Palomino Locos Salvatruchas
Mara Salvatrucha 13; Palomino Locotes Salvatruchas
The Palomino Avenue Locos began as the Ginger Street Stoners and originated in Little Seoul, Los Santos in the early 1980s. Neighborhood lore points towards their founding year as being 1983, but personal accounts among residents vary. The criminal group was formed by Salvadoran refugees who had recently arrived from the Salvadoran Civil War, although some other Central Americans such as Guatemalans and Nicaraguans were also in the founders circle. The clique were involved in organizing heavy metal concerts around Little Seoul and used such venues to distribute marijuana. Conversely, the revenue from selling weed was used to fund these concerts. The marijuana had been trafficked into the city from across the border in Tijuana, Mexico. Eventually, the clique began cultivating their own marijuana out of high-rise housing projects around Little Seoul.
During the late 1980s, the Ginger Street Stoners joined along with the emerging Mara Salvatrucha gang. Becoming the Palomino Avenue Locos, they were infamous for their rivalry with the 18th Street Decker Park Locos. In addition to this infamy, they had a reputation for being well organized and extremely violent. The clique's leadership had the alleged support of Mario 'Satan' Villatoro, a Salvadoran guerrilla who was an active combatant in the early 1980s. Villatoro was a Communist insurgent involved with combatting the Salvadoran Army and federal police in & around the Santa Ana area for many years. At an unknown point during the decade, he arrived in Los Santos after illegally crossing through Mexico. During his tenure as the clique's top shotcaller, he reformed the logistics of narcotics distribution while tightening the discipline among the gangbangers. He additionally fostered a culture of extreme violence, promoting brutal attacks against rival gangbangers and the general public using weapons such as knives, machetes and axes.
Villatoro himself would eventually get met with such extreme violence by falling victim to a public homicide in 1998. He had been impaled in the head with an axe by a Little Seoul shopkeeper who was infuriated with his repeated extortion attempts.
Their street wars with 18th Street Decker Park Locos continued well into the 1990s, until a truce was allegedly brokered between the two gangs. This came after the several years of street fighting resulted in alarming numbers of homicides, incarcerations and deportations. During this period of turbulence, some hardened members of the Palomino Avenue Locos were deported to El Salvador and Guatemala. In cities such as San Salvador and Huehuetenango, the offshoots of the clique were started by these criminal deportees. Simultaneously, in order to avoid harsher criminal prosecution in San Andreas, gangbangers re-located to the American Northeast. In 1998, offshoots of the Palomino Locos clique were created in Bohan, Liberty City. The Baltimore police documented the Palomino Avenue Locos in 2002. Around this time, the FBI in the American Northeast began an investigation into the gang, conducting street-level surveillance within impoverished urban neighbourhoods.
Status of clique leadership
In 2005, the clique's top Los Santos shotcaller, naturalized American citizen Josue 'Lil Bandit' Zelaya was sentenced to 20 years in a San Andreas state prison for a double 2nd degree homicide that happened earlier in 2003. The clique leader had immigrated to Los Santos, San Andreas from La Union, El Salvador with his family in 1989. In 1996, he became an American citizen with his father, around the same time that he joined the Palomino Avenue Locos. At the time of the double-homicide, he was heading the clique's narcotics production & distribution activities in Los Santos.
On July 16, 2003 Zelaya gunned down two innocent members of the general public from outside of their apartment building in Mirror Park, a gentrified neighbourhood of Los Santos. He had killed the man and woman, who had recently gotten married, after mistaking them for two individuals who had ripped off his younger brother in a drug deal earlier in the year. He approached their ground-floor balcony after sunset, where he fired multiple shots through the sliding glass door. The victims, Steven Tessier and his wife Alexandra, were struck multiple times and were killed. Their pet dog was grazed by the gunfire but survived after receiving emergency veterinarian care. The killings became widely publicized in San Andreas as a whole, as the two victims had recently gotten married, had careers in public communication and had just re-located to Los Santos from Chicago. Their victimization in such a crime was seen as an abnormal phenomenon for Mirror Park.
Zelaya was apprehended around a month later after forensic evidence and witness reports connected him to the crime. In 2005, he was convicted of his crimes and sentenced to 20 years in prison; 10 years of incarceration were attached to each individual killing. He has been locked up in the state prison system since 2005, although in 2021, he will be eligible for parole as he will have served most of his sentence.
To this day, the clique maintains leadership in the county & state correctional systems in San Andreas. Although there are shotcallers in the streets of Los Santos, the clique's higher echelons are all incarcerated. The majority of them are locked up in maximum security state prisons around San Andreas. Following the 2003 killings of Steven and Alexandra Tessier, the clique's high leadership strictly forbade street-level shotcallers from directly participating in homicides. The clique was given an order to only use lower and middle ranking gangbangers for public homicides, as Zelaya's incarceration caused a massive deficit for the clique's narcotics distribution operations in the street.
Contemporary era
The Palomino Avenue Locos are the largest clique, or set, of the Mara Salvatrucha in the United States. The clique is estimated by local & federal police to have several hundred members. These gangbangers are criminally active in Los Santos, Liberty City, Baltimore and Washington D.C. In addition to these cities, they have a presence in the state and federal prison systems. Although the clique has lost a significant amount of power and influence in Los Santos over the past 20 years, they have been strengthened in the American Northeast.
The clique is regularly at odds with the Sureños, 18th Street gang, Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings and Trinitarios, among other American street gangs. Heavily involved with narcotics production and distribution, the clique is alleged to have criminal contacts across the United States and in Central America. Their other criminal activities include gun running, prostitution and involvement with prison criminal organizations such as the Mexican Mafia (eMe).
