Trinitarios
Dominican American criminal organization
The Trinitarios is a Dominican American criminal organization founded by Dominicans in New York City in 1993. They were described by the US Justice Department in 2009 as lower-level distributors and one of "the smaller Dominican criminal groups and street gangs", although larger and more structured than the "hundreds of small, unaffiliated neighborhood gangs" in the New York - New Jersey HIDTA.
History
The Trinitarios were established in 1993 on Rikers Island, the New York City jail, by two Dominicans facing separate murder charges—Leonides "Junito" Sierra and Julio "Caballo" Marine. The Trinitarios on the East Coast was built in Rikers Island prison to protect mainly Dominicans and other Hispanic nationalities from African American gangs or other American gangs. This Dominican gang is considered to be the first Latino gang that originated in New York City and then later spread out to the whole northeastern region of United States. The group was named for three revolutionaries of the Dominican War of Independence; its slogan is Dios, patria y libertad (the official motto of the Dominican Republic, "God, homeland and liberty"). Their colors are lime green, as well as red, blue, and white (the colors of the Dominican Republic flag).
The group suffered a major blow in 2009, as the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York dismantled the group through a series of prosecutions. In 2011, 50 members and associates of the Bronx Trinitarios Gang (BTG) were charged with federal racketeering, narcotics and firearms offenses. Forty-one defendants were charged with a racketeering conspiracy under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in connection to alleged participation in a criminal enterprise that included narcotics trafficking, murder and attempted murder.
In 2014, the Trinitarios' co-founder and former leader, Sierra, was sentenced to 19 years in prison for the racketeering conspiracy, to run consecutively with a 22½ year to life sentence in New York that Sierra was already serving as a result of his 1989 murder conviction.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Trinitarios” as dominican American criminal organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as dominican American criminal organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3539281. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1993, 2009, 2011 and 2014.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Trinitarios” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.