FirstAlerts

Lynn Trinitarios Member Sentenced to Over 11 Years for Racketeering

Luis Enrique Santana, a member of the Lynn Chapter of the Trinitarios, was sentenced to 136 months in federal prison for racketeering conspiracy, including attempted murders and accessory after the fact to two murders.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 25, 2026, 6:00 p.m. ET
Developing · checked 1h ago

This case is not concluded. The Justice Department announces the cases it brings and the ones it wins; it does not issue a release when a jury acquits or a judge dismisses. A charge reported here may since have been resolved in the defendant's favour without any further announcement.

We last searched for new coverage of this at Aug 25, 2026, 6:38 p.m. ET — checked 1h ago.

BOSTON – On Aug. 25, 2026, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts announced that Luis Enrique Santana, a/k/a “Chiquito,” 32, a member of the Lynn Chapter of the Trinitarios, was on Aug. 19, 2026, to 136 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Santana pleaded guilty in April 2026 to racketeering conspiracy, which included three attempted murders and accessory after the fact to two murders. After serving his prison sentence, he will be deported to the Dominican Republic. According to court documents, Santana participated in a March 2019 shooting in Lynn, where the Trinitarios intended to kill three rival gang members. He posed as a female online to lure them to a nightclub, and another gang member fired at them, wounding two. He also acted as an accessory after the fact to the Sept. 2, 2023 murders of Jandriel Heredia and Abraham Diaz, helping move the vehicle used in the shooting to conceal it from law enforcement. The Trinitarios is described as a violent enterprise with thousands of members across the United States. The charges stem from a multijurisdictional investigation that began after four murders and a series of shootings in Lynn in 2023. In February 2025, federal racketeering charges were unsealed against 22 leaders and members; in June 2026, additional charges were unsealed against 26 more. According to court documents, the gang has allegedly participated in five additional murders in Essex County since 2017, bringing the total of federally charged murders to 11. The announcement was made by U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley, along with other federal and local officials. The case is part of the Homeland Security Task Force initiative and Operation Take Back America.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 125 Aug 2026, 22:00current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.