Pubdate: Fri, 17 Jan 2003
Source: Boston Herald (MA)
Copyright: 2003 The Boston Herald, Inc
Contact:  http://www.bostonherald.com/news.html
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/53
Author: Laurel J. Sweet

ALLEGED TRIGGERMAN FOR DRUG CARTEL NABBED IN HUB

A hired gun alleged to have once kept his family fed by killing those who 
got in the way of his Caribbean drug cartel was under lock and key 
yesterday in Boston, where authorities found him armed with a broom.

"The first thing he told us was, 'Good job,' '' said Jeffrey Bohn, New 
England supervisor of the U.S. Marshals Service's High Intensity Drug 
Trafficking Area Fugitive Task Force.

Victor "Trigger'' Cruz-Pagan, 22, who has been working as a contract 
janitor for the U.S. Postal Service under the alias Jose Figueroa, was 
captured Wednesday night in the parking lot of the South Bay shopping 
center. He had been on the run nearly two years from Puerto Rican officials 
looking to pin the brutal murders of three men on him.

At his arraignment yesterday in South Boston District Court on a fugitive 
from justice warrant, Cruz-Pagan waived extradition and was held without 
bail. He is expected to be returned to Puerto Rico within a week.

He was positively identified by the tattoo of a letter "H'' on his left 
hand that U.S. marshals in Puerto Rico said stands for his mother, Hilda.

Her aberrant son "was an executioner, a very dangerous killer,'' said the 
lead San Juan-based federal agent on Cruz-Pagan's case, speaking on 
condition of anonymity.

Cruz-Pagan, who fled north with his common-law wife, Elsie Gomez, 24, and 
her three kids from a failed marriage, was a reputed kingpin in a cocaine 
and heroin trafficking operation based in the Las Gladiolas Public Housing 
Project in San Juan.

Cruz-Pagan is accused of the double murders of Jonathan Feliciano-Rodriguez 
and another, still-unidentified man on Feb. 20, 2000, and of killing Luis 
D. Ramos-Guzman the following Oct. 5, all at the housing project.

The victims, the agent said, were either rival gang members or Cruz-Pagan's 
own associates who refused to carry out his orders.

Cruz-Pagan fled stateside sometime after May 2001. Last week, a fugitive 
task force in Puerto Rico developed information that he may be living in 
Holyoke, but investigators tracked him to Boston instead.

Bohn said local officials picked up Cruz-Pagan's trail Wednesday night 
about 6:30 p.m., when Gomez and one of her children picked him up at the 
post office in Allston.

Bohn said Cruz-Pagan also worked for a Roxbury dry cleaner he declined to name.

Officials followed the couple to South Boston, where they proceeded to shop 
at Home Depot and K-Mart. When Cruz-Pagan emerged alone, officers from the 
Boston Police Department's Youth Violence Strike Task Force moved in.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens