ALLEGED TRIGGERMAN FOR DRUG CARTEL NABBED IN HUB

A hired gun alleged to have once kept his family fed by killing those who
got in the way of his Caribbean drug cartel was under lock and key
yesterday in Boston, where authorities found him armed with a broom.

"The first thing he told us was, 'Good job,' '' said Jeffrey Bohn, New
England supervisor of the U.S. Marshals Service's High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area Fugitive Task Force.

Victor "Trigger'' Cruz-Pagan, 22, who has been working as a contract
janitor for the U.S. Postal Service under the alias Jose Figueroa, was
captured Wednesday night in the parking lot of the South Bay shopping
center. He had been on the run nearly two years from Puerto Rican officials
looking to pin the brutal murders of three men on him.

At his arraignment yesterday in South Boston District Court on a fugitive
from justice warrant, Cruz-Pagan waived extradition and was held without
bail. He is expected to be returned to Puerto Rico within a week.

He was positively identified by the tattoo of a letter "H'' on his left
hand that U.S. marshals in Puerto Rico said stands for his mother, Hilda.

Her aberrant son "was an executioner, a very dangerous killer,'' said the
lead San Juan-based federal agent on Cruz-Pagan's case, speaking on
condition of anonymity.

Cruz-Pagan, who fled north with his common-law wife, Elsie Gomez, 24, and
her three kids from a failed marriage, was a reputed kingpin in a cocaine
and heroin trafficking operation based in the Las Gladiolas Public Housing
Project in San Juan.

Cruz-Pagan is accused of the double murders of Jonathan Feliciano-Rodriguez
and another, still-unidentified man on Feb. 20, 2000, and of killing Luis
D. Ramos-Guzman the following Oct. 5, all at the housing project.

The victims, the agent said, were either rival gang members or Cruz-Pagan's
own associates who refused to carry out his orders.

Cruz-Pagan fled stateside sometime after May 2001. Last week, a fugitive
task force in Puerto Rico developed information that he may be living in
Holyoke, but investigators tracked him to Boston instead.

Bohn said local officials picked up Cruz-Pagan's trail Wednesday night
about 6:30 p.m., when Gomez and one of her children picked him up at the
post office in Allston.

Bohn said Cruz-Pagan also worked for a Roxbury dry cleaner he declined to name.

Officials followed the couple to South Boston, where they proceeded to shop
at Home Depot and K-Mart. When Cruz-Pagan emerged alone, officers from the
Boston Police Department's Youth Violence Strike Task Force moved in.