Just after 5 a.m. on a cold Tuesday last February, a crash of breaking glass shattered the morning stillness at a Citgo gas station in Swampscott.
The silver tip of a hammer jabbed into the storefront’s window, each violent strike widening the hole until a person-sized gap was created.
A suspected Trinitarios gang member slipped through, masked and hooded, and made a beeline for the wall of Massachusetts State Lottery tickets, as seen on surveillance video footage.
With swift movements and beside two accomplices, he tore down 307 scratch tickets before fleeing through the same hole he created.
As of Feb. 21, at least 28 Trinitarios gang members active in its Lynn Chapter have been charged with state or federal crimes.
The charges stem from a slew of organized criminal activities over the past decade — including the murders of six people and the attempted killings of 11 others.
But outside the bloodshed, the suspects are accused of taking up another complex yet unique enterprise: the theft of lottery scratch tickets to win money.
After just a month of the “smash-and-grab” scheme last year, suspected Trinitarios members stole thousands of Massachusetts State Lottery and New Hampshire lottery tickets from gas stations, grocery stores and other convenience shops in the North Shore and southern New Hampshire.
The tickets — not the prizes — stolen during that period were valued at well over $40,000. During a single break-in at a Merrimack, New Hampshire, store, gang members stole $9,578 worth of lottery tickets, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court Boston on Wednesday.
Less than a week earlier in Saugus, they’d taken 15 ticket books from one shop. A single ticket book can have between 150 and 200 tickets.
How a gang evaded Mass. Lottery officials for a month
Patterns of planned lottery ticket theft outlined in court documents the Trinitarios gang members paint a picture of quick, smooth and somewhat successful operations to evade Mass Lottery officials and law enforcement.
The dozen or so robberies happened from Feb. 27 through March 29, 2024, with at least seven men from the gang involved, according to court documents.
Always under the cover of darkness, groups of two and three hooded, gloved and masked perpetrators struck stores between 2 and 5:30 a.m. in groups of twos and threes.
And they always smashed their way in through a front window of the store.
The thieves cashed winning stolen tickets at another store within the next one to six hours, according to the affidavit and checked for winning tickets by scanning them in the Mass Lottery app.
The earliest break-in started at 2:59 a.m. at the Salem Variety Store in Wakefield on March 6, 2024, when they stole multiple scratch ticket books in under a minute.
Abel Severino Reyes, 21, worked with two others to break the front window and stuff the tickets into a bag before they escaped in a getaway car, according to court documents.
Then at 6:25 a.m., Westyn Lantigua, 24, walked into a Mobil gas station in Saugus to cash some of the stolen tickets, according to the documents. He and David Garcia, 23, continued on to 7-Eleven stores in Saugus and Lynn to cash other tickets that morning.
During their final break-in on March 29, 2024, the gang members left a trail of lottery tickets in the parking lot outside Elia’s Country Store in Wilmington that led toward the hotel they were staying at across the street, according to court documents. A pair of latex gloves was also found nearby.
They’d already stolen $8,000 worth of tickets earlier that morning at another gas station in New Hampshire — and were finally foiled with help from the Mass Lottery that day.
What can the Lottery do when tickets are stolen?
By tracking the stolen tickets and where and when they were redeemed for prizes, investigators were able to determine who was involved in the theft ring.
When scratch tickets are reported as stolen, the Massachusetts State Lottery takes immediate steps to try and stop criminals from getting the prize money, a spokesperson for the Lottery told MassLive.
The individual ticket is internally flagged so that it can’t be cashed without filing a formal claim. If the tickets are recovered, they will not be recirculated for sale, the Lottery said.
Though the Lottery does not know the prize value of tickets within any given book, no tickets for the game would be reprinted, and any prize contained in the stolen tickets would go unclaimed.
When the Trinitarios members stole 307 tickets from a Citgo in Swampscott on Feb. 27, 2024, Mass Lottery officials were the ones to inform investigators just how many tickets were stolen, according to court documents.
Lottery officials also provided a list of the tickets reported stolen and a “detailed” list of the tickets cashed, where they were cashed and at what time.
Investigators consequently went to five convenience shops in Lynn to get surveillance video footage of the gang members cashing the tickets — some of which showed them receiving prize winnings, the court documents read.
After the March 2, 2024, break-in at the Richdale Convenience Store in Saugus, where 15 ticket books were stolen, officials had to “shut down” the books.
However, Mass Lottery officials said some of the winning stolen tickets were cashed before the lottery closed them out.
They also gave investigators a “printout” of the stolen tickets being cashed at shops in Peabody, Danvers and Lynn, and told investigators about its mobile device app that allows players to scan tickets and see if they’re winners.
Through the app’s user profile, the Lottery confirmed with investigations that Lantigua had scanned the tickets stolen in Saugus the morning of the break-in, according to the court documents.
The suspects were finally stopped by Mass Lottery officials on March 29, 2024, when the thieves tried to cash stolen tickets in Wilmington at a Circle K in Tewskbury — and walked away empty-handed.
They are now facing criminal charges.
