The 2008 War That Let the Trinitarios Take Washington Heights From the Dominicans – HT
It’s a summer night in Washington Heights, upper Manhattan. The block between 171st and 174th Streets is doing what it always does after midnight. Working, not construction, not a bar shift. Drug shifts. Young men rotating in and out of their posts. Handing off small packages, collecting cash, handing it up the chain, managers replenishing supply, lookouts whistling at the first sign of police.
This block runs like a machine because it was built like one, but the men running it in 2008 aren’t the ones you’d expect. Washington Heights had been a Dominican neighborhood since the 1960s, and its drug trade had been controlled by Dominican crews since the crack wars of the 1980s. Crews like the Wild Cowboys, crews like the Jerry Curls established organizations with supply lines stretching all the way back to the Dominican Republic.
These were the people who turned the Heights into what federal agents would later call the mid-level cocaine and heroin distribution hub for all of New York City. But by 2008, a different kind of Dominican was running those corners. Younger, more organized, more willing to kill than the men who came before them.
They carried machetes as their weapon of choice, operated by a written rule book and answered to a national leader giving orders from inside a New York state prison. They were the Trinitarios. And what happened in Washington Heights between 2007 and 2009 was one of the most brutal gang takeovers in the history of New York City.
This is that story. Before we get into it, if you’re new here, this channel covers US gang history and organized crime every week. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Now, let’s go back to where this all started. To understand how the Trinitarios took Washington Heights, you need to understand what Washington Heights was.
By the late 1980s, Washington Heights was the crack distribution capital of New York. Its location just south of the George Washington Bridge made it a natural transit point. Drugs flowing in from New Jersey, moving downtown, spreading across the burrows. In 1990, the 34th precinct, which covered Washington Heights, reported over 10,000 crimes in just over three square miles.
103 of those were murders in a single year in a neighborhood. The men running that violence were Dominican almost exclusively. The Wild Cowboys, led by brothers Lenin and Nelson Sepa, built an openair crack empire that ran around the clock. The Jerry Curls, led by Raphael Martinez, pulled in millions per year in cocaine before a major undercover operation collapsed them in 1991.
These crews were eventually dismantled through the 1990s by aggressive prosecution. But the drug infrastructure they built didn’t disappear. It just got inherited. By the early 2000s, Colombian and Dominican trafficking organizations were still headquartered in Washington Heights, still using it as the staging ground for heroin and cocaine distributed across the entire New York, New Jersey corridor.
Smaller street gangs, Dominicans don’t play, Bloods, Latin Kings were all competing for corners at the retail level. And then came the Trinitarios. The origin of the Trinitarios is one of the stranger founding myths in American gang history because it starts with patriotism. In 1838, three Dominican revolutionaries, Juan Pablo Dwarte, Francisco del Rosario Sanchez and Matias Rammon Mela formed a secret society called Latinitaria to fight Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic.
Their motto was Dios Patria ilibertad, God, country and liberty. They won. The Dominican Republic exists because of them. That’s who Leonides Sierra named his gang after. Sierra, known on the street as Unito, was a Dominican inmate at Riker’s Island, serving time for a 1989 murder conviction. By 1992, Rikers was a pressure cooker.
Dominican inmates were getting targeted by established prison gangs, Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, the Natas. Junito’s solution was simple. Organize. He and Julio Cabalo Marine pulled together a coalition of Dominican inmates and named it the Trinitarios. Their motto was the Dominican Republic’s own national motto.
Their colors were the Dominican flag, red, white, and blue, with lime green added for the homeland. On paper, it was a protection gang. In practice, it was the seed of something that would become one of the most dangerous criminal organizations on the East Coast. The gang spread the way prison gangs always spread through the bodies. Walking out the door.
As Trinitario’s members finished their sentences and hit the streets, the gang followed them. They got their street start in the Marcy houses in Brooklyn. Then they spread to upper Manhattan, to the Bronx, to Queens and Long Island. They weren’t just former inmates keeping in touch. They were operating as a structured organization with a membership handbook with dues with mandatory meetings with a national leader still giving orders from inside a cell.
Because Yunito never really left, he ruled the Trinitarios from prison, establishing what prosecutors would later call a central committee, a group of top left tenants responsible for relaying his orders to street leadership. He was running a gang from behind bars, and it was working. The Trinitarios became known for two things above everything else.
their machetes and their rule. Anyone who disrespects the trinitarios must be swiftly and severely punished. Rule number two in the official membership handbook, not buried in the back. Number two, by the mid 2000s, the Trinitarios were already a known threat. They’d been fighting their bitter rivals, Dominicans don’t play, since the early 2000s in a war that produced stabbings, shootings, and machete attacks across the city.
In April 2005, a DDP member slashed a 17-year-old Trinitario across the neck and drove a blade into his back at a Bronx subway station. In 2006, a Trinitario homicide in Washington Heights triggered what would become a year’slong federal investigation. But between 2007 and 2008, something shifted.
The Trinitario’s numbers exploded. The NYPD later estimated there were 3,181 Trinitarios in New York City by 2011 and the vast majority of that growth happened in those two years. Washington Heights became the focal point. Why then? A few things converged. First, the existing Dominican drug infrastructure in Washington Heights was under pressure.
Federal agencies had spent years taking down mid-level Dominican trafficking organizations in July 2007 alone. Law enforcement arrested the head of a major Dominican international drug network that had been running heroin and cocaine from Colombia through Venezuela to the Dominican Republic and then into New York.
When those upper level organizations got hit, they left gaps at the street level, corners without bosses, blocks without protection, revenue streams waiting to be claimed. The Trinitarios claimed them. Second, the Trinitarios had something the old guard crews didn’t. Structure, a real hierarchy, a rule book, a prisonbased leadership that could coordinate movement across the city without everyone being in the same room.
They weren’t a loose collection of neighborhood kids. They were an organization. and organizations move faster than mobs. If you’ve been watching for a while and you haven’t subscribed yet, hit that button. This channel covers the stories that actually happened, not the sanitized version. Now, back to it. The man who actually ran the Trinitarios in Washington Heights was Jonathan Felis.
Feliz led the Manhattan faction of the Trinitarios and built his operation across a fourb block corridor, West 171st Street through West 174th Street in Washington Heights. These weren’t just corners. This was a full enterprise. Members called pitchers handled the hand-to-hand drug sales. Pitchers worked shifts.
Some pulled doubles. Above them were managers who replenished supply and collected cash. And above the managers was Feliz who directed the violence. At one point, Feliz allegedly ordered members to kill a rival drug dealer at a 174th Street and Orderon Avenue. The attempt failed, but the intent was clear.
This wasn’t a drug business with a gang attached to it. This was a gang that had built a drug business, and the violence was how they held it together. The block between 174th and 175th Streets, bordered by Amsterdam and Orderbon Avenues, became known internally as the set, the center of operations, the heart of what prosecutors would later call a narcotics trafficking network that ran with the discipline of a corporation and the brutality of a war.
By 2008, the Trinitarios controlled drug trafficking on those four blocks. The established Dominican organizations that had previously operated there, or their remnants were out. The old guard was either locked up, dead, or had moved on. The Trinitarios had won the turf, not with a single dramatic confrontation, but through a sustained campaign of violence, recruitment, and organizational discipline that wore down everything in front of them.
The federal government had been watching since that 2006 murder in Washington Heights, but it took until 2009 for them to move. On March 10th, 2009, 200 law enforcement officers fanned out across Washington Heights and the Bronx in a coordinated raid. 41 members of the Trinitarios were arrested.
The charges covered drug trafficking on at least four city blocks. It was the largest single strike against the Trinitarios to date, and it wasn’t the last. What followed was a cascade of prosecutions under Operation Patria and Operation Green Haze. Between 2009 and 2012, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York filed a series of RICO indictments charging 149 Trinitario’s members and associates.
The charges included nine murders and 24 attempted murders. The investigations traced back to that 2006 homicide in Washington Heights. A single killing that unraveled a network built over more than a decade. Jonathan Felis, the man who had built the Manhattan faction from the ground up, plead guilty in May 2012.
his sentence, a mandatory minimum of 30 years in federal prison for the murders and drug trafficking he’d orchestrated on those four blocks. Lewinsky Minia, another top leader, plead guilty to his role in the November 2006 murder of Roy Abro, the killing that started the whole federal investigation and received a comparable sentence.
By 2014, at least 147 members of the Trinitarios had been charged in connection with these cases. That same year, the man who started it all, Leonides Junito Sierra, was sentenced to 19 years in federal prison. On top of the 22 and a half to life sentence, he was already serving in state prison for that original 1,989 murder.
The judge looked at him and said, “Instead of putting up a stop sign, you gave the Trinitarios a green light to commit violence. Your actions sent the message that retribution, violence, and murder are okay. The federal government believed they had broken the Trinitarios. They were wrong. The problem with taking down a gang’s leadership is that someone always steps up.
And when the people who step up are younger, angrier, and have less to lose than the men they replaced, things get worse, not better. By 2018, the Trinitarios were back. Internal factions were at war with each other. The Bronx was particularly bloody with tit fortat machete attacks leaving at least 10 people maimed in a single month.
And on June 20th, 2018, the gang made national news in the worst possible way. 15-year-old Lzandro Guzman Feliz, a Bronx kid who wanted to grow up and be a detective, was dragged out of a bodega on East 183rd Street and hacked to death with machetes and knives by a group of Trinitarios. It was caught on surveillance camera.
The video went viral. Rihanna shared it. Cardi B shared it. The city was devastated. It was a case of mistaken identity. They killed the wrong kid. 12 Trinitario’s members were arrested in connection with Junior’s death. The killing became the most visible symbol of what the Trinitarios had become. A gang that had outlasted federal prosecution, internal warfare, and the complete dismantling of its original leadership and had emerged more dangerous and more chaotic than before.
Today, the Trinitarios remain one of the most active gang networks on the East Coast. In January 2023, another raid swept up members of the 174th Street crew, the same block Jonathan Felis had built back in 2008, still operating under a new generation of leadership. In February 2025, federal authorities charged 22 members and associates in Massachusetts with six murders committed between 2017 and 2023.
The 2008 war for Washington Heights didn’t end with a victory celebration. It ended with a federal hammer, a 30-year sentence, and a gang that just kept coming back. Washington Heights was always going to be contested ground. The bridge makes it too valuable. The population density makes it too easy to disappear in the Dominican community, overwhelmingly law-abiding, overwhelmingly working families, has lived with the consequences of that geography for 40 years.
The wild cowboys came and went. The Jerry curls came and went. The established mid-level organizations came and went. The Trinitarios are still here. And the block on 174th Street, it’s still a block. Bedas, apartment buildings, families going to work in the morning. The gang may change names and faces, but the structure that Junito built on Riker’s Island in 1992, a code, a hierarchy, a sense of Dominican identity weaponized for criminal purposes.
That structure keeps reproducing itself one generation at a time. If you made it this far, you’re exactly the kind of viewer this channel is made for. Hit subscribe. We cover stories like this every single week, and you do not want to miss what’s coming next. And if you want to go deeper on Dominican organized crime in New York, click the video on screen right now.
