Sentencing for Latin Kings scheduled for August

Jorge Cornell (right) in Greensboro about a month before his arrest.

Sentencing for nine Latin Kings and an associate tried as part of a criminal racketeering enterprise has been scheduled for the mid-August.

Jorge Cornell, inca, or leader, of the North Carolina Latin Kings from 2005 to 2011, along with his brother, Russell Kilfoil, are scheduled to be sentenced at the Hiram H. Ward federal building in downtown Winston-Salem on Aug. 14 at 10 a.m. Russell Kilfoil is also known as Jonathan Hernandez.

Cornell and Kilfoil were found guilty of racketeering by a federal jury in November 2012.

Ernesto Wilson, a Latin Kings associate who was convicted with Cornell and Kilfoil will be sentenced on Aug. 13 at 10 a.m. at the same location, along with Wesley Williams and Steaphan Acencio-Vasquez. Williams and Acencio-Vasquez pleaded guilty before the case went to trial, but did not testify.

Four others, Jason Paul Yates, Marcelo Ysrael Perez, Luis Rosa, Richard Robinson and Charles Moore, will be sentenced on Aug. 15 at 10 a.m. at the federal court building. Yates, a rival of Cornell for leadership of the North Carolina Latin Kings, was to be tried separately because his original lawyer was not prepared to represent him with the other defendants. He subsequently pleaded guilty. Perez, Rosa, Robinson and Moore pleaded guilty and testified for the government.

Three other defendants, Samuel Velasquez, Irvin Vasquez and Randolph Kilfoil, who is also Cornell's younger brother, were acquitted by the jury at the conclusion of the 2012 trial. A racketeering charges against a fourth defendant, Carlos Coleman, was dismissed by US District Court Judge James A. Beaty Jr.

Cornell founded the North Carolina Latin Kings in Greensboro in 2005 after relocating from New York with his family three years earlier. As a member of the New York Latin Kings in the mid- to late 1990s, he was strongly influenced by Antonio Fernandez, a leader known as King Tone. Cornell later recounted that he received authorization from the national leadership of the Latin Kings in Chicago to start the North Carolina organization.

After going public to protest police harassment in 2008, the North Carolina Latin Kings under Cornell's leadership aligned themselves with an interracial group of pastors. Cornell made two unsuccessful bids for Greensboro City Council, and his organization remained a fixture on the city's social justice scene until a federal raid in December 2011 led to the jailing of most of the organization's membership.

Jason Paul Yates, Latin Kings defendant, pleads out

Jason Paul Yates, a defendant in the North Carolina Latin Kings federal racketeering case, has entered a plea agreement with the US government.

The plea agreement, which was entered on Monday, was filed under seal. Yates' court-appointed lawyer, Joseph M. Wilson Jr., had alluded to a possible plea agreement when he mentioned his client's plans to meet with prosecutors "to see if the matter can be resolved" during a hearing last month. 

Yates and co-defendant Jorge Cornell were rivals for the leadership of the North Carolina Latin Kings, with Yates coming to North Carolina from the Chicago area, where the street organization was founded in the 1940s, while Cornell moved to Greensboro from New York City in 2002. Chicago has developed a reputation as the more ruthless of the two organizations, while Cornell joined the Latin Kings in New York as a follower of the reform-minded King Tone in the 1990s.

Yates was active as a Latin King in Raleigh in the mid-2000s. In 2008, he moved to Greensboro, and Cornell moved into Yates' apartment shortly afterwards. Cornell was at Yates' apartment when he was shot by an unknown assailant in the summer of 2008. The crime has never been solved. Yates was a candidate to replace Cornell as a statewide leader of the Latin Kings that same year when a meeting was called by a faction intent on ousting Cornell. Yates lost the vote, and Cornell reportedly stripped him of his membership with authorization from the Chicago leadership of the Latin Kings.

Cornell, his younger brother Russell Kilfoil and an associate named Ernesto Wilson were convicted by a federal jury of racketeering in December, and await sentencing. Three other defendants were acquitted, and the charge was dropped against one by Judge James A. Beaty during the trial. Yates was originally going to be tried with the other seven defendants, but his case was severed from the others after his previous lawyer told the judge she was not prepared to go to trial.