A mysterious beating death last summer in an abandoned southwest Little Rock mobile home was linked Thursday to a violent document-trafficking ring based in Mexico that authorities say has cells in 11 states, including Arkansas.
On July 6, police found the body of 18-year-old Pascual Ramos of North Little Rock inside a vacant mobile home at Lot 187, Cove B, at 9500 S. Heights Road, after being led there by 16-year-old Adrian Ceja.
Police met up with Ceja at a hospital where he was being treated for a swollen left jaw and minor cuts on his forehead and fist. He told police he had escaped from the mobile home, where several men had bound and beaten him and Ramos.
Ceja told police that when he left the mobile home about 1:30 p.m., Ramos was lying on the floor and he feared his friend was dead.
When police arrived at the mobile home five hours later, they found Ramos’ body inside and said it showed signs of blunt-force trauma.
Ramos had turned 18 just four days earlier.
On Thursday, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia announced that a federal grand jury in Richmond had indicted 22 members of a sophisticated and violent fraudulent-document trafficking ring whose members kidnapped, beat and - in Ramos’ case - killed competitors.
“The indictment portrays a deadly criminal organization that uses brutal violence to eliminate rivals, protect its turf and enforce discipline against its own members,” U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride said at a news conference in Richmond.
Cells across the country produced high-quality falseidentification cards for illegal aliens, with each cell maintaining detailed sales records and dividing the proceeds among locals and upper-level managers in Mexico, authorities said. They noted that from January 2008 through November, members wired more than $1 million to Mexico.
Lt. Terry Hastings, spokesman for the Little Rock Police Department, said Thursday that investigators “knew by the scene that there’d be more involved than just a simple murder case here. That’s why we asked for the FBI to help us get some more information.”
Hastings didn’t elaborate on what officers found that prompted them to alert the FBI.
According to the 59-page, 12-count superseding indictment handed up in Virginia, Edy Oliverez-Jiminez, who is also known as Daniel, Erasmo, Ulysses and Jesus, managed the Little Rock document-production cell under the supervision of Israel Cruz Millan, also known as El Muerto, 28, of Raleigh, N.C.
At some point before July 4, the indictment says, Oliverez-Jiminez and others identified Ramos as a rival document seller in the Little Rock area, and targeted him for violence to deter him.
The indictment says that Oliverez-Jiminez had someone call Ramos, pretending to be a customer, to arrange a meeting for the next day at the abandoned mobile home.
Ramos - identified in the indictment only as “P.R.” - was attacked by a group of Hispanic men, including Oliverez-Jiminez, as he entered the mobilehome with “an associate,” the indictment alleges. It said the men bound Ramos’ hands, feet, mouth and eyes with duct tape and beat him repeatedly.
The indictment says that Ramos’ “associate” - presumably Ceja - had been waiting in a car, but at some point was taken inside, and bound and beaten as well. It says the assailants left the two men lying on the floor, and soon relocated the “Arkansas cell” to Virginia to escape the murder investigation.
A news release says that 28 members of the organization were arrested Nov. 18, and that five of them have since pleaded guilty, while 22 of them were indicted Wednesday on racketeering conspiracy charges.
Investigators initially uncovered the ring in Norfolk, Va., and tracked down cells in three other Virginia locations. They then traced the ring to Arkansas, Connecticut, Kentucky, Indiana, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri and Tennessee, The Associated Press reported.
Information for this article was contributed by Spencer Willems of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 02/26/2011