Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Trinitarios Gang Members Charged in Five Murders, Including Influencer Ariela “La Langosta” Mejia-Polanco

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Trinitarios Gang Members Charged in Five Murders, Including Influencer Ariela “La Langosta” Mejia-Polanco · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine you're driving home from work. You are almost at
0:03
your doorstep, completely unaware that a piece of hidden technology
0:07
has marked you as a target.
0:09
Speaker 2: Right. It is literally a nightmare scenario, it really is.
0:12
Speaker 1: I mean, you are executing a flawless multi state heist.
0:17
You and your crew use military grade GPS stealth technology.
0:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, to track a high value target across three different
0:25
state lines.
0:26
Speaker 1: Exactly. You execute the operation with the precision of a
0:29
corporate espionage team. You vanish into the night with hundreds
0:33
of thousands of dollars in assets, completely undetected by the
0:36
victim until it's far too late.
0:38
Speaker 2: It is a masterclass in operational security.
0:40
Speaker 1: Right, and then you immediately go on Instagram and brag
0:43
about it to your followers.
0:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is just It is the ultimate paradox of
0:46
the modern criminal landscape.
0:48
Speaker 1: It's insane.
0:49
Speaker 2: We are looking at a bizarre, terrifying collision between twenty
0:53
first century surveillance technology, nineteen ninety street gang culture, and
0:58
the desperate modern need for digital clout.
1:01
Speaker 1: And that is exactly what we are getting into today.
1:04
We're exploring how those three elements came together to create
1:08
a completely new kind of organized crime. Definitely, we have
1:11
a massive stack of sources to go through for this
1:13
deep dive, most notably the unsealed fifteen count federal indictment
1:18
from July twenty, twenty twenty six.
1:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, targeting the Bad Boys seven or BB seven.
1:23
Speaker 1: Right, which is a set of the notorious Trinitarios gang.
1:27
The mission for this deep dive is to really unpack
1:30
this two year campaign of terror that stretched across New
1:33
York and New Jersey.
1:34
Speaker 2: And to understand how a localized street gang suddenly acquired,
1:38
you know, the logistical supply chain and operational discipline to
1:42
run multi state espionage.
1:43
Speaker 1: Because it's a huge leap, right, But to understand the
1:46
sheer scale of what federal authorities were up against, we
1:49
have to start with the event that forced this entire
1:51
shadow operation into the spotlight.
1:53
Speaker 2: Right. The catalyst for public awareness and really the focal
1:56
point of the federal response was the murder of Ariel
1:59
Omhia Polanco on August seventeenth, twenty twenty five.
2:02
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this because if you followed the news
2:05
in late twenty twenty five, you probably know her by
2:07
her online.
2:08
Speaker 2: Moniker Ariola l'nghosta Yeah.
2:10
Speaker 1: Ariola Leelangosta to her five hundred and sixty thousand Instagram followers.
2:14
She was this huge presence, a thirty three year old
2:18
nightlife influencer, a mother of two, and.
2:20
Speaker 2: A massive figure in the Dominican American cultural scene. Right.
2:24
Speaker 1: And I really want to set the scene of her
2:25
final hours because the geography and the sheer brazenness of
2:29
what happened to her completely shatters the illusion of safety
2:33
we all rely on when we get into our cars.
2:35
Speaker 2: The timeline is critical here. It's early Sunday morning, around
2:39
four thirty am. Okay Ariela leaves her job at the Icon,
2:42
New York night club, which is in Inwood at the
2:45
northernmost tick of Manhattan.
2:47
Speaker 1: Right, So this is an environment she knows intimately exactly.
2:50
Speaker 2: She's comfortable, She's finishing a long shift, and she gets
2:53
into her vehicle.
2:54
Speaker 1: Which was a black Mercedes Benz G sixty three AMG
2:57
SUV the G Wagon, Right, And I mean, this isn't
3:01
just a car, It's a very specific, highly recognizable status symbol.
3:05
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely.
3:06
Speaker 1: So she begins to drive home. She takes the eastbound
3:09
Cross County Parkway heading up into Westchester County.
3:12
Speaker 2: And that route is important to note because it's a
3:15
controlled access highway.
3:16
Speaker 1: Okay.
3:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, at that hour of the morning, traffic is virtually
3:20
non existent. You have these long stretches of dark road
3:23
segmented by specific exits.
3:25
Speaker 1: Just her in the road.
3:27
Speaker 2: Right, She is heading toward her home at a luxury
3:30
high rise at forty two Broad in Mount Vernon.
3:33
Speaker 1: So she is literally in the home stretch. When you
3:37
drive that specific route, as you approach the broad Street exit,
3:41
you can actually see that building looming in the distance.
3:44
Speaker 2: She was that close.
3:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, she is at that exact moment in a commute
3:48
where your brain kind of shuts down the hypervigilance of driving.
3:51
You just feel the relief of being home.
3:53
Speaker 2: Right, you're reaching for your bag, You're thinking about your bed.
3:56
Speaker 1: Which is when the trap is sprung.
3:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, two stolen vehicles, operating in tandem rapidly approach your
4:01
Mercedes and intentionally box her in.
4:04
Speaker 1: Wow at highway speeds.
4:06
Speaker 2: At highway speeds, it is a highly dangerous maneuver. They
4:09
force her vehicle to a halt near the exit ramp.
4:11
Speaker 1: I mean boxed in by metal on all sides. The
4:15
sheer suffocating panic she must have experienced in those few
4:18
seconds is agonizing to even think about.
4:21
Speaker 2: It, really is and as she is trapped there trying
4:23
to process what is happening, multiple shots are fired into
4:27
the guagon. Oh man, she is struck and she dies
4:31
right there in the driver's seat.
4:32
Speaker 1: Just awful. And because of the hour and the location,
4:36
she isn't even discovered until around eight am, right.
4:38
Speaker 2: And you know when a tragedy of this magnitude happens,
4:41
especially a violent highway execution of a prominent public figure, Yeah,
4:46
the immediate response from the public and the media is
4:49
to search for a complex narrative.
4:51
Speaker 1: Oh, the speculation was immediate, and it was toxic. I mean,
4:54
Ariola wasn't just popular, she was highly visible in a
4:57
specific subculture.
4:58
Speaker 2: Right the nightlife and music scene.
5:00
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, she started on a music video
5:02
called Wapaei for the rapper Takashi sixty p seven, who
5:05
is a very controversial figure extremely He publicly referred to
5:08
her as the Queen of New York and after her death,
5:11
Cardi B posted a tribute to her. She called her
5:14
quote ripped Dominican pretty.
5:15
Speaker 2: So she had these very high profile connections.
5:18
Speaker 1: Exactly, and because of those associations, especially with six nine,
5:22
who has a very public, very fraught history, with gang
5:26
affiliations and cooperating with federal authorities.
5:29
Speaker 2: The Internet immediately jumped to conclusion it really did. The
5:32
narrative that formed almost instantly was that she must have
5:35
been caught up in some sort of underworld retaliation. The
5:38
public assumption was that her death was a targeted hit
5:41
based on personal beefs or gang rivalries associated with the
5:45
music industry.
5:46
Speaker 1: And I really want to pause and push back on
5:48
why we do that as a society, because it's a
5:51
psychological defense mechanism.
5:53
Speaker 2: How do you mean, Well, when.
5:55
Speaker 1: We hear about a thirty three year old mother getting
5:57
boxed in and murdered on a familiar highway, it is terrifying.
6:02
So to protect our own sanity, we look for reasons
6:04
why she was different from us.
6:06
Speaker 2: Oh, I see like distancing ourselves, right.
6:08
Speaker 1: We tell ourselves, well, she hung out with controversial rappers,
6:11
she was in a dangerous crowd. I don't do those things.
6:14
Therefore I am safe.
6:15
Speaker 2: Right. It's a way to feel.
6:17
Speaker 1: In control exactly. It's almost like we want there to
6:20
be a dramatic personal motive because the alternative that you
6:24
can be killed purely for the car you drive is
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too terrifying to accept.
6:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, And what is fascinating here is how the July
6:33
twenty twenty six federal indictment completely dismantled that psychological defense.
6:38
Speaker 1: Mechanism, completely shattered it.
6:40
Speaker 2: When US Attorney Jay Clayton unsealed the charges, the reality
6:44
was far more chilling than any Internet conspiracy theory.
6:48
Speaker 1: Yeah.
6:48
Speaker 2: Westchester County Police Commissioner Terrence Rayner and District Attorney Susan
6:52
Kikashu were adamant about this point. Ari La Mihia Polanco
6:56
was an entirely innocent bystander.
6:58
Speaker 1: She didn't know these men, not at all. She wasn't
7:01
involved in their organization. She wasn't carrying a message or
7:04
caught in a crossfire.
7:05
Speaker 2: The motive was coldly, brutally financial. It was a botched carjacking,
7:09
just for the car the game members wanted, the Mercedes
7:12
g Wagon. It is a high value asset that can
7:14
be stripped for parts, shipped overseas, or used in the
7:17
commission of other crimes.
7:18
Speaker 1: But wait, I mean, if it was just a carjacking,
7:20
why didn't they just take it at gunpoint at a
7:22
red light and inwood right?
7:24
Speaker 2: Why go through the trouble?
7:25
Speaker 1: Yeah? Why wait until she's driving at highway speeds on
7:28
the Cross County Parkway. That seems incredibly risky and complicated,
7:33
and that.
7:33
Speaker 2: Is the exact question that elevates this case from a
7:36
standard street crime to a federal racketeering investigation. Okay, they
7:41
didn't just spot her car on the street and decide
7:43
to follow her. According to the indictment, they had placed
7:47
a consumer grade GPS tracking device on her Mercedes.
7:51
Speaker 1: Whoa, So they were stalking her digitally. They weren't physically
7:56
tailing her through Manhattan. They were watching a dot on
7:58
a screen.
7:59
Speaker 2: Precise Let's think about the mechanics of consumer GPS trackers
8:03
for a moment.
8:03
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, let's break that down.
8:05
Speaker 2: These devices are roughly the size of a deck of cards,
8:08
sometimes even smaller. They rely on the same technology as
8:11
your smartphone.
8:12
Speaker 1: Okay, so they connect to satellites, right.
8:14
Speaker 2: They pull location data from GPS satellites, and then they
8:18
use a built in cellular sim card to ping that
8:21
location back to a server.
8:22
Speaker 1: Which the gang members can monitor in real time on
8:25
an app.
8:25
Speaker 2: Exactly, it's just an app on their phone.
8:27
Speaker 1: And because these devices have strong magnets, you just walk
8:31
past a vehicle in a parking lot, reach under the
8:33
wheel well or the real bumper and slap it onto
8:36
the metal chassis.
8:37
Speaker 2: It literally takes three seconds.
8:38
Speaker 1: That is terrifying, it is.
8:40
Speaker 2: And once that device is placed, it completely fundamentally shifts
8:44
the nature of the crime. How so well, Traditionally, street
8:49
level robbery or parjacking is opportunistic. A perpetrator season opening
8:54
a distracted driver, an unlocked door, a dark intersection and strikes.
8:59
Speaker 1: Right of proximity. You are in the wrong place at
9:02
the wrong time.
9:03
Speaker 2: But with a GPS tracker, the gang controls the timeline.
9:06
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, they control everything.
9:08
Speaker 2: It moves from an opportunistic crime to calculated, premeditated stocking.
9:13
The tracker allows them to study her.
9:15
Speaker 1: Routine so they can see what time she leaves.
9:17
Speaker 2: The club, right, they can map out her exact route home,
9:20
they can identify the most vulnerable point on.
9:22
Speaker 1: That route, which in this case was a quiet, isolated
9:25
exit ramp in Westchester County.
9:27
Speaker 2: Exactly, and they can simply wait for her to arrive.
9:30
Speaker 1: That is just I mean, imagine you're driving home from work,
9:32
almost at your doorstep, completely unaware that a piece of
9:36
hidden technology has marked you as a target. That's exactly
9:40
what happened here. Chilling, and as horrific as Ariela's murder was,
9:44
it wasn't an isolated incident. The unseiling of the Bad
9:48
Boys seven indictment revealed that her death was the climax
9:51
of a much larger two year reign of terror.
9:53
Speaker 2: It was a massive wave of violence.
9:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, which seamlessly connects her individual tragedy to the broader indictment.
10:00
Let's talk about the scope of this federal indictment because
10:02
it is absolutely staggering.
10:04
Speaker 2: The indictment file in the Southern District of New York
10:07
covers crimes stretching from September twenty twenty three to September
10:11
twenty twenty five, full two years. Yeah. It charges eleven
10:14
specific individuals with racketeering conspiracy.
10:17
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the list of charges here and it
10:19
reads like a mob indictment from the nineteen eighties, but
10:21
updated for the digital age very much.
10:23
Speaker 2: So.
10:24
Speaker 1: You have racketeering conspiracy, five counts of murder, armed robberies, carjackings,
10:29
narcotics trafficking specifically cocaine, heroin and marijuana, and wire fraud.
10:34
Speaker 2: It's a massive criminal enterprise. And when we talk about
10:37
these eleven individuals, figures like children Sosa, Eric Placentia, Justin
10:42
Martha and Darwin Martinez. It's important to understand how they
10:46
operated structurally.
10:47
Speaker 1: Right, because law enforcement isn't just arresting eleven guys who
10:50
happened to commit crimes together.
10:52
Speaker 2: No, not at all. They are dismantling a set.
10:54
Speaker 1: And that's a crucial distinction. Break down what a gang
10:57
set actually means in this context. How is it different
11:00
from just a crew of friends hanging out.
11:02
Speaker 2: Well, a set operates very similarly to a franchise model
11:07
in the corporate world. Oh really yeah, think of the
11:10
Trinitarios gang as the parent corporation. The Bad Boys seven
11:14
or BB seven is a specific localized franchise of that corporation. Okay,
11:19
track that, and within that franchise you have a rigid hierarchy.
11:23
You have leaders who dictate operations, foot soldiers who carry
11:27
out the violence and narcotic sales, and a system for
11:29
distributing the proceeds.
11:31
Speaker 1: So if a foot soldier commits a robbery, he doesn't
11:33
just pocket the cash and go home.
11:35
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. A percentage of that profit, often called
11:39
tribute or dues, has to be funneled upward to the
11:42
leadership of the set. Wow, and sometimes even further up
11:45
the chain to the incarcerated founders of the overarching gang.
11:49
Speaker 1: So they are paying franchise fees basically essentially yes.
11:52
Speaker 2: In exchange for paying this tribute, the members get the
11:55
protection of the gang's brand, they get access to their
11:58
supply chains for narcotics, and the collective manpower needed to
12:01
execute larger, more complex crimes.
12:04
Speaker 1: It's literally a formalized economy of violence, it is, and
12:08
the stakes for the men running the specific franchise are
12:11
now existential. I mean, out of the eleven defendants, six
12:14
are specifically charged in relation to Ariella's.
12:17
Speaker 2: Death right justin Martha Michael Mercedes Marte, Jose pril To Gomez,
12:21
Manuela Bodrives, Wilfrid Carbuccia, and jillen Porto's Guaba.
12:26
Speaker 1: And they are facing potential capital charges, the death penalty,
12:30
or a mandatory life in federal prison.
12:32
Speaker 2: It's as serious as it gets. And while the murder
12:35
of an innocent influencer brought the media spotlight, the indictment
12:38
details for other murders that showcase the gang's absolute lack
12:42
of regard for human life.
12:43
Speaker 1: Let's walk through that timeline of violence, because it really
12:46
establishes a pattern of behavior. Right, If you go back
12:48
to March thirty, twenty twenty four, in the Bronx, you
12:52
have the murder of Francolist Davares allegedly by Childred Sosa
12:56
and Angel mannon.
12:58
Speaker 2: And then the summer of twenty twenty five hit and
13:00
the violence accelerates dramatically.
13:02
Speaker 1: Yeah. Talk about July twenty eight, twenty twenty five.
13:05
Speaker 2: There is a large public car meet in the Bronx.
13:08
Defendant Darwin Martinez, who is known by the street name Mole,
13:12
allegedly rides up on a.
13:13
Speaker 1: Moped and this is where the sheer, terrifying randomness of
13:16
the violence is apparent. He doesn't go there to settle
13:19
a gang dispute. No, he spots two individuals, Gabriel Alvarez
13:22
and Adam waldropped, and he tries to steal a necklace,
13:26
a piece of jewelry, just an opportunistic robbery, right, And
13:29
when they resist the robbery, Martinez allegedly opens fire, killing
13:32
both of them.
13:33
Speaker 2: Two lives ended over a necklace. Seconding it perfectly illustrates
13:36
how BB seven used extreme violence as a first resort,
13:39
not a last one exactly, And just five days later
13:42
on August two, twenty twenty five, a large group of
13:45
these defendants allegedly murder Alvis Perez Leiano.
13:49
Speaker 1: But this time they aren't in the Bronx.
13:51
Speaker 2: No, they are near a barber shop in Newark, New Jersey.
13:54
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, because look at the
13:56
geographical spread.
13:57
Speaker 2: Of what we've just described, right, it's fast.
13:59
Speaker 1: We have Upper Manhattan, we have Mount Vernon in Westchester,
14:03
we have the Bronx, we have Newark, New Jersey. This
14:07
fundamentally changes how we think about street gangs. Okay, we
14:11
usually picture a gang aggressively protecting a single city block
14:15
or a corner store, but this operates more like a
14:18
regional franchise of violence. They are completely.
14:21
Speaker 2: Mobile, and that mobility is their defining characteristic. It's what
14:25
made them such a complex threat for local law enforcement
14:28
to handle.
14:28
Speaker 1: See as they keep crossing jurisdictions.
14:30
Speaker 2: Right, they weren't just defending territory. They were actively venturing
14:33
out of their strongholds to hunt for lucrative targets across
14:36
state lines.
14:37
Speaker 1: Which brings us to a frankly astonishing incident detailed in
14:40
the sources, one that happened just about six weeks before
14:43
Ariela's murder.
14:45
Speaker 2: Yes, the robbery in late June.
14:46
Speaker 1: There is a twelfth defendant associated with this set, a
14:49
man named Jeryl Ledesma, also known as El Nuev. He
14:54
is charged separately for an armed robbery that took place
14:57
over two days June twenty seventh and twenty eighth, twenty five,
15:01
and this event.
15:02
Speaker 2: Is the definitive proof of their operational sophistication.
15:05
Speaker 1: So what happened?
15:07
Speaker 2: Well, the target of this robbery was a prominent international
15:10
recording artist. While the federal indictment anonymizes him, multiple reports
15:15
have identified the victim as the Dominican dembo musician Boon
15:18
in forty seven.
15:19
Speaker 1: Okay, so a very recognizable figure exactly.
15:22
Speaker 2: He was in the middle of a lucrative US tour.
15:25
Speaker 1: So you have a highly visible musician, likely carrying significant
15:28
amounts of cash and high value jewelry, but he is
15:31
moving constantly. How do you rob a moving target?
15:34
Speaker 2: You apply the exact same methodology they would later use
15:37
on Ariela Mahia Polanko.
15:38
Speaker 1: The GPS tracker.
15:40
Speaker 2: They used a GPS tracker, but the scale of this
15:42
stocking is incredible. They placed the tracker on the artist's
15:45
vehicle or his tour bus, and they monitored his movement
15:48
starting in Massachusetts.
15:49
Speaker 1: Wait Massachusetts.
15:51
Speaker 2: Yes, they tracked his electronic signal down through New England,
15:54
down into Westchester County, through the Bronx across Manhattan, and
15:58
finally tracked him to a hotel parking lot in Fort Lee,
16:01
New Jersey.
16:03
Speaker 1: So they stocked a musician across three different state.
16:05
Speaker 2: Lines, Yes, they did.
16:07
Speaker 1: I really want to pause and think about the logistics
16:09
of that for a second. If you are tailing someone
16:12
from Massachusetts to New Jersey, you have to worry about
16:15
battery life on the tracker.
16:17
Speaker 2: Right, because these consumer devices usually only last a week
16:20
or two, depending on how often they ping the cell tower.
16:22
Speaker 1: And you have to monitor the app constantly. You have
16:25
to coordinate a team of armed men in a chase vehicle,
16:28
managing their fatigue, their fuel.
16:30
Speaker 2: Crossing multiple toll bridges with automated.
16:33
Speaker 1: Cameras exactly, all while maintaining stealth.
16:36
Speaker 2: It requires a level of patience and operational discipline that
16:39
we traditionally associate with sophisticated organized crime syndicates like Lecosinostra
16:45
or even state sponsored espionage.
16:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, not a street gang.
16:49
Speaker 2: Right to follow a target for days, waiting for the
16:52
perfect geographical vulnerability, in this case a specific hotel parking
16:56
lot in Fort Lee. Shows immense restraint, and.
16:59
Speaker 1: Once they had him isolated in New.
17:01
Speaker 2: Jersey, they brandished firearms and stripped him of his high
17:04
value jewelry.
17:05
Speaker 1: It's chilling because when you look at the timeline, the
17:09
Bilin forty seven robbery in late June was a proof
17:12
of concept.
17:13
Speaker 2: It was a beta test.
17:14
Speaker 1: They beta tested this methodology. They proved to themselves that
17:17
they could use military style tracking tech to hunt high
17:20
value assets across state lines.
17:22
Speaker 2: And a month and a half later, they deployed that
17:25
exact same playbook to steal a Mercedes g Wagon, resulting
17:29
in Ariella's death. It is just incredibly dark, and if
17:32
we connect this to the bigger picture, it raises a
17:35
profound historical question. How does a street gang develop this
17:39
kind of cold, calculated discipline. To understand that, we have
17:42
to look away from modern technology and look back at
17:45
the origins of the trinitarios. We have to look at
17:48
the pressure cooker where this gang was forged.
17:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, because a group like BB seven doesn't just magically
17:53
appear on the streets of the Bronx with GPS trackers
17:55
and a highly structured franchise model. They are a branch
17:58
of a very deep, very dark tree.
18:01
Speaker 2: Exactly the origins of the Trinitarios, often styled as three
18:05
and I take us back to the early nineteen nineties.
18:07
Speaker 1: Okay, so over thirty years ago, right, and to.
18:10
Speaker 2: One of the most notoriously violent environments in the United States,
18:14
the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City.
18:18
Speaker 1: Man Rikers. When we talk about Rikers in the early nineties,
18:22
we are talking about an era of extreme institutional chaos.
18:26
Speaker 2: Completely.
18:26
Speaker 1: It was overcrowded, understaffed, and heavily controlled by deeply entrenched
18:31
prison gangs.
18:32
Speaker 2: Exactly. You had legacy organizations like the Latin Kings, the
18:35
need Atas, the Bloods, and the Crips.
18:38
Speaker 1: And these groups essentially ran the cell blocks.
18:41
Speaker 2: He did. If you were a new inmate arriving at Rikers,
18:44
you were immediately vulnerable to extortion, assault, and worse, unless
18:47
you had the backing of a larger group.
18:49
Speaker 1: So you have a growing population of Dominican inmates entering
18:52
this ecosystem and they are finding themselves completely unprotected, right.
18:56
Speaker 2: They are being targeted by the established gangs. But what
18:59
do they do well out of pure necessity and self preservation.
19:02
A group of Dominican inmates decided they needed to form
19:05
their own coalition.
19:06
Speaker 1: A mutual aid society.
19:07
Speaker 2: Basically, the organization was spearheaded by individuals like Leonida's Unido
19:12
Sierra and Julio Cuboyo Marine. Okay, and it's worth noting
19:16
that both of these men were already incarcerated on murder charges.
19:20
Speaker 1: Oh wow, okay, Yeah.
19:21
Speaker 2: So they were not naive to extreme violence. They understood
19:24
exactly what currency mattered inside.
19:26
Speaker 1: Rikers, right, they knew how to survive. But the branding
19:29
they chose for this group is really fascinating to me.
19:32
Speaker 2: How so they.
19:33
Speaker 1: Didn't just pick a tough sounding street name. They tapped
19:37
into deep patriotic history. They called themselves the Trinitarios, right,
19:42
and they adopted the motto Dios patria, elibertad, God country
19:46
and Liberty.
19:47
Speaker 2: Which carries immense cultural weight in the Dominican Republic.
19:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, because La Trinitario was the name of the
19:53
secret society founded by Juan Pablo Darte in eighteen thirty eight.
19:57
Speaker 2: Movement that fought for and eventually won the independence the
20:00
Dominican Republic.
20:01
Speaker 1: Yes, so here you have men sitting in Rikers Island,
20:04
saving time for murder, co opting the sacred language and
20:08
imagery of their nation's founding fathers to build a prison gang.
20:11
Speaker 2: It is incredibly cynical.
20:13
Speaker 1: It really is. But you can see why it worked
20:15
as a recruitment tool. You know, it gave them a
20:17
sense of righteous identity. I've always thought about this evolution
20:22
like a corrupted startup company.
20:23
Speaker 2: A corrupted startup, how do you mean?
20:25
Speaker 1: Well, think about a tech startup. It begins with a
20:28
small group of founders in a garage, right, or in
20:31
this case, a cell block. Okay, I fall, and they
20:34
are trying to solve a specific, localized problem. For the Trinitarios.
20:39
That problem was how do we not get stabbed in
20:41
the yard today?
20:43
Speaker 2: Right?
20:43
Speaker 1: So they band together, they establish rules, They solve the
20:46
immediate problem. But then as members start getting released from
20:50
Rikers back onto the streets of New York, the organization
20:53
doesn't disband, it scales up.
20:56
Speaker 2: That is an incredibly apt analogy because they write a
21:00
is that the same disciplined, hierarchical structure they kept them
21:03
alive in prison could be weaponized to generate massive profits
21:08
on the outside.
21:08
Speaker 1: Exactly the mutual aid society metastasized into a sprawling, predatory enterprise.
21:14
Speaker 2: They aggressively expanded their market share. They moved out of
21:17
the prison system and established sets across the Five Boroughs,
21:21
eventually bleeding into New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and.
21:24
Speaker 1: Their business model shifted from mere protection to hostile takeovers
21:29
of street level narcotics.
21:31
Speaker 2: Right they moved heavily into the distribution of cocaine and heroin,
21:35
and to protect those lucrative drug markets, they required internal
21:39
discipline and external.
21:41
Speaker 1: Terror, which they were very good at providing.
21:43
Speaker 2: Very over the decades, the Trinitarios developed a terrifying reputation
21:47
for using machetes and overwhelming group violence to send messages
21:52
to rivals.
21:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you really cannot discuss the history of the
21:55
Trinitarios without mentioning the heartbreaking twenty eighteen murder of Lazandro
21:59
Junior Guzman Felice.
22:01
Speaker 2: In the Bronx, A completely tragic case for.
22:03
Speaker 1: Those who don't remember, Junior was a fifteen year old
22:05
boy who was part of an NYPD Explorer program. He
22:09
was aspiring to be a police officer.
22:11
Speaker 2: And a group of Trinitario's members mistook him for a
22:14
member of a rival faction.
22:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, they dragged him out of a bodega and brutally
22:19
murdered him with machetes on the street.
22:21
Speaker 2: The security footage of that murder went viral globally.
22:25
Speaker 1: It was horrified.
22:26
Speaker 2: It was a watershed moment because it forced the public
22:29
to confront the sheer theater of violence this gang was
22:33
capable of. The brutality wasn't just anger, it was performative, right.
22:38
Speaker 1: It was designed to instill absolute terror in the community. Yes,
22:42
and the bad Boy seven set that we are discussing
22:45
today is the modern iteration of that exact same corporate culture.
22:49
They inherited that structural violence, but they upgraded the tool exactly.
22:53
Speaker 2: They swapped the machetes for firearms and the street corner
22:56
lookouts for GPS trackers.
22:57
Speaker 1: Which makes them infinitely more dams.
23:00
Speaker 2: It does, and this raises the central question of the investigation.
23:04
If you have an organization that is this structurally sound,
23:07
this mobile, and wielding this level of technological sophistication, how
23:12
do you actually catch them?
23:13
Speaker 1: Right? Because a local precing detective can't dismantle a multi
23:17
state franchise alone. No, It's impossible, because if the game
23:20
doesn't respect city limits or state lines, law enforcement can't
23:23
afford to either. The jurisdictional red tape would normally allow
23:26
these guys to slip through the cracks.
23:28
Speaker 2: Exactly, they commit a robbery in Fort Lee, New Jersey,
23:31
could they sleep in the bronx? If the police departments
23:34
aren't talking to each other, instantly the trail goes cold.
23:37
Speaker 1: So how did they break the case? Because the takedown
23:40
of BB seven is being heralded as a triumph of
23:42
what NYPD Commissioner Jessica S. Tish called precision policing.
23:47
Speaker 2: Yes, precision policing. This wasn't a standard investigation. Following the
23:52
murder of Ariela Mahia Polanco in August twenty twenty five,
23:56
a massive, unprecedented inter agent see dragnet was formed.
24:01
Speaker 1: Okay, let's look the mechanics of this dragnet. How did
24:04
they get their first real break in the case. It
24:06
started with the vehicles, right.
24:07
Speaker 2: Correct, The two stolen cars used to box Ariela in
24:10
on the Cross County Parkway.
24:12
Speaker 1: Because when you commit a crime on a major highway,
24:14
you are entering one of the most heavily surveilled environments
24:17
in modern society.
24:18
Speaker 2: You are and this is where the Westchester County real
24:21
time crimes that are proved invaluable, specifically their use of
24:25
ALPRs or automated license plate readers.
24:28
Speaker 1: I think people hear a license plate reader and they
24:30
just picture a camera that takes a photo if you
24:31
run a red light. But ALPRs are so much more
24:34
invasive and powerful than that, Oh, massively more powerful. Can
24:37
you explain the sheer scale of this technology.
24:40
Speaker 2: It is essentially a sprawling, interconnected digital net. ALPRs are
24:46
high speed cameras mounted on highway overpasses, toll booths, police cruisers,
24:52
and even seemingly random street pols.
24:54
Speaker 1: They are everywhere.
24:56
Speaker 2: Yes, they capture an image of every single license plate
24:59
that passed by reading the alphin Americ characters instantly using
25:03
optical character recognition.
25:05
Speaker 1: So they aren't just looking for stolen cars in real time.
25:08
They are building a massive historical database of movement.
25:11
Speaker 2: Exactly every time a plate is scan the system logs
25:15
the time, the date, the exact GPS coordinates of the camera,
25:18
and the direction of travel. That is wild, it is.
25:21
What this allows investigators to do is retroactive mapping.
25:25
Speaker 1: Retroactive mapping what does that mean in practice?
25:27
Speaker 2: Once the police had the license plate numbers of the
25:29
stolen cars used in the Westchester attack. They didn't just
25:33
look for where the cars were right.
25:34
Speaker 1: Now, because they'd probably be dumped.
25:36
Speaker 2: Right They queried the database to see everywhere those cars
25:39
had been in the days leading up to the murder
25:41
and the exact path they took fleeing the scene.
25:44
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So they followed the digital breadcrumbs they did,
25:47
and those breadcrumbs led them straight south out of Westchester,
25:51
through the Bronx, over the George Washington Bridge and into
25:54
New Jersey.
25:55
Speaker 2: And the ALPR data eventually allowed police to locate one
25:58
of the stolen vehicles parked in New Jersey, just sitting
26:01
there right in close proximity to residence, is directly linked
26:05
to several BB seven gang members.
26:07
Speaker 1: So once that physical link was established, the jurisdictional walls
26:10
came down. The collaboration was immense. Yes, you had the
26:14
FBI's Safe Streets Task Force leading the charge, working alongside
26:18
the NYPD, the district attorneys from the Bronx in Westchester,
26:22
and prosecutors and local police from Bergen, Essex and Passaic
26:26
Counties in New Jersey.
26:27
Speaker 2: It was a truly unified front.
26:28
Speaker 1: And when this multi agency task force finally moved to
26:31
execute synchronized search horrs across multiple locations. The physical evidence
26:36
they recovered was devastating to the gang.
26:38
Speaker 2: It was they seized the standard tools of the trade,
26:42
you know, firearms, ammunition, fraudulent identification cards.
26:46
Speaker 1: But crucially they found the technology.
26:49
Speaker 2: They found the GPS trackers.
26:50
Speaker 1: Sitting right there in their homes.
26:52
Speaker 2: They recovered the exact same type of consumer GPS trackers
26:56
that were utilized in both the Mahia Polanco carjacking and
27:00
bull In forty seven robbery.
27:02
Speaker 1: And finding those physical devices in the possession of the
27:05
defendants essentially cemented the premeditation aspect of the federal charges.
27:10
Speaker 2: Yes, it'd showed this wasn't random, but the most damning
27:13
evidence didn't actually come from the physical trackers. No, it
27:16
came from the electronic devices they see, the cell phones
27:19
and the computers.
27:20
Speaker 1: Okay, this brings us to the part of the story
27:21
that I find completely baffling. I have to admit I
27:24
am struggling to understand the psychological disconnect here.
27:28
Speaker 2: It is hard to wrap your head around.
27:29
Speaker 1: We just spent twenty minutes detailing how sophisticated these guys were.
27:33
They are running multi state operations. They are using military
27:37
style stealth tracking. They are coordinating chase vehicles.
27:41
Speaker 2: Right, showing incredible operational.
27:42
Speaker 1: Discipline exactly, And yet the federal prosecutors noted that the
27:46
bedrock of their indictment included the defendant's own social media
27:50
posts where they allegedly discussed, celebrated, and promoted these exact crimes.
27:55
Why on earth would you execute a flawless, untraceable heist
28:00
and then immediately posts a digital confession on Instagram. It
28:04
defies all logic.
28:06
Speaker 2: If you look at it purely from the standpoint of
28:08
criminal operational security, it is completely irrational, totally. But if
28:12
you analyze the ecosystem these individuals operate in, it makes
28:16
perfect sense. It is the modern social media paradox, and
28:20
it is the Achilles heel of almost every contemporary street gang.
28:23
Speaker 1: So what is the answer.
28:24
Speaker 2: The answer is digital clout.
28:26
Speaker 1: Okay, explain that economy to me. Why is clout more
28:29
valuable than staying out of federal prison.
28:31
Speaker 2: Well, in the modern gang structure, committing the violent act
28:34
or executing the robbery is only fifty percent of the objective,
28:38
only fifty percent, right. The other fifty percent is ensuring
28:41
that your peer group, your rivals and the broader culture
28:44
actually know that you did.
28:46
Speaker 1: It, so they need the audience.
28:47
Speaker 2: Your reputation is your primary currency. It dictates your rank
28:51
within the set, your ability to recruit, and your power
28:55
to intimidate rivals. Okay, I see, if you orchestrate a
28:58
massive jewelry heist against an international musician and the streets
29:02
don't know as BB seven who pulled it off, you
29:05
don't gain any of that currency.
29:06
Speaker 1: It's the ego demanding an audience. They are treating crime
29:10
like content creation exactly.
29:13
Speaker 2: They're operating under the delusion that their digital spaces are insulated,
29:17
or they simply succumb to the narcissistic need for immediate validation.
29:21
Speaker 1: So what are they posting.
29:22
Speaker 2: They post photos wearing the stolen jewelry. They use localized
29:27
slang or emojis in comments to take credit for specific
29:30
acts of violence.
29:31
Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
29:32
Speaker 2: They completely underestimate the fact that federal investigators are operating
29:35
fake accounts, scraping their data and meticulously cataloging every bost
29:40
So they.
29:40
Speaker 1: Literally handed the FBI the rope to hang them with.
29:43
Speaker 2: They really did.
29:44
Speaker 1: By the time the federal indictment was unsealed in July
29:46
twenty twenty six. Most of these defendants were already sitting
29:50
in custody on other state charges, completely unaware that their
29:53
own Instagram feeds had been weaponized into a federal asec
29:57
Q case.
29:58
Speaker 2: It is a profound failure of disp been driven by vanity. Yeah,
30:02
But as we transition away from the mechanics of the investigation,
30:05
this raises an important question about the reality of the
30:09
communities left in the wake of this.
30:11
Speaker 1: Violence, which is so important to discuss because.
30:13
Speaker 2: When we discuss multi state task forces in federal indictments,
30:17
the narrative can start to feel very clinical, very much
30:20
like an action movie.
30:21
Speaker 1: Right. We have to ground this in the human toll,
30:23
because the collateral damage is permanent. Yes, Ariela Michhie Polanco
30:27
was only thirty three because in a coldly financial decision
30:30
made by men who wanted her car. Two teenagers are
30:34
going to navigate the rest of their lives, their graduations,
30:36
their weddings without their mother.
30:38
Speaker 2: It's a staggering loss.
30:39
Speaker 1: And it's not just her. We are talking about the
30:41
families of Franklist Tavarez, Gabriel Alvarez, Adam Waldropped, and Elvis
30:46
Perez Leiano. Five families entirely shattered.
30:50
Speaker 2: And beyond the direct grief of the families, we have
30:54
to consider this systemic paralyzing effect on the neighborhoods where
30:57
BB seven operated. How so well, Let's look back at
31:01
the double murder at the Bronze Car meet. A young
31:04
man decides he wants a necklace and within seconds it
31:07
escalates into a double homicide in a crowded public space.
31:11
Speaker 1: It creates a baseline of absolute fear it does. It
31:15
means you can't go to a community gathering or wear
31:18
a nice piece of jewelry without the subconscious terror that
31:21
someone might ride up on a mopad and end your
31:23
life over a few ounces of metal. It stifles the
31:27
entire culture of a neighborhood.
31:29
Speaker 2: And that is the insidious nature of opportunistic violence. When
31:32
a gang operates with that level of casual brutality, the
31:36
threat of escalation is constantly humming in the background.
31:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're always on edge.
31:40
Speaker 2: And when the incorporated technology, as they did with Ariela,
31:43
it shatters the illusion of safety for everyone in the
31:45
broader region.
31:46
Speaker 1: Exactly, you are no longer safe. Just because you left
31:49
the bad neighborhood, they can track you to the safe.
31:51
Speaker 2: Neighborhood right nowhere is off limits.
31:53
Speaker 1: Which is exactly why the federal government stepped in. When
31:56
a local problem becomes a regional technologically advanced terror campain,
32:00
the local authorities hand the reins to the Feds.
32:03
Speaker 2: And the Feds bring out the heaviest weapon in their
32:06
legal arsenal.
32:07
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for the legal horizon
32:11
of the bad Boy seven.
32:12
Speaker 2: Well, they are currently facing the crushing weight of a
32:14
Riiko prosecution. All eleven defendants pleaded not guilty and are
32:20
currently being held without bail by US District Judge Philip M.
32:24
Halpern in the Southern District of New York.
32:27
Speaker 1: We hear the term reicho thrown around a lot in
32:29
pop culture, usually in mob movies, But what does it
32:31
actually do legally? Why is it so devastating for a gang?
32:34
Speaker 2: Raiko stands for the Racketeer Influenced in Corrupt Organizations Act.
32:39
It was passed in nineteen seventy specifically to solve the
32:42
problem of the mafia structure. Okay, before Riiko, if a
32:45
mob boss ordered a foot soldier to commit a murder,
32:48
it was incredibly difficult to prosecute the boss unless you
32:51
had direct.
32:52
Speaker 1: Proof of the order, which they never wrote down.
32:54
Speaker 2: Right, Raiko changed the game by making it a crime
32:57
to simply participate in or derive income from a corrupt enterprise.
33:01
Speaker 1: So the government doesn't have to prove that Sheldred Sosa
33:04
or Justin Martha pulled the specific trigger on every single
33:08
crime exactly. They just have to prove that BB seven
33:11
is a criminal enterprise, that these men are members of it,
33:14
and that the enterprise committed a pattern of crimes.
33:17
Speaker 2: Right. It bridges the gap between the leadership and the
33:19
street level violence, and defending against an ICO charge is
33:24
a grueling, year's long process. I can imagine the volume
33:28
of discovery the evidence the government has to share with
33:31
the defense is going to be monumental.
33:33
Speaker 1: Because of all the tech.
33:34
Speaker 2: Yes, we are talking about terabytes of ALPR mapping data, GPS,
33:39
server logs, cell site analysis, intercepted communications, and years of
33:43
archives social media posts.
33:45
Speaker 1: And inevitably, the pressure of a federal case usually cracks
33:48
the loyalty of the gang.
33:49
Speaker 2: Right almost always, our co J cases heavily rely on
33:52
cooperating witnesses.
33:53
Speaker 1: The foot soldiers flip yes.
33:55
Speaker 2: When low level members realize they are facing decades in
33:58
federal prism. The streets tends to evaporate rapidly. Understand the
34:02
government will leverage lighter sentences to convince members to testify
34:06
against the leadership, breaking the gang from the inside out, and.
34:10
Speaker 1: The sentences they are looking at are staggering. As we noted,
34:14
six of them face potential capital charges for the carjacking
34:17
resulting in Ariella's death. Yes, realistically, how often does the
34:21
federal government actually pursue the death penalty in these gang cases?
34:25
Speaker 2: It remains relatively rare. Pursuing federal capital punishment requires an
34:29
extensive authorization process from the Department of Justice in Washington,
34:33
d C. And it adds years of complex litigation to
34:37
the trial. While it is a tool the prosecutors hold
34:40
to exert maximum pressure, historical precedent suggests that mandatory life
34:44
imprisonment without the possibility of parole is the much more
34:48
common resolution.
34:50
Speaker 1: Either way, the explicit goal of this indictment is permanent removal.
34:54
The rhetoric from law enforcement leadership makes it clear that
34:56
they view this as an existential fight. They absolutely DOBI
35:00
Assistant Director James C. Barnacle Junior publicly condemned the violence
35:04
as horrific in its brutality and Burden.
35:06
Speaker 2: County Prosecutor Mark Musella highlighted the broader implications.
35:10
Speaker 1: What did he say?
35:11
Speaker 2: He stated that this indictment proves organized street gangs are
35:14
no longer just a localized nuisance. They are a regional
35:17
threat that demands a unified, borderless response.
35:21
Speaker 1: So this multi agency takedown is designed to be a deterrent.
35:24
Speaker 2: Yes, it sends a message to every other gang set
35:27
operating in the Northeast. If you attempt to scale your
35:30
violence across state lines, the federal infrastructure exists to map
35:34
your every move and dismantle your entire hierarchy.
35:37
Speaker 1: It is a massive surgical attempt to remove a deeply
35:41
entrenched cancer from the New York and New Jersey region.
35:44
We set out today to understand how the tragic, seemingly
35:47
random murder of a prominent influencer on a quiet highway
35:50
pulled back the curtain on a sprawling criminal enterprise, and.
35:54
Speaker 2: We've seen the mechanics of how a evolution occurred. We
35:56
watch the Trinitarias evolve from a desperate mutual aid societ
36:00
the inside Rikers Island into a predatory regional franchise.
36:03
Speaker 1: We saw how the bad Boy seven set weaponized the
36:06
tools of the twenty first century consumer GPS trackers and
36:09
digital coordination to commit the oldest, most brutal crimes in
36:13
the book.
36:14
Speaker 2: And ultimately we saw how their own vanity, their desperate
36:18
need for digital clout, provided the exact blueprints the federal
36:22
government needed to bring them down.
36:24
Speaker 1: It is a sobering, deeply complex reality of modern crime.
36:28
Speaker 2: It really is.
36:29
Speaker 1: It absolutely is. But before we wrap up this deep dive,
36:32
there is one underlying detail from this entire saga that
36:35
I simply cannot stop thinking about, and I want to
36:38
leave you with this thought.
36:39
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm listening.
36:40
Speaker 1: We spend an enormous amount of our daily lives worrying
36:43
about invisible surveillance. We worry about tech corporations mining our data,
36:49
or foreign governments monitoring our social media algorithm.
36:52
Speaker 2: Sure, the big abstract threats, exactly.
36:54
Speaker 1: We think of surveillance as something vast and abstract, but
36:58
this case reveals a much more mediate, physical and terrifying threat. Yeah,
37:03
if a localized street level criminal franchise can easily purchase
37:07
and deploy military GRATEE tracking technology to stock a vehicle
37:10
on a highway or to patiently hunt a musician across
37:13
three different state lines.
37:14
Speaker 2: It changes everything.
37:16
Speaker 1: It really does. We have to ask ourselves a difficult question.
37:19
Has the democratization of consumer technology accidentally democratized professional espionage?
37:25
Speaker 2: Wow? A chilling thought.
37:27
Speaker 1: The tools of the spy trade are now available for
37:30
thirty dollars with next day shipping. Next time you are
37:33
walking through a parking lot and you see an unfamiliar
37:36
blinking device stuck to a chassis, you might look at
37:39
it a little differently.
37:40
Speaker 2: It certainly forces you to reevaluate the invisible technological systems
37:45
we blindly trust every single day.
37:47
Speaker 1: It absolutely does. Thank you for joining us as we
37:50
unpack this intricate and tragic case. Keep your eyes open,
37:53
stay curious, and keep questioning the world around you. We'll
37:55
see you on the next deep dive.