Bloodbath at the Beach

                 Ready for another typical Monday after a normal resort town weekend, Ocean City, Maryland chambermaid Rosa Gonzalez slowly unlocked the door of the luxury condominium unit and wheeled her equipment cart into the room. She had expected to make quick work of it–a minor dusting, picking up a few dozen discarded paper cups and booze bottles and a once-over with a vacuum. 

     To her horror, she found pools of red blood spattered inside the door, across the bed and leading up to the bathroom. Afraid of what else she would find, she gingerly entered and let out a blood-curdling scream after she looked in the bathtub.

     She almost fainted as she stared in horror at the naked male body sprawled in three inches of water. It looked like the scene out of a “B”  horror movie.  Rosa gagged on the filth and stink in every corner of the high end suite.         

      Her yelling awakened resort manager Harry Crowe from his mid-morning nap in his office two floors below. Crowe punched the elevator button for the second floor and, after quickly taking in the disaster scene in Unit 2666, he warned, “Don’t touch a thing. I’ll call the police, Just lock the room and wait for me in my office until they get here.”

     Ocean City Detective Sergeant Harold Simpson met Crowe at the front desk. The manager’s face looked as pale as one of the sheets on the condo’s bed.

           “I don’t understand it. This type of thing never happens here, especially in the off-season,” he said. “We have a very peaceful and well-run establishment with high-end clients. I personally booked the suite for this weekend to Jose Garios, one of the most successful and well-respected landscapers in Worcester County, and his son Pietro. They stayed in the same suite every year when hiring their summer help. That’s Jose’s body. Don’t see any sign of Pietro.”

          Police investigators threw the broken and overturned furniture out of the way and scoured every inch of the suite for clues. After giving the corpse a careful once-over they called in the state coroner who zipped it into a body bag after tagging it for identification.

        “Jose and his son went out to dinner at the Bull on the Beach about 7 o’clock,” Crowe told Simpson. “Supposedly, they had scheduled a meeting with two guys they wanted to hire as summer helpers.”

          Yeh, they spent about four hours here,” said Bull on the Beach Chief Host Barry Sinchow. “They had dinner and a couple of rounds of drinks. But, as they got ready to leave, the helpers got into a dustup with the landscapers.  Because of the arguments, our wait staff watched out the back door when they left. All four of the men hopped into the landscaping truck and sped onto Coastal Highway. Looked like the helpers abandoned the car in the parking lot of a deserted building nearby.”

         None of the few off-season renters back at the condominium recalled any commotion in Room 2666--or maybe they just didn’t want to get involved.

        Then the police picked up the trail of the murderers. A few witnesses had seen the Garios Landscaping truck speed out of the parking lot, apparently headed north. 

     About noon the next day, a service station attendant in Cape May, New Jersey called Ocean City Police Headquarters. He had heard about the investigation of the killing in Maryland on the regional news. “Two guys in a landscaping truck with the name Garios on it came in here about an hour ago. They used a credit card from Garios Landscaping. Looked like they headed toward New York.”

          The trail picked up at an Arby’s on the Garden State Parkway in Union, New Jersey, where the manager reported, “We got an intercompany alert on the trouble in Ocean City. Two of the guys described in the alert  just left here. My employees, who understand Spanish, heard them say they would head for Garios’ brother’s house in Newburgh, New York. They planned to tell the brother that the landscaper sent them north for equipment and gave them permission to use his business credit card. They figured to ditch the truck with the brother and rent a car and drive to LaGuardia Airport and escape back to El Salvador.”

          The landscaping helpers, John Ceritos and Sam Rodriguez, arrived two hours later at the  home of Josef Garios. A posse of Newburgh police and Ocean City detectives greeted them. Simpson put the cuffs on the duo and arrested them for the murders of Jose and Pietro Garios.

          Police had found Pietro’s corpse in the trunk of the abandoned car in a side street.

    The next day, Simpson told reporters, “Looks like they stabbed Jose in the deserted condominium room after they came back from the Bull. They then dumped Pietro in their vehicle and high-tailed it out of the area.” 

     At his trial, Ceritos testified, “Our gang leaders in El Salvador put out a contract on Jose Garios because he turned down their invitation to join their organization and prevented his son from joining and then took the skills he learned as a landscaper on MS-13 estates in El Salvador. He said he wanted to make himself rich off the wealthy gringos in the Assateague Island, Maryand area,”

    High-powered MS-13 legal mouthpieces found loopholes that made it impossible to directly link the illegal activities of the two landscaper helpers with the top capos  of MS-13. Although the trial caused a temporary halt to some of the gang’s Central American operations and the imprisonment of some top lieutenants in the mob, it didn’t materially disrupt MS-13’s criminal enterprises for even a single day.

      In return for their testimony, before sending them to prison, U.S. authorities provided new identities to the two Salvadorans who had passed themselves off as landscaping helpers. This was necessary because the pair remained on the MS-13 radar, and they knew gang operatives in prison could turn permanently eliminate them.