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The bloodthirsty leader of a brutal MS-13 gang clique that terrorized Long Island with machete killings, drive-by shootings and neighborhood arsons was sentenced Tuesday to 68 years in federal prison.
Alexi Saenz — known on the streets as “Blasty” and “Plaky” — led the Brentwood/Central Islip chapter of the Sailors Locos Salvatruchas Westside, one of the most violent MS-13 factions on the East Coast.
The brutal gangster pleaded guilty last year to eight murders, three attempted murders, arson, drug trafficking and firearms offenses — all committed in service of the gang’s twisted mission of fear, violence and control, federal prosecutors said.
“This man led an unspeakable reign of terror,” said U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. “He killed without mercy, hunted victims in quiet neighborhoods, and treated brutality as a badge of honor.”
Ordered the hit on two high school girls
Among the most horrifying of his crimes was the September 2016 double murder of 15-year-old Nisa Mickens and 16-year-old Kayla Cuevas — two Brentwood High School students ambushed and butchered with bats and a machete.
Prosecutors explained that Saenz gave the green light to kill the girls — then cruised the block to look out for cops as his crew pounced. In 2018, Cuevas’ mother, Evelyn Rodriguez, an anti-gang activist, was fatally struck by Ann Marie Drago, 63, of Patchogue during a dispute over a neighborhood memorial for Cuevas that marked the second anniversary of her death.
Saenz, 30, was more hands-on in the April 2016 killing of 19-year-old Oscar Acosta, a suspected defector to a rival gang. Saenz ordered the teen beaten unconscious, stuffed into a car trunk, driven to the abandoned Pilgrim Psychiatric Center, and hacked to death in the woods.
Acosta’s remains weren’t found for five months.
Brutal deli killing
In January 2017, Saenz spotted 29-year-old Esteban Alvarado-Bonilla inside a Central Islip deli, wearing a football jersey with the number 18 — a number associated with MS-13’s rivals, the 18th Street gang.
Saenz supplied the gun used in the cold-blooded hit. The shooter walked in and fired multiple rounds, killing Alvarado-Bonilla and striking a female deli worker in the chest.
“One of the bullets pierced through Alvarado-Bonilla’s head and struck the chest of a female employee of thedeli, who was standing directly in front of him,” federal prosecutors said in a statement.
The deli worker survived.
“He wielded his power with a sickening disregard for human life,” FBI Assistant Director Christopher Raia said. “He hunted victims like prey and turned neighborhoods into war zones.”
Violence the likes of a horror movie
The violence tied to Saenz is the stuff of nightmares and slasher films: nine murders or attempts in just over a year.
That includes a man shot nine times on a sidewalk; a machete attack that left one man permanently disfigured; and an arson that blew up a parked car and set another ablaze. And it all went down, federal authorities said, as he fueled his gang operation with drug money and wired cash to MS-13 bosses in El Salvador.
Authorities noted that Saenz’s fate — growing old and likely dying while behind bars — is far more merciful than what the pain and terror he inflicted on his victims.
The case was part of Operation Take Back America, a Department of Justice crackdown on transnational criminal organizations.
Since 2010, prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York have obtained indictments charging MS-13 members with carrying out more than 75 murders in the the district, resulting in the convictions of dozens of MS-13 leaders and members connected to those murders.
U.S. District Attorney announcement
Top photo: Alexi “Blasty” Saenz (United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York).
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