If you ordered up a bounce house for Junior's birthday or celebrated a quince with a pony ride in South Florida over the past few months, you might want to listen up. According to police, a suspected gangbanger with some nasty associations may have been splitting his time between law breakin' and a more wholesome side gig: running kids' parties.
Dilbert Coreas is the suspect's name, and right now he's in federal custody. But police say until recently he was running IT'Z A KID'Z WORLD PARTY PLANNING AND RENTAL. From the website, the business looks like a one-stop shop for everything you'd need for a top-line kid rager, from bounce houses and ponies to popcorn machines and trackless train rides. Reasonable prices too.
But Coreas is also suspected of being a member of MS-13, a Salvadoran gang that's bloomed into one of the most dangerous street outfits in the world. According to a criminal complaint filed last week in federal court, in June 2009, Coreas was convicted of possessing cocaine with intent to sell, tampering with evidence, and resisting arrest. Following a prison stint, he was deported back to El Salvador in November 2012.
Skip forward to this year, when the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office gang unit called Homeland Security. The cops came across Coreas on social media and saw that some of the photos were "suggestive of his gang involvement, more specifically the transnational criminal street gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)." (So yeah, the takeaway here is the cops are watching social media, so keep that in mind next time you flash your white boy faux thug life hand signs when the camera comes out at the Greek Week kegger, yo.)
Federal and local authorities punched Coreas' name into the system and saw he'd been deported. They followed the suspect, catching him in the act "operating bounce houses and conducting pony rides at local Palm Beach County events," the criminal complaint says. The photos from Coreas' Facebook account seem to back that up.
Now in custody, Coreas is facing a charge of illegal entry after deportation. We called both numbers listed on It'z a Kidz World's site and sent over an email. No response.
Follow Kyle on Twitter @kyletalking. For tips, send an e-mail.
Follow @NewTimesBroward