A 14-year-old boy nicknamed “El Chapito” has been arrested in Mexico in connection with the drug-related slaughter of eight people at a birthday party, officials said.

The federal Public Safety Department announced Thursday the arrests of the teenager and his alleged accomplice stemming from the massacre that took place on Jan. 22 in the low-income Mexico City suburb of Chimalhuacan.

According to officials, “El Chapito” and a man known as “El Ñoño” allegedly rode up on a motorcycle and opened fire on a family celebrating a birthday at their home.

The attack also injured five adults and two children, including a 3-year-old and a minor younger than 14.

Federal police officers also arrested seven other accused gang members on drug charges during a 12-hour sting operation that was carried out last weekend in the Mexico City suburbs.

“El Chapito’s” real name was not released, but his nickname, translated as “Little Chapo,” is an apparent nod to notorious drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the former head of the Sinaloa cartel who is serving a life sentence in Colorado.

The motive behind the January killings has not been disclosed, but drug gangs in Mexico are known to dabble in kidnapping and murders-for-hire. They also target rivals selling drugs on their turf or people who owe them money.

Investigators collared “El Chapito” and the others after apprehending the leader of their gang, 28-year-old “El Lenguas,” on Feb. 25.

“El Chapito” has been transferred to a Specialized Control Judge in the Comprehensive Criminal Justice System for Adolescents, while the adult suspects have been booked into the Neza-Bordo Penitentiary and Social Reintegration Center.

Child killers are not unheard of in Mexico.

In 2010, soldiers detained a 14-year-old boy nicknamed “El Ponchis,” or “The Cloak,” who claimed he was kidnapped at age 11 and forced to work for the Cartel of the South Pacific. He said he had participated in at least four beheadings.

After his arrest, the boy, a US citizen identified as Edgar Jimenez Lugos, told reporters that he was drugged and threatened into committing the crimes.

Lugos was subsequently found guilty of torturing and decapitating four men and was sentenced to three years behind bars — the maximum penalty allowed by law because he was a minor at the time of the killings.

After his release from prison in 2013, Lugos was allowed to return to the US.

With Post wires

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Another 2,000 suspected gang members were shipped to El Salvador’s revered mega-prison, the country’s president announced Wednesday as he unveiled more footage of the “impossible to escape” facility.

The new arrivals joined another 2,000 accused gangsters that landed in the new Center for the Confinement of Terrorism last month as El Salvador looks to win its battle against raging violent street gangs.

President Nayib Bukele blasted out new footage of the prison and its new prisoners being hustled off buses and into the facility as they’re surrounded by heavily armed guards.

Inside the prison, the tattooed men, in white shorts, barefoot and handcuffed, are seen huddled together as they crouch down and hang their shaved heads before running into jail cells.

Este día, en un nuevo operativo, trasladamos al segundo grupo de 2,000 pandilleros al Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT).

Con esto, ya son 4,000 pandilleros los que habitan la cárcel más criticada del mundo. pic.twitter.com/A2oTUIYubW

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 15, 2023

“There are now 4,000 gang members in the world’s most criticized prison,” Bukele said in a tweet.

The prison has a capacity for 40,000 people.

It was previously reported that the prison, located 46 miles from the Central American country’s capital, would hold inmates in eight buildings that each have 32 cells that will hold 100 prisoners each.

Each cell has only two toilets and two sinks.

The prison is considered to be the largest in the Americas.

Bukele has bragged it’s “impossible to escape.”

While Bukele has taken a proactive approach in his war against gangs, the initiative has raised concerns among human rights observers that basic constitutional rights are being violated, including worries that people are being detained without a warrant.

Over the last year more than 60,000 accused gang members have been captured by the country’s army or police.

The government’s minister for justice and peace, Gustavo Villatoro, declared the alleged gang members would never be back on the streets even though about 57,000 of those detained are still waiting for formal charges or a trial.

“They are never going to return to the communities, the neighborhoods, the barrios, the cities of our beloved El Salvador,” Villatoro said.

With Post wires

This article was originally posted here

Illegal casinos in Los Angeles are cropping up everywhere from warehouses to homes and are largely benefiting incarcerated members of a prison gang called the Mexican Mafia, authorities say. 

Richard Velasquez, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective, told the Los Angeles Times that casitas, Spanish for “little houses,” are “everywhere, to be honest with you.”

“It’s hidden in plain sight. You don’t know that it’s there till you know that it’s there,” he said. 

The casitas can bring in tens of thousands of dollars per week, as people flock to the gambling playgrounds to operate electronic machines. Velasquez told Fox News Digital that through his investigations, he heard some of the gang members running the gambling operations were pulling in $80,000 a week — though that number has now fallen. 

The gambling houses are also called “nets,” short for the internet cafes of the early 2000s, or “tap taps” and “slap houses” for the sound heard from outside the gambling rooms as players hit buttons and joysticks on the machines. 

“All of these places, someone in the Mexican Mafia has their hand over it,” Velasquez told the LA Times. 

The roughly 140-person Mexican Mafia is a prison mob syndicate that oversees street gangs in Southern California. Many of the members are incarcerated, yet benefit from the profits of the illegal casinos. They are given part of the profits for allowing the gambling houses to operate in their territories of LA. 

“The way I see it, the Mexican Mafia is not much different than the Italian mob,” Velasquez told the outlet. “You open a smoke shop, you’re selling gaming software or you have a [gambling] machine, some [gang member working for the Mexican Mafia] is going to walk in there and say, ‘Hey, you can’t do this in our area without our permission, without our protection.’”

The LA sheriff’s detective added that contraband cellphones are pervasive across the prison system in California, which allows for the mob bosses in prison to freely speak with gangsters on the outside. 

Illegal casinos have long been present in Los Angeles, but appeared to have a boom during COVID. 

“A lot of people that we talked to, they said that there was a boom during COVID because people couldn’t really go anywhere. It’s like a social environment,” Velasquex told Fox. 

He noted that California Employment Development Department (EDD) fraud during the pandemic helped bolster the illegal casinos. 

“A lot of people that live in the area where they’re operating came into a lot of money through EDD fraud, and then they went and dumped it into these machines,” he said. 

The sheriff’s office said that in 2022 alone, officials executed 128 search warrants at 58 different locations related to illegal casinos, made 80 arrests, recovered 11 kilos of fentanyl. 

With the gambling houses comes crime, according to authorities. The Mexican Mafia has previously killed, beaten, shot or kidnapped people accused of ripping the gang members off, the LA Times reported. 

The gambling houses clientele often includes other gang members and drug-users, which has fanned the flames of crime at the operations, including assaults and shootings. 

The Mexican Mafia has also been known to tax Asian or Armenian gambling operations in San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys, the outlet reported. If the illegal casino operators in LA or elsewhere do not pay the taxes, they face the gambling house getting vandalized or their equipment stolen. 

“They’re going to create the problem that you need protection from. And then once they have you, you belong to them. They’re going to keep taking and taking,” Velasquez told the LA Times. 

Velasquez told Fox News Digital that he doesn’t believe the illegal casinos are necessarily driving crime across LA, but they are affecting the specific areas where the casinos are located. 

“I do believe they bring more crime to the specific area where they are operating. They are very similar to how a drug house would bring more crime into the area in which its operating,” he said. 

Despite its name, the Mexican Mafia did not originate in Mexico, but within the California Department of Corrections back in the late 1950s, according to the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ). 

“The Mexican Mafia’s main source of income is extorting drug distributors outside prison and distributing methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and marijuana within the prison systems and on the outside streets,” the DOJ says of the gang.

This article was originally posted here