The members of MS-13 joined the notorious gang for kinship and protection in an unfamiliar country — and getting into MS-13 isn’t all that different from getting hazed into a college fraternity, a defense lawyer for one of the gang’s alleged leaders told a Brooklyn jury.

Edenilson Velasquez Larin and his friends weren’t part of a “larger web” but were rather part of “groups that bind themselves together in kinship,” his lawyer, Scott Sherman, said at the MS-13 member’s racketeering trial in Brooklyn Federal Court Monday.

Velasquez Larin and three other MS-13 members are on trial for racketeering, murder, conspiracy and other charges in a sprawling case that includes four brutal murders between 2016 and 2022 in Queens and Long Island.

Prosecutors say Velasquez Larin — who rose thro

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