| More information: | - He was one of the first to join the Peatonales Locos, one of the oldest gangs in El Salvador, located in downtown San Salvador. He soon became the gang's leader, according to testimonies from gang members collected by the author.
- He met Ricardo Alberto Díaz, alias Rata de Leeward, when the latter unified the Zuritas, Peatonales, and Quiñones cliques under his command, according to the same sources.
- In 2007, “he was promoted to runner by the late Crimen de Peatonales [Luis Ernesto Mejía Torres]. The thing is, the real, real right-hand man [of Rata] was Crimen, and Crimen was Cruger's boss... And in 2007, Crimen gave Cruger the position of runner for the Central Program,” recalled a veteran of the San Sívar Locos clique in conversation with the author.
- “He has the keys to MS-13 in El Salvador and also has a say in New York, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, Atlanta, and many other places, because Cruger is Mouse's [Rata's] right-hand man,” said Maniaco, a former gang member who has now converted to Christianity and lives outside El Salvador.
- On September 17, 2008, he was arrested for carrying false documents, according to a file from the Joint Border Intelligence Group.
- He was released from prison on September 11, 2009, when his case was dismissed, according to his SIPE prison file. He was apparently recaptured, because on August 24, 2011, he was released again from the San Francisco Gotera prison, according to his file.
- In 2015, Ranfla en Libertad, also known as La Federación, was created, where Cruger, along with Edwin Ernesto Cedillos Rodríguez, alias Renuente, and Dany Balmore Romero García, alias Big Boy, were put in charge of the central part of the country, according to the Jaque Case.
- Cruger received firearms from abroad, according to the Jaque Case, and endorsed several orders to kill police officers, relatives of police officers, and even “pets.”
- In December 2015, Cruger participated in the planning of the murder of Walter Alexánder Carrillo Alfaro, alias Shorty de Fulton, leader of a group of dissidents within the gang, according to Operation Jaque documents.
- In early 2016, Cruger traveled to Mexico and met in the city of Celaya, in the state of Guanajuato, with Hugo Armado Quinteros Mineros, alias Flaco; Francisco Javier Román Bardales, alias Veterano; and Marlon Antonio Menjívar Portillo, alias Rojo.
- From there, he remained involved in all matters of high importance to the gang and lived for a time with Flaco, according to a gang member who spoke with agents from the Joint Border Intelligence Group. “I took him out of Sivar [El Salvador] when they were looking for him,” the late Rafael Ernesto Gómez Ruballo, alias Boxer de Normandie Locos, said for this investigation. “We took him in after Flaco and Veterano. We got him papers because he was wanted in El Salvador. I was just told to go find him, then we got him fake papers like everyone else,” he said.
- In 2016, all MS-13 drugs entering El Salvador were handled by Cruger and Veterano, who brought marijuana from Mexico across the La Hachadura border in the west of the country and then distributed it among cliques and prisons, according to the indictment in the Jaque case.
- He moved from Guanajuato to the State of Mexico, where he set up a take-out food business that he ran himself, and then opened a cream shop in the town of San Pablo de las Salinas, Municipality of Tultitlán, according to the testimony of a former gang member based in Mexico.
- In June 2018, he returned to El Salvador, according to a police intelligence report from October 2020.
- According to Boxer, Cruger knows the La Hachadura border inside out and was backed by many of the cliques in El Salvador.
- In January 2019, he returned to Mexico and from there asked José Roberto Ayala Serrano, alias Big Crazy de Abriles Danger, to go to Mexico “to train criminal structures in that country in the use of explosives,” according to a gang member from the City Danger clique who was interviewed by the Transnational Anti-Gang Center on January 22, 2019.
- In 2019, he was identified by the Salvadoran police as “one of those interested in carrying out an attack with explosives together with Sparky from City Paraísos (Daniel Jeremías Brizuela Soriano), who have had contact with an individual located in the central market who has a vegetable stall, who appears to be in the military and is the one who obtains the explosives in Guatemala. In addition to being one of the main individuals involved in planning to attack the system.”
- On January 22, 2019, Elvis Enrique Mejía, alias Sayco, was captured. He was carrying a wila (written message) with two projects to be carried out together with Cruger: one consisted of forming a group of MS-13 snipers, who would be trained by Guatemalan military personnel with whom Veterano had contact. The second was to attack the system with explosives, which was scrapped because no one on the streets wanted to support it, according to the police report, titled “MS-13 gang leaders on the run and based in Mexico.”
- In February 2019, Cruger, along with Carlos Tiberio Ramírez Valladares, alias Snayder, were “heavily involved” in the February elections that brought Nayib Bukele to the presidency, according to the Eastern District of New York indictment.
- By 2019, the Mexico Program was the intellectual center of operations for the Ranfla Nacional. “This is where all the gang's operations for El Salvador originate, the main orders, the drug business, and logistics. This is where the ideas of how they want things to be done in El Salvador come from. The Mexico program is in this country, and one of its main missions is to nurture and expand it,” Gustavo Adolfo Martínez, Maligno de Park View Locos, told the Transnational Anti-Gang Center (CAT) in an interview.
- On June 10, 2019, another gang member who collaborates with the Transnational Anti-Gang Center accused Cruger of “ordering all criminal activity from Mexico” through the Soma and Line chat applications, according to a CAT PowerPoint presentation.
- In July 2019, when Bukele was already president, gang member Maligno from the Park View Locos clique also confessed to the CAT that MS-13 was in “contact with people in the government” and that they were expecting a “visit from three people recommended to talk” at the maximum-security prison in Zacatecoluca to “make a decision about the future direction of the gang.” However, he assured that “there are only two individuals who insist that the gang react, namely Veterano de Tribus and Cruger de Peatonales.”
- On July 16, 2019, when Bukele's negotiations with the gang were ongoing, Cruger and Sparky devised a plan to ask all the cliques in the Centro Program and other programs to contribute $2,000 to create a plan to attack President Bukele and the system, according to the police report “MS-13 gang leaders on the run and based in Mexico.”
- On September 20, 2019, Cruger and Rojo were accused by their own comrades of ordering from Mexico an increase in homicides in El Salvador, when 19 people were killed in one day, a number that was five times the daily average of homicides since the arrival of President Nayib Bukele, according to a September 28, 2020 presentation prepared by the PNC and titled “Ranfleros en México” (Gang Leaders in Mexico).
- Cruger intended to attack former congressman Guillermo Gallegos and the director of prisons, Osiris Luna, according to another gang member nicknamed “Sailor” who spoke to the Salvadoran police in an interview.
- From November 7 to 15, 2019, according to the Salvadoran police, “coordination at the highest level with the authorities of that country (Mexico) was carried out in order to locate and capture him,” as stated in a PowerPoint presentation by the Elite Division Against Organized Crime. However, he was never captured.
- The gang members on Salvadoran soil with whom he communicated from Mexico were Big Crazy from Abriles Danger; Grillo and Hellboy, from his own clique, according to a report by the Ministry of Justice and Public Security dated January 6, 2020, entitled “Activities carried out to capture the ODI (Objectives of Interest).”
- In January 2020, “the gang is conducting an investigation because they link him to organ trafficking, which is not in line with the gang,” according to an inmate at the Zacatecoluca prison, as recorded in a daily gang analysis report from January 2020.”
- In 2020, DECO and the PNC compiled a report with information from Cruger to capture him, based on the source codenamed “Exodus,” who accused him of several things: He claimed that a woman known as “Tere,” the sales manager for Avenida España and Calle Rubén Darío, collected $28 per month in extortion money from 60 street vendors and sent it to Cruger. He also accused Cruger of controlling the security guards at businesses in that area. The same source also reported that “he owned two auto repair shops: one located in the San Jacinto area and another on Fifth Street East, near the Confitería Americana, in downtown San Salvador, and that Cruger is responsible for importing vehicles, which are repaired in those shops and then sold or put to work as pirate taxis.” “Éxodo” also accused him of taking over a nightclub that belonged to a clique member known as Crimen.
- On March 2, 2021, Flaco was captured in El Salvador and Cruger took over as head of the Mexico Program, according to various gang sources who spoke to this investigation.
- A gang member who spoke to the Joint Border Intelligence Group claimed that he suffers from osteoporosis.
- Despite this information suggesting that Cruger was unhappy with the pact, in September 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Cruger in its indictment with “coordinating the efforts of MS-13 leaders and members outside of prison involved in these negotiations. He provided instructions and guidance on behalf of the National Ranfla to MS-13 leaders outside of prison who participated in the negotiations (with the Salvadoran government).”
- On July 30, 2024, he appeared in the Eastern District Court of New York without the details of the indictment being known, as stated in case documents, where he was assigned a lawyer. This is the only arrest that has not been made official and for which there is no press release indicating the place of his detention.
- Daniell Hass, spokesperson for the Eastern District of New York, declined to provide details about Cruger's arrest, according to an interview in La Prensa Gráfica. He simply stated, “No comment on Cruger.”
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