The man was seen wearing red. And that, federal prosecutors say, was enough to get a chunk of his face carved off with a giant machete.

The attackers were members of the violent MS-13 gang in Southeast Baltimore, and wearing red signaled he was one of their rivals, prosecutors told jurors Wednesday.

But that man’s punishment was nothing compared to other alleged victims like Gabriela Gonzalez-Ardon, a 16-year-old runaway from New York who was viciously killed and left at the end of a trail at the Loch Raven Reservoir, and 18-year-old Michelle Tenezaca, stabbed 114 times on CSX train tracks in the city’s Brewers Hill neighborhood. Her sister, stabbed 70 times, survived despite being left for dead.

Murder of rivals and those suspected of cooperating with law enforcement “is a type of blood sport” for MS-13, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Wallner said as images of the battered victims were displayed on computer screens.

Three men — Wilson Arturo Constanza-Galdomez, 26, Edis Omar Valenzuela-Rodriguez, 25, and Jonathan Pesquera-Puerto, 24 — are on trial in U.S. District Court on charges that they participated in a racketeering conspiracy as members of MS-13 and carried out violent attacks on the gang’s behalf.

The trial, expected to take weeks, will involve evidence such as photos taken of the victims by their alleged attackers to demonstrate to higher-ranking gang members they had carried out their tasks. It will also include testimony from confessed members of the gang who took part in the attacks and have pleaded guilty and turned cooperators, Wallner said.

Wallner told jurors that prosecutors don’t expect them to like those witnesses, and that they will be aghast at some of the things the cooperators will say. But that comes with the territory, Wallner said.

“If a crime happens in hell,” he said, the witnesses “are not choirboys.”

“They’re devils and demons,” Wallner said.

Among the cooperating witnesses is Wualter Orellana-Hernandez, who was originally charged in the case and pleaded guilty last fall.

Defense attorneys said the cooperating witnesses are trying to earn lighter sentences for their crimes as well as the government’s protection for themselves and their families from the gang. They’ll say anything and are not to be trusted, the attorneys said.

Defense attorney Tyler Mann, who represents Pesquera-Puerto, denied his client was an MS-13 gang member at all and said he was not present at the crime scenes.

“He’s presenting to be something he’s not. He’s a hanger-on. He’s a wannabe,” Mann said. While he was “at times an errand boy” for MS-13, “he’s not a killer,” Mann said.

Although Valenzuela-Rodriguez was arrested carrying a phone with incriminating evidence, his attorney Richard Bardos said, nothing else ties his client to that phone and he’d never been seen with it prior.

The case, which charges violence that occurred during a three-month span in 2020, far predates President Donald Trump’s crackdown on what he says are violent migrants in the country illegally, though his administration attempted at the 11th-hour to have the defendants in the case face the death penalty.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, rejected that request in June. The lead prosecutor on the case then left the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, part of a wave of departures there that have been ongoing since the previous administration.

Wallner, the veteran prosecutor who delivered the government’s opening statement, entered his appearance just weeks ago and is joined by prosecutors from The U.S. Department of Justice’s organized crime and gang section.

Wallner at one point held up a machete allegedly recovered from a gang clubhouse located off Eastern Avenue that was nicknamed “Destroyer,” and said the witnesses will walk jurors through the violence, “step by bloody step.”