life. ... They've been duped by his public face."

Not so, counters Jorja Leap. A reserve LAPD officer who teaches social welfare at UCLA, she became a friend and supporter of Sanchez when they worked together on Mayor Villaraigosa's gang policy at city hall. "The bottom line is that Alex saves people," she says. "I know former gang members who are thugs and manipulators, and I know others with integrity. Alex has integrity."

The gang names in the 16-count RICO indictment read more like a cast of Disney cartoon characters than a list of dangerous criminals. Among them are Gato, Salty, Shyboy, Skinny, Creeper, Grumpy, Tears, Little Man, and Pain.

Each of the defendants stands accused of an overreaching racketeering count linking them to MS-13's alleged drug and extortion activities-a charging tactic that prosecutors developed soon after Congress passed the federal RICO Act in 1970 as a tool to combat the Mafia. Each racketeering count carries a possible life sentence. The remaining 15 counts charge specific defendants with eight murder plots, seven actual murders, and numerous acts of robbery, extortion, drug trafficking, and witness intimidation. The indictment is further broken down into 158 overt acts.

Paul Cortez Jovel, a.k.a. Little Man, is named in ten of these overt acts, which include the murder of a rival gang member. Facing the same number of allegations is Pedro Lopez, a.k.a. Grumpy, who's accused of murdering a gang rival and ordering the execution of LAPD's Detective Flores. The case laid out in the indictment against Sanchez, though, boils down to just one overt act, arising from the four fateful phone calls that the FBI listened in on.

In advancing the prosecution's interpretation of those calls, Detective Flores's testimony has been pivotal. An L.A. native who grew up in the same neighborhoods where MS-13 members hung out, Flores has testified as an expert witness in more than a hundred MS-13 cases across the country. But that didn't stop Sanchez's defense attorney, Kerry Bensinger, from trying to have Flores disqualified through a Daubert hearing. Bensinger, who serves on the indigent defense panel for the Central District, noted that the detective lacked academic credentials and had done no formal research. Flores's expert testimony, he thus concluded, amounted to little more than parroting what gang members had told him during police interviews. Judge Real rejected this line of reasoning, ruling that under federal law a police detective's knowledge and on-the-job experience is sufficient to justify an expert witness designation. But Real also dealt the prosecution a blow, ruling that Flores cannot testify in a single trial both as an expert witness and as the target of a murder conspiracy; unless prosecutors find another expert, the judge said, he will strike the conspiracy count. Both sides have appealed that ruling, which resulted in the latest trial delay.

In multiple courtroom battles, Flores has portrayed the FBI-recorded phone calls as clear evidence of criminal activity. Sanchez's statement that Camarón had to "face the consequences," for example, was gang code for ordering his murder, Flores maintains. In another conversation Sanchez complained about fake papers he said Camarón was passing around to gang members that purported to show Sanchez was an FBI snitch. Sanchez then indicated that he planned to send a copy of the papers to Little Man—MS-13's main shot-caller in L.A.—as a way, Flores has opined, to "reinforce Sanchez's order" to have Camarón killed.

Another exchange Flores cites has Sanchez asking MS-13 members for names and phone numbers of gang leaders in El Salvador. "These people haven't heard our position," Sanchez says on the recording, "and these people still have some respect for me." To Flores, this proves Sanchez remained an active gang member. And finally, Sanchez in one call addresses Zombie, the gang member who allegedly did the actual killing, saying, "We have said it, we go to war." Sanchez then says Zombie should "have the last word," which Flores also interprets as an order to kill.

But Bensinger also has an expert in his corner. His name is Gregory Boyle, a Roman Catholic priest who founded HomeBoy Industries—a nationally known gang-intervention program. Boyle contends that the government's case against Sanchez depends on a tortured interpretation of what was said on the tapes, and on taking excerpts out of context.

Take the exchange in which Sanchez uses the word consequences. In a sworn affidavit, Boyle says that listening to the entire conversation makes it clear that Sanchez is referring only to withholding money, not to killing anyone. As Sanchez is heard to say in Spanish: "The homies from Normandie said that no one is going to send any money to that motherfucker [Camar&Atild#243n] because ... he has always talked shit about all of us."

Another conversation may indicate that Sanchez simply wanted to involve Little Man to help debunk Camarón's claims. "I have them [the papers] right here in my hands, man," Sanchez says. "And tonight I'm going to show them to Little Man, and I'm going to ask [him to] call you, and I'm going to show them to all the homies I can show them to ... so they can see them and call you and tell you the same thing I'm telling you right now, these papers are fake."

When Sanchez says "these people still have some respect for me," Boyle argues that only a former gang member would have to claim that people "still" respected him. And if Sanchez had never left the fold, Boyle asserts, he wouldn't have needed to ask for the names of gang leaders in El Salvador and how to get in touch with them—he'd already know.

Even the remarks where Sanchez declares "war" and says Zombie should have the "last word" seem, to Boyle, when taken in context, to be much less sinister than the prosecution claims.

"We can defend you," Sanchez tells Zombie. "We are all doing that. And we have said it, we go to war. ... You see? So then we were very clear yesterday, and we already told everybody ... that this motherfucker has nothing to do with this clique. That [he] is on his own there. ... We actually need you to have the last word ... so these guys hear from your own mouth, the things this son of a bitch is making up. ... You need to speak. ...You see, we have told this guy off, man. We are not going to send him money or any other shit! Nothing! Nothing, man!"

Boyle also cites a recorded exchange that didn't make it into the prosecution's briefs. In it, a gang member tells Sanchez to butt out of MS-13's business because he is "no longer active." And the speaker giving this advice? None other than Camar&Ati#243n, just days before he was murdered.

"I don't know why ... you get involved in things when you are no longer active, man!" Camarón says.

"If you told [someone] that I'm working with the FBI, then you know what, you are getting me involved," Sanchez responds.

Bensinger argues that if Sanchez is no longer active, he cannot be a shot-caller, cannot have ordered a hit, and cannot be guilty as charged.

Another issue complicating the prosecution's case has to do with the identity of Zombie, the alleged triggerman. According to the complaint, he's a notorious gangster in El Salvador whose real name is Juan Bonilla. But as it happens, at least two MS-13 members go by Zombie, and the other Zombie—Ricardo Treminio Hernandez, who has not been named as a suspect in the killing—insists it's his voice that's on the recording. Meanwhile, Bonilla—who cooperated with prosecutors and in exchange received unspecified "special privileges" until he reportedly escaped from a Salvadoran jail—is now unaccounted for.

During Sanchez's first two bail hearings, Judge Real heard only Flores's interpretation of the wiretapped calls. But after the Ninth Circuit weighed in on Bensinger's appeal, Real granted Sanchez a third bail hearing. The judge then convened an unusual closed session to consult with, among others, the Los Angeles City Attorney's director of anti-gang operations, Bruce K. Riordan (who has since joined the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles). The records from that hearing remain sealed, but when it was over Sanchez was freed on the $2 million bail that his supporters pledged in cash and real estate.

Will the prosecution submit additional evidence against Sanchez at trial? Some defense motions hint at possible testimony by paid informants such as Nelson Comandari, the heir of wealthy Salvadorans who is often described as MS-13's CEO, and his lieutenant Jorge Pineda, who cooperated in obtaining some 500 consensual recordings of gang calls that the feds have code-named "Gold Dust." Although both Comandari and Pineda were allegedly party to recorded conversations in which murders were plotted, neither has been charged in the racketeering case.

"Look, here's the problem," says UCLA's Leap. "MS-13 has electroshock value. It's very big in the FBI right now. Then you've got transcripts that are open to interpretation. Then you've got a cop [Flores] who is intent on proving he's right. And you have a government that understands neither the nature of MS-13, nor what Alex Sanchez is doing. You want to talk about the perfect storm? There it is."

Edward Humes, based in Southern California, is a Pulitzer Prize – winning journalist and the author of ten nonfiction books.

---