7thriv

San Francisco's biggest gang trial in years opened Monday with a federal prosecutor accusing seven men of terrorizing city neighborhoods with assaults, shakedowns and four 2008 murders.

They are "a group that lives, breathes and celebrates violence," said Justice Department attorney Theryn Gibbons.

From the mid-1990s onward, Gibbons said, local leaders of El Salvador-based Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, have used fear and intimidation to control their Mission District turf, extort money from drug dealers and phony-document peddlers, and eliminate rivals.

Gang members are initiated by undergoing a brutal beating - which lasts 13 seconds - and then "rise in the ranks through acts of violence," Gibbons said in her opening statement in a U.S. District Court trial that could last six months.

She said their attitude was illustrated by the July 2008 shooting death of Armando Estrada, 30, of Rodeo, a seller of fake documents who had refused to pay "taxes" to MS-13 in its territory.

Gang member Guillermo Herrera, 20, fired a shotgun into the back of Estrada's head in broad daylight at 20th and Mission streets, then got into a car, "pulled down his blue bandana and laughed," the prosecutor said.

The defendants all face life sentences if convicted.

Naturally, this is a case brought by federal prosecutors, and not the local district attorneys office. Former DA Kamala Harris was well known for turning a blind eye to crimes committed by young men of a certain, shall we say, undocumented status. Luckily for us, she left office last fall, but, ha ha, she only left to become California's latest soft-on-crime Attorney General. You'd think her Republican opponent would have made a big deal about her tendency to coddle illegal alien perps (not to mention her low conviction rate and staunch opposition to the death penalty), but loser Steve Cooley is one of those "moderate" types who doesn't like negative campaigning.