Senior MS-13 gang leader arrested on southern border

A senior leader of the notorious MS-13 gang — one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives — was captured on the California-Mexico border earlier this month after more than three years on the lam, according to court records.

Freddy Ivan Jandres-Parada had been on the run since December 2020, when the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York indicted him and more than a dozen other members of MS-13’s “board of directors” on terrorism charges.

Jandres-Parada was nabbed by FBI agents in San Diego on March 7, according to officials. He waived his right to bail the next day, CNN reported.

The 48-year-old El Salvadoran national, who goes by the nickname ‘Lucky de Park View,” is being held at the federal jail in San Diego, according to inmate records, pending his transfer to federal custody in New York to await trial.

Jandres-Parada had been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, with a $10,000 reward being offered for information leading to his arrest.

“He is alleged to be among the most senior leaders of MS-13 worldwide,” the FBI wrote on its website. “Jandres-Parada has been charged with several terrorism offenses for his alleged role in ordering numerous acts of violence against civilians, law enforcement, and rival gang members, as well as drug distribution and extortion schemes worldwide.”

Two other members of the ruthless transnational gang’s governing body, known in Spanish as the “Ranfla Nacional,” César Humberto López-Larios and Hugo Armando Quinteros-Mineros, are still at large.

All 14 suspected M3-13 members — 11 of whom have been in custody for years, most in El Salvador — are facing federal counts for conspiracy to provide and conceal material support to terrorists and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries, according to the indictment.

Federal prosecutors have alleged that the group ran “military-style training camps; obtained weapons, handguns, rifles, grenades, improvised explosive devices and rocket launchers,” and also “directed acts of violence and murder in El Salvador, the United States and elsewhere.”

“Ranfla Nacional” grew out of a hierarchical ruling body of the gang that was formed in 2002 in a Salvadoran prison and was dubbed the “Twelve Apostles of the Devil,” according to the 31-page federal indictment. 

The criminal “board of directors” governed the gang’s activities around the world and issued “green lights” — an execution order — to kill rivals, disloyal gang members, or law enforcement officials, the indictment said. 

MS-13, also known as “La Mara Salvatrucha,” grew out of a Los Angeles street gang that was formed by Central American immigrants in the 1980s, and metastasized into one of the nation’s most violent criminal syndicates tied to a slew of savage machete slaughters, including on Long Island.

At least a dozen suspected MS-13 members were indicted in 2017 in connection with seven murders, including the bloodthirsty killings and mutilations of three Brentwood high school students in 2016.