Ten members of the infamous MS-13 gang from Flushing were indicted Thursday on racketeering charges, including violent machete and baseball attacks against rivals, authorities said.
Federal agents and NYPD detectives arrested eight of the thugs in early morning raids while two others were already incarcerated.
The defendants were members of a powerful clique of Mara Salvatrucha 13 wreaking havoc in their Queens neighborhood since 2007, authorities said.
Christian Merino, a reputed leader of the clique, was secretly intercepted on a wiretap discussing a September 2010 stabbing and baseball bat beating with an associate.
A machete was seized from gang member Abraham Iraheta, who is charged with using the large knife in a 2009 attack.
Carlos Hernandez is charged with volunteering to be the triggerman in a revenge shooting against a rival who slashed the face of MS-13 member Kevin Cardona.
The indictment also charges the Queens-based faction with raising money to finance the gang’s activities in El Salvador and with plotting to smuggle MS-13 members from the Texas border to Virginia.
Immigration and law enforcement officials have arrested and charged 20 people, including five Queens residents and three Brooklyn residents, in connection with a human trafficking operation that allegedly brought women from Russia and Eastern Europe and forced them to dance in various strip clubs in the city.
The charges, which were unveiled today at Federal Plaza in Downtown Manhattan, allege that four members of the Gambino crime family and three members of the Bonnano crime family worked with Russian collaborators to bring the victimized women into the country on work and travel visas.
Once the women were brought into the country, they were forced to work as exotic dancers.
Visa rules forbid employment in adult entertainment.
Authorities conducted raids for evidence early this morning at clubs where the women were allegedly forced to strip, including Cheetah's Gentlemen's Club on 43rd Street in Midtown and Gallagher's in Long Island City, Queens.
Other women were forced to marry men in Binghamton, N.Y.
The 20 defendants are facing varying charges, including visa fraud, marriage fraud, racketeering, extortion and transporting, harboring and inducing the entry of illegal aliens.
A Brooklyn man was sentenced to seven to 21 years in prison Tuesday for posing as an inspector to extort tens of thousands of dollars from city construction sites.
Anthony Lewis, 42, was convicted of enterprise corruption this year for the ruse in which he and a co-defendant visited job sites in hardhats with "Committee on Contract Compliance" stenciled on them.
If their victims balked at handing over cash, the duo called in fake complaints to city agencies.
The official in charge of construction at the city agency that helps build moderately-priced housing — the largest municipal developer of such housing in the nation — was arrested early Thursday on federal racketeering conspiracy and bribery charges along with six developers, two of them lawyers, according to court papers.
The charges accuse the official, Wendell B. Walters, assistant commissioner for new construction for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, of transforming the agency into a racketeering enterprise along with one of the developers, Stevenson Dunn, officials said.
The indictment in the case charges that Mr. Walters took approximately $600,000 in bribes and kickbacks on about $22 million in moderately priced housing projects overseen by the housing preservation department in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn between 2002 and 2011, officials said.
Two men were convicted Thursday of posing as inspectors, complete with hardhats bearing an official-sounding name, to shake down builders for tens of thousands of dollars by threatening to report bogus violations in Brooklyn and throughout the city.
A jury found Kyle Correll, 43, and Anthony Lewis, 41, guilty of racketeering and other charges. Each faces up to 25 years in prison at sentencing. Lewis already is serving at least nine years on an identity theft conviction.
Correll plans to appeal, said defense lawyer Arnold Levine, who said the two men ran a legitimate business. Lewis’ lawyer didn’t immediately return a telephone call Thursday evening seeking comment. The case was one of a series of Manhattan district attorney’s office prosecutions in recent years targeting extortion among the city’s minority labor coalitions, groups initially aimed at integrating building trades but later rife with intimidation squads, according to authorities.
Lewis and Correll implied they were working for a government agency as they arrived at job sites with clipboards, video cameras and hardhats emblazoned with “Committee on Contract Compliance,” prosecutors said. They said the two might have found some legitimate violations but mostly just took up time with unnecessary inspections and then turned up later to demand payments. When contractors brushed them off, the men made fake complaints of violations to a host of city and federal agencies, prosecutors said.
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