Modern Wisdom - #316 - Steven Dudley - MS-13: America's Most Notorious Gang

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

Steven Dudley is the Director of InSight Crime, a crime & public security reporter and an author. MS-13 are one of the best known gangs in the world. President Trump declared war on them and called them a national security threat. Today we get to hear exactly how the gang works from the most informed MS-13 expert on the planet. Expect to learn how MS-13 have become so dangerous without any single leader, how the gang initiates new members, the terrifyingly difficult prospect of trying to leave the organisation, how the gang are both victimisers and victims, the danger of them entering into politics and much more... Sponsors: Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at http://bit.ly/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 3.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy MS-13: https://amzn.to/3xxOktc Follow Steven on Twitter - https://twitter.com/stevensdudley  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Stephen Dudley, he's the director of Insight Crime He's a crime and public security reporter and an author MS-13 are one of the best known gangs in the world President Trump declared war on them and called them a national security threat today We get to hear exactly how the gang works from the most informed MS-13 expert on the planet gang works from the most informed MS-13 expert on the planet. So today, expect to learn how MS-13 have become so dangerous without any single leader, how the gang initiates new members, the terrifyingly difficult prospect of trying to leave the organization,

how the gang are both victimizers and victims, the danger of them entering into politics and much more. One of the most interesting takeaways that I got from this conversation is that a lot of our ideas around how criminal organizations, cartels and gangs are run is very jaded by what we saw towards the back end of the 1900s.

We saw the Mexican cartels and we saw the New York Mafia and stuff like that. But in reality, there are gangs who are operating very hand-to-mouth like MS-13. They don't have huge swaths of cash and submarines and airplanes that they're flying all over the place. They're just doing low-level, local, pretty unsophisticated crime.

They're not very well organized, they don't have a central power structure and they don't have that much money, which genuinely does make you reframe exactly what's going on with gangs in 2021. Before I get to other news, I wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone that supported the show over the last couple of months. The growth that we've seen so far in 2021 is insane. If you are a new listener here or if you are a long time one, make sure that you've hit the subscribe button. It is the only way that you can ensure that you will never miss an episode

every Monday, Thursday and Saturday when they go up. So just navigate to your little podcast that for me and press that subscribe button. It ensures that you're never going to miss these conversations. But now it is time for the wise and very wonderful Stephen Dudley. Stephen Dudley, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me, Chris. How do you describe what you do for work? I would say I find human stories about organized crime and corruption, mostly in the Americas where I live. And I try and tell those human stories to illustrate institutional or systematic problems that we face as societies, as countries.

And, you know, for me, the most exciting thing is getting to and telling those human stories. That's the part that gets me up in the morning. And that's what I spend most of my time doing. So a lot of it is kind of finding these people, getting them to talk to you, and then reconstructing their stories, hopefully in the most accurate way possible. We as humans are incredibly complex, we are, we're gray. There's no black and white. So that's what I aim to tell is that gray area. I love that gray area. That's where the interesting stuff is. Yeah, it's absolutely. So I'm a specialist in the gray area. I get that. You've been focused on MS-13 for quite a while now. What is MS-13? MS-13 is a gang that was born really from refugees that were fleeing a civil conflict in El Salvador and other parts of Central America eventually in the 1980s. And they landed in spaces like Los Angeles,

and the deep part of Los Angeles, and found themselves in the midst of hundreds of street gangs. And they formed one of their own. Initially, it's a gang that is grouped together, at least their common bond, was initially heavy metal music of all things. So that's innocent enough. That evolved for a lot of reasons, perhaps most of all because of the environment in which

they were living. And it became this international or transnational gang over the last 40 years. It is an incredibly notorious gang, even if it's not the most violent, mostly because of these very gruesome ways in which they go after and often kill their rivals or perceived rivals. They use blunt instruments like machetes, knives, those sorts of things, and they kill in groups. So they act as a group and they often kill in numbers.

So three to four victims, what would be considered sort of a massacre and international standards, those sorts of things, and very often in public. So they have this, you know, fearsome reputation, but they're really kind of a, they're a haphazard, loosely knit network. They're grouped under this umbrella, the MS-13,

but they're linked, they're more linked, more closely connected to what are called clicks, or they're sort of personal personal cells where they grew up So it's a very you know while it's international most of their activities are very much local So that's that's where it comes from and that the fascination around them comes from just Mostly I would say this gruesome way in which they go after their rivals or perceived rivals. Do they have a leader? which they go after their rivals or perceived rivals. Do they have a leader? They have leaders, each of the clicks that I mentioned has a leader.

Underneath, or I should say above the clicks, they have what are called programs and those group a number of clicks. And there are probably in the range of 35 or 40 programs. And this is in a half- half dozen countries now, mostly in the Americas, but they are popping up now in Europe. And then above them, they have leadership, kinds of boards of directors, really, that work, that work kind of geographically speaking. So you have a board of directors, or what they call a Mesa, or a table of directors in LA. You have another one, which is probably the most powerful one,

in El Salvador. It's known as the Ramfla, they call it the Ramfla Storica, which means quite literally the translation would be historical wheel, Ramfla's wheel. It goes back to their origins in LA, where there is a fascination with cars, right? And you'll think of the very cliched cars bouncing up and down, yeah, that's the Ramfla, right? Let's get the Ramfla, right? So they take that and it's transformed in sort of,

in sort of the, it's referred to as the wheel or the leadership circle and historical. So this is the traditional leadership. That's probably the most powerful board of directors that the MS-13 has, but no one part of the gang has complete control over the other parts of the gang. And that's the thing that's very hard for people to wrap their heads around. There isn't like one single leader. No, there's no. No. There's no one single leader moving these guys around like chess pieces, you know, of, you know, very common misperception about what the gang is. It's very loosely knit network.

And they are mostly loyal to their clicks and their click leaders. In particular, the person who administered their beating in. So they have rituals to enter into the gang. And one of them is this sort of beat in ceremony that last, well, they say 13 seconds, but that's a long 13 seconds that they're counting away while a bunch of guys are beating up this guy who's going to be initiated or who is being initiated. And their loyalty then is to the person who administered that very often. So it's a very, very, sort of difficult thing again to wrap our hands

around. What's it got to do with the Mexican Mafia? There's affiliations there as well, isn't there? The Mexican Mafia is this sort of prison gang, is a prison, prison-based gang, mostly run out of Southern California state prisons. And what they understood as a kind of gang very early on was that if they controlled the prison systems, in particular the Latinos inside the prison system,

they could set up and extend their network beyond the prison walls themselves. So beginning really going back to the 1950s and 1960s, they established a firm control over the Latinos inside the US prison system. Why is that important? Well, in the United States, the prisons are really divided along racial lines. the prisons are really divided along racial lines. And so it's basically brown versus black versus white in the in the crudest sense of of understanding how it works there. And so the Mexican mafia, which I know that you've spoken about in other shows of yours, you know, was able to sort of corral all the Latinos underneath in umbrella, an umbrella group they call the Sureños. And at a certain point, they not only sort of, you know, would take people who came in,

but they began to force all of the Southern California Latino gangs to become part of that umbrella group, the Sureños. And that was the case with the MS-13. They were essentially forced into this umbrella group, the Suraños. So they're part of this Mexican Mafia umbrella group, which gives the Mexican Mafia this sort of control and leverage over the Cummings and Goings of all of these street gangs operating

in Southern California and beyond. And they can use these networks for themselves so they can make money. And they do make loads of money. As you well know, the Mexican mafia is a very, you know, a sort of a member of the Mexican mafia. It's anywhere between 100 and 130 members. So very small compared to these street gangs

like the MS-13 that have thousands and thousands of members. What do they care, right? This is just contract labor for them. the MS-13 that have thousands and thousands of members. What do they care, right? This is just contract labor for them. So they're able to in essence sort of extend their criminal networks via these gangs like the MS-13. I suppose if you're in jail and the choice is between striking out on your own or finding a partnership with your people, if the Mexican Muffia is, if it's a choice between those two, why would you try and splinter off on your own?

The whites aren't going to have either. Blacks aren't going to have you, presumably. So you've got to go with those people. Going back to El Salvador. Is it right that there's about a murder a minute in El Salvador and it's got a population that's less than London? Not currently. It has gone down considerably since your

murder a minute statistic probably came out. There was a time in which it hovered around 100 murders per 100,000, which would far surpass whatever London's is, which I would imagine is maybe even one or below that per 100,000. So, you know, at any point it was 100 times more, you're more likely to be murdered in El Salvador than you were in London. So, yes, in that regard, it has gone down considerably and there is a lot of debate about why it's gone down. And one of the theories around why it's gone down is because of an alleged pact between the current government and mostly, in this case, because the MS-13 is the only

gang there, but mostly the MS-13 because it is the most powerful gang in El Salvador. And what is this pact in tail? It entails a trade-off where the gang says, we're going to lower homicides, at least we're going to make it so you don't find nearly as many bodies. So, forced disappearances by the way are going way up. And the murder rate goes down. This is politically advantageous because we on the outside, what do we do? We use murder rate as a proxy for evaluating how a country is doing on security in security matters. It's probably not a fair proxy, but that's the proxy we use. That goes down great, so foreign direct investment and all the other things that come along,

accolades and look at you, you're solving the gang problem, all of that comes with it, right? And in return, what does the government do? It gives them, you know, sort of special visiting rights and privileges inside of prisons, you know, to their loved ones and others, including reported by some, not necessarily by us and I work, I should say I work for Insight Crime,

which is a think tank that covers these matters. It includes this sort of maybe quid pro quo of trading off certain things inside the prisons, including having meetings or brokering meetings of guys from the outside, on the inside, so they can continue to do business. Visitation rights for family members, as you know, that is super important. You know, and then also their ability to control the administration of special assistance,

especially during this time of COVID, in the neighborhoods that they control. So in other words, you have a government program that is providing special assistance to people in need during the pandemic. Who administers that, who hands out that assistance. What we understand is that gang members begin to control that assistance. So what does that give them?

That gives them a huge amount of capital and clout in those communities where they operate. So you can see how this quid pro quo operates. You know, I guess the last thing and a super important thing, especially from the political perspective, is that they open up the door for political parties, the principal political party run by the president to campaign in their areas under their control, and they prohibit the other campaigns from going in their areas under their control. So, how do you campaign? How do you do a political campaign? This worked very much in the favor of

the government who ended up winning the midterm elections and now controls Congress by a healthy margin. And it looks as if they might even change the constitution so the president can stay on for years and years. So, you can see how this can have real real effects. Wow. I can't believe that what they gave the government was Will make the bodies disappear the kit we can't we can't promise anything about the murders But the bodies there'll be fewer bodies around and that's that's ended up yet It really does feel like they've got their fingers into absolutely everything.

What is it that they want? Do they have a mission? Obviously, when you look back to kind of the classic, the Mexican cartels and stuff like that, there was this vision of riches and drugs and kind of conquering and controlling territory. What's the equivalent for MS-13? What's that goal? Yeah, they don't have a goal. I mean, they are very much for the most part up until now,

and we're talking about sort of a 40-year history, where mostly it has been a rudimentary hand-to-mouth existence. It is about the here and now, about sort of living the day. And part of that, and this is what I've learned now, 10 years investigating this and talking to gang members, is the social aspect. I think we really downplay the social part of the gang. We put the criminal aspect first. We talk

about them as a cartel or they had this money-making machine as it relates to extortion or maybe they're involved in human smuggling or prostitution rings or whatever the case may be, we put the sort of cart before the horse, I think, and that we put the criminal economy in front, and we say, this is what drives them. Now, I don't think so. I think what drives them is their social cohesion and their bonds with one another and their relationship with one another.

They are not a rich organization. This isn't a huge money-making operation. Now, there are elements of the gang that are showing signs of changing this in terms of getting involved in increasingly sophisticated drug trafficking activities. But these are very small elements within, you know, we're talking about the MS-13 umbrella. We're talking about anywhere between 50,000 and 100,000 members across six different countries. We're talking about just a few dozen getting involved in these more sophisticated activities. Because most of the others, while they may be making a lot of money in, for example,

extortion, and they are, that's parceled out through many, many, many hands, through all of these thousands of hands and their family members, you know, and others who they have to pay off along the way in order to do these criminal activities. So we can talk about them making, you know, in the millions of dollars, but that is spread out among many hands. And to be honest, you know, again, going back to the most important point for me is they are a social organization first, you know, maybe we want to call them anti-social in many respects, but they're social. It's a community. We don't want to think of it that way, but it is a community first, a social community first, a criminal organization second,

to the point where in our investigations, what we found and what I've found in my own investigations are that these these members who become very good, very entrepreneurial in what they're doing, for example, in drug trafficking, they are literally pushed aside. They're pushed out of the organization and they don't even use the organization in many respects to do these sophisticated criminal activities because they know that that's not what the organization is built for. That's not what the MS-13 is built for. So it's very hard for us to wrap our heads around this because this is where I started as well. I started by looking at it as a criminal organization.

I was looking at it, what are their criminal activities? That's what drives them, right? No, that's not what drives them. That's interesting. I wonder whether the classic South American drug cartel, mafia style approach that's kind of embedded in the back of our brains. I wonder whether that's

washing them and we always look, okay, so what's the commercial enterprise here? What's the game that they're playing? Are they running rackets like the New York Mafia? Are they in the concrete game? Are they in the drug game? Are they in the people traffic in game? That's the interesting thing about MS-13. I think you call them this this hand-to-mouth organization that, for one of a better word, they don't sound tremendously sophisticated. Like a poorly funded, poorly organized version of other cartels that have come before them. I don't know how I feel about that. I wonder whether it makes it feel a little bit more desperate.

In a way, it makes it feel less bourgeois and kind of like they had a choice. It certainly feels like if they're doing this because they need the social cohesion that it's there for a, the purpose feels more human, but that also makes the killing and the violence seem more wanted. That makes sense. Absolutely. And these are the, this, that's, that's sort of a central paradox in all this. You really hit a central paradox with the MS-13 is that they are they are victims in a certain way and they are victimizers, you know, they they embody both of these things constantly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can pick out the victim side and we can pick out the victimizing side

and we can highlight whichever one we want at the time that most suits us. They do commit horrendous acts of violence. My argument would be that those horrendous acts of violence are part of the way in which they create this group cohesion. They're not even part of what they're doing as a means of establishing control over a criminal. It's almost purposeless, isn't it? You think of it as purposeless in the sense of your rational economic mind.

But it's totally purposeful when you think about it in your social work. Cohesion binding them together as a group, shed sacrifice. Illustrating my commitment and shared sacrifice because that's what I'm about. That's the most important element. So if you look at the cases against them, the cases against them are all cases of assault and murder. There are some cases of sophisticated activities. Sophisticated meaning, the most sophisticated they get are, and this just came up in an indictment

about six months ago in the United States, was moving 100, I believe it was, I want to say 100 tons of marijuana. That was the most, not 100 tons, sorry, 100 pounds of marijuana. You know, this is, this is slightly low level stuff when you're thinking about the grand scheme of cartels. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not a cartel. Exactly. It's just not, they just don't get there. And when they the guys who do start to get there, what they do is they liaise with them with the guys like the Mexican mafia. They start to interact with them. They are trying their best to get accepted into the Mexican mafia. The six or seven cases that at Insight Crime that we've chronicled over the years

that illustrate these international drug trafficking schemes come undeared by leaders of the MS-13. They're almost invariably connecting with and working with the Mexican Mafia, not with their own gang. They need to outsource to a more sophisticated business unit because within their own gang, they don't have any of the people that are of this sort of commercial, entrepreneurial, enterprising mind. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I can't work that out. I read about murder rape control being some sort of tagline. What's that about?

I mean, there's a lot of myths. I don't know whether to call this a myth, but you know, there's a lot of stories that I think in part are promoted, you know, by the gang as are promoted by the gang as things that are part and parcel of the gang. This is kind of one of them. I think it's just part of a gang trying to burnish its reputation as being extremely strong and vicious and ruthless because I have never, and this is, I have interviewed dozens of these guys, not one of them has ever spontaneously talked like that to me. As spontaneously said, oh yeah, our motto is, you know, this, this, and that is not how it works.

So I sometimes think that these things got picked up and then they just become, they kind of take on a life of their own. I think this is probably one of them. A little bit of artistic license, like you might use to embellish the features of a product. The features of their product are their scaringness and their viciousness. And it helps them. It helps prosecutors. It helps police departments get more resources. You know, it helps politicians get elected. I mean, it helps prosecutors, it helps police departments get more resources, you know, it helps politicians get elected. I mean, it is a win-win-win-win situation with these kind of, you know, these little teeny myths that kind of percolate about these organizations. You know, I think just one more thing going back to the social aspect that I think we have to

keep in mind is that it makes them in the long haul that I think we have to keep in mind is that it makes them in the long haul. I think it has made them more resilient to law enforcement efforts because if you are simply thinking that you're going to take away their criminal economy and you are going to thus remove their sort of core element of being. You're sorely mistaken. In fact, by throwing them in jail, you are just reinforcing this social cohesion, which is what happens over and over, and why they were able to basically replicate the Mexican Mafia style when they move their operations to El Salvador and other places in Central America.

I suppose they're kind of like Bitcoin. They're such a decentralized structure. They don't have one single operator structurally in terms of the way that the hierarchy's ordered. And their earning potential is also done in that same way. There isn't some great river with tributaries coming off it that everybody's feeding on. It's all just little rackets here and there. It's making the bus driver pay. There was like a bus driver's strike or something because they were threatening the bus drivers

that they need to pay them. And then this bus driver's dead in the street and stuff like this. So yeah, I suppose as being resilient as a gang goes, staying poor is actually quite an easy way to do that because there isn't one single income stream that can be chopped away. When it comes to who they're recruiting, where are they getting their members, who are they recruiting? I think they're recruiting where gangs recruit, youth know, youth in the neighborhood

at the schools playing soccer. You're talking like children. Yes, absolutely. They are, the members, those who become members, talk about their first interactions with the gang, you know, when they are toddlers. And because the gang is around, right? It's just another element that is that is around that could be part of their house It could be part of their neighborhood could be part of their school

And so the gang is there. It's sort of Around and in many places these are the coolest kids. I mean they have access to the coolest toys, you know the best music the marijuana, you know, it's not too different from what draws us as youth to any crowd, you know, so I don't think it's I don't think it's necessarily that different in that respect. I think in other respects, it can be very different in the sense that I may join the gang just to be safe or think that I am safe from the gang. You know, I live in a neighborhood where the gang is operational. And one of the ways in which to keep myself safe is to join them or to collaborate with them in some respect, or maybe to think that I'll keep myself,

maybe not safe, but maybe my brother's safe, or my sister and my family and all the rest. So I think there's a lot of different motivations that go into this. What I've heard over the years talking to gang members is that in places like El Salvador, for instance, they don't have to recruit. They have a pretty steady line of possible recruits, kind of hovering on the edges.

What I think we don't often take into account in a lot of these spaces, both in El Salvador, places like El Salvador in the United States, is how much violence is happening inside the home and how so many of these guys don't want to be in their house and find themselves on the street, just a lot of time on the street for a lot of reasons, but very often because they have been subjected to violence in their home. And it could be, you know, physical violence or it could be sexual violence. So it's a literal, a lot of second family, then, a literal surrogate family. Absolutely. And again, going back to this social, the social aspect that is definitely their, their

surrogate family. No question about it. And they all talk about it like that. It's a bit of a cliche, but I don't think it's far from the truth for them in that in that core element. That family allows them to speak their own language. And in the book, I go through some of this where you've got a Salvadoran migrant in a largely Mexican, Mexican-American neighborhood, avoiding the way in which he would normally say the word you, you know, just referring to you, you know, he would use the word both. But that immediately identified him as a Salvadoran, so he had to switch his language until he found the Salvadorans who were embracing that. And who were they? They were the MS-13. So, you know, we think of, we don't necessarily think of these things, but I think they play a big

role in drawing these groups of people together into this community. Talk me through the full initiation procedure then. You've talked about this 13 seconds thing. I've also heard about some pretty disturbing stuff that women are supposed to have to do if they're gonna get in and then there's some other steps. How does it work? Quick parentheses would be that women are no longer allowed into the MS-13. Sometime in the early 2000s,

they made a kind of... Bloody patriarchy. Bloody patriarchy again. It is the bloody patriarchy. Bloody patriarchy again. It is the bloody patriarchy. And yes, there were very, as far as female initiates, and I spoke to a few of them, one of them is chronicled in my book. There is this sort of, there's kind of two avenues, you're either sexting where you have to have sex with multiple members of the gang, the click in this case,, you're either sexting where you have to have sex with multiple members

of the gang, the click in this case, or you're beaten in. So, you know, the ones that I spoke to both said that they had been beaten into the gang because if you're sexting, then you're really never a member of the gang. Anyway, but in terms of the way in which you reach that stage, because there's really a long process or there can be a long process before you reach the initiation stage where you're beaten in. That differs depending upon geography in places where you have a lot of potential recruits like El Salvador. That period, at least when I was doing the bulk of my research a couple of years ago, you know, could last a couple of years. And that included sort of,

you know, starting you out doing very basic services, you know, keeping an eye out, those sorts of things, maybe starting to mess in your things back and forth, you know, maybe you're involved then into, you can see it escalating, maybe you're involved in collecting for the money from extortion. Those sorts of things, and it steadily escalates to the point where you're at a certain point required to, or at least asked to participate in a murder or two. There were differing stories about how many murders you had to commit in order

to be part of the gang. There are periods, I would suppose, when you have to commit more murders rather than less. So I don't think it necessarily is sort of a hard and fast rule. And it's very much related to, again, geography. You don't necessarily get that same rule of having to commit one or more murders if you are being ushered into the gang in a space like the United States, which has far higher costs to being a violent gang than being a violent gang in a space like El Salvador.

So they're kind of differing ways in, but it's sort of this sort of rising scale of activities tell you reach the point where okay, now you're going to be a member that'll beat you in, but even after that you have to continue to illustrate what they call commitment. And you do that very often by these collective or participating in these collective expressions of violence. These multiple members going after other rivals, you know, basically. And again, not necessarily and very often not even related to criminal economies, just

this illustration of group cohesion, just this illustration of we are the strongest. So, you know, it is, it kind of boggles the mind, but that's why that's another reason why they have never become this very sophisticated criminal organization because they're really bad criminals. You know, I mean, it's, it comes down to that. And like, and if you are, if you are managing a very sophisticated criminal organization, why would you align yourself with them? They're, they're totally visible. They, they fall in the radar of, of law enforcement, nonstop. They're all tattooed up. I mean, you know, and they're really bad at what they do. And there's so many possible

leaks of information, you know, you just, it just doesn't make sense on so many levels to align yourself with them. And then inside they're just, they're just bad criminals. I mean, it's just, maybe it comes down to that. Yeah, maybe. What about leaving? How hard does it to leave? I think again, it varies from place to place. I think it's much harder to leave in spaces like El Salvador. It's a smaller space.

The circles are smaller. Everybody knows each other. And, you know, it's difficult to leave in that area, which is why you get a lot of them applying for asylum in the United States because they leave and they find they can't really leave. And even if they sort of go through the process and there is a process whereby you are basically supposed to ask for permission You don't give permission. So you you get old you have a family You have a job you have other responsibilities and you can ask to leave and you give your given sort of permission and you become

Basic what they call a Kalmau, you know, you're calmed You're retired. Now, here's the thing, you can be cold out of retirement if you go through this, this way. Now, you can, you can ask for another way to leave, which is you can say, I'm going to join the Evangelical Church. And then in that instance, if you do commit yourself for real to the evangelical church, you cannot be called out or you will, it's very unlikely you'll be called out of retirement in that case. If you show your commitment, you dedicate yourself to this other higher cause, which by the way has a lot of parallels with the gang life. Again, we don't think of it in that way, but there is a lot of parallels with the gang life again We don't think of it in that way, but there is a lot of parallels

And then the third way is you run out you run away. That's the third way you get out Run and you say I'm not turning around and they could be chasing you your whole life Which is the case I have in that kind of forms the spine of my book with Norman Yeah, what's what's the deal with the church thing? Do the gang respect religious faith so much that it supersedes their cohesion as a group? I think that there is a respect for religion in the sense that you are devoted to a higher cause like you are with the gang. So when you're in the gang, you know, everything is about El Barrio, right? This idea of community, which is sort of their word

for community, El Barrio, the neighborhood. And in the same way, they see that sort of interestingly in the evangelical church, they don't have the same appreciation or relationship with the Catholic church. But with the evangelical churches, there obviously many, many evangelical churches and strains. They have this acceptable avenue of escape. Again, as long as you dedicate and you illustrate that you are committed to that, and you don't stray away, you could say, I joined the evangelical church and if they find you drinking and smoking and all this stuff, you could find yourself in deep trouble. So they have this reverence for that. But they don't have for the Catholic church

and they allow that. And yeah, again, just going back just quickly about the similarities, our sense from like an inside crime perspective and from a Steve Dudley perspective is that there is a lot of similarities in the structure of life. It's a very patriarchal system, both are very patriarchal systems. Both occupy a huge amount of your time.

So you're going to church every night or you're going to, you know, what they call meetings every night for the gang. You have this commitment again to this higher, higher cause. You know, it's about sort of group cohesion. There's a lot of solidarity in churches and obviously a lot of solidarity in the gangs. So anyway, yeah, all that to say that there's a lot of parallels. I'm not surprised that they're not getting much crime, don't know much money made. They're too busy. They're constantly at meetings or in church, singing hymns and stuff. I'd have no time to do anything at all. What's the story? Can you explain the story that Norman, your character, pseudonym character for a real person in the book, goes through, where he needs to prove there's a 50% or greater chance that he's going to be killed or tortured?

So he goes to the United States running from the gang. He wanted to leave. Oh no, they wanted to make him a boss of some kind. Then he said, I don't want to do that. I'm going to leave. And they said, you're not. And he said, I am. And then he run.

Yes. So he's escaping. He escapes one attempt on his life by the gang, and then the police nearly kill him as well. He's got a lot of enemies. And the rival gang, the 18th street, doesn't exactly like him either. So he's got a lot going on

and he's recently out of jail. Let's say, you know, I guess he's a few years out of jail at that stage. And huge portions of the gang have been put in jail, leadership. And so they have holes in their leadership outside of jail. So they start calling him up and he ignores their calls. There's only so long you can ignore the call

of the Ramfla Storika, right, which is basically the leadership council is calling him up. So he runs and his family comes in behind him and his family hands, they hand themselves over to the United States Authorities at the Texas border. He doesn't have that option. He can't, because of his gang affiliation, can't apply for asylum like his family members can. So he has another avenue that he can use in order to stay and get what's called relief from

deportation from the United States. And it's called the Convention Against Torture. It's an international convention. One of the signatories is the United States. And basically, it means that as a signatory, you have the obligation of evaluating whether or not a place where you would send somebody back to, to port somebody back to, would be so dangerous that they would face a greater than 50% chance of being tortured and or killed by the state. Okay, it has to be the state

that would commit that crime. Right? So, in essence, the judge is evaluating whether or not the Salvadoran state, probably pretty specifically the police in this case, the Salvadoran police, would find and kill or at least allow for others to kill, perhaps Norman in this case, inside a prison, inside the prison system, for example, or torture him, right? Is there a greater than 50% chance that that's gonna happen?

That's what the judge is evaluating. So that's why the part about him, escaping narrowly, escaping death, the hands of the police is so fundamental. And in that case, if the judge finds that, he is obliged because the United States is a signatory to this international convention to give him relief as long as that is the case.

So that means that Norman, even though he eventually obtains relief under that convention, and he is a gang member too, which obviously this is the tension. You've got this admitted gang member who is at that point, enemy number one of the Trump administration applying for relief to stay in the United States. So, and he eventually gets it, but he still has to check in every year with United States authorities. And say, hey, I'm here, I'm living here.

You can find me here, blah, blah, blah. And then, and at any point, the attorney general of the United States could decide, you know what, we're done with Norman, he's going back. So that's, so he's still in a precarious position, but he did obtain relief. There are people who obtain cat and stay the rest of their lives, you know, cat relief

and stay the rest of their lives in the United States. So it could happen with Norman as well. That's terrifying. Not only do your enemies hate you, but your old friends hate you, and they wanna kill you as well. And then the people that are supposed to protect you from both of those groups,

they're also, they also hate you, and they're gonna kill you. It's, um, yes, it's crazy. You talk about in some gruesome detail, the conditions of the prisons and the way that some of the experiences go through. Can you tell us some of the more extreme stories that you heard about the conditions in the prisons and what's going on there. Well, I think it's important to consider that when the gangs, basically what happens is more and more gang members who had begun their lives in the gang in the United States get deported back to places like El Salvador in huge numbers. And that's what establishes the base for which the gang emerges in El Salvador, are these deportees. They then begin their operations or they start doing their activities, many of them

violent in El Salvador and they start to land in jail in El Salvador. And when they land in jail in El Salvador, this is the late 1990s, early 2000s, they are at the disadvantage. They are smaller in number than some of their rivals, including the rival gang, the 18th Street, but also the most powerful criminal prison gangs at the time. And those prison gangs are brutal in many respects. And perhaps the most brutal part of it is that they commit horrible acts of sexual violence against them. You know, one of the first things that Norman sees when he is ushered into, I think it's the third jail.

The Mariona. The Mariona, right, a super famous jail in El Salvador, and the biggest of all the jails in El Salvador run by a brutal prison gang is one, is another MS-13 member. He gets a, so normally it's ushered into a cell. And in this cell, he is in, he's in front of another member who's being raped right in front of him in this jail cell. That other member ends up dying of AIDS according to AIDS-related illnesses, according to Norman. So this is his that is, you know, another point of cohesion of these particular criminal organizations, especially inside jail, is this risk of sexual assault. And so they are, they are definitely, they almost immediately, you know, begin to bind

to each other. And they begin to form their own very strong presence inside the prison enough so that they can confront this stronger prison gang, which is doing not just rapes inside of those prisons, but is extorting them, is extorting their family members, is assaulting their family members, including sometimes sexual assault, you know, is beating them openly, you know, with the guards' support because, you know, there are these kind of informal packs between guards and, you know, strong prison gangs, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, in a very perverse way, it kind of makes the prison guards job easier if there is a, you

know, one sort of master. Yes, exactly. Self-enforcement. So I think you probably know all too well what I'm talking about. And so there is, you know, there's that aspect that's playing out. And you have the emergence of these other, these other, you know, criminal prison gangs, one of them is the MS-13. To the point where, you know, the fighting begins and then the fighting gets so bad that the government makes a strategic decision to begin to separate them. So the MS-13 goes to one prison, or they actually control like two or three prisons, and then the 18th street goes to another prison, which gives them de facto control, total control over those prisons, and basically gives them an operational headquarters in many respects. So you can see the

logic behind it. It's an effort to slow the violence, but the sort of ripple effects thereafter they didn't foresee. It's so damned if you're doing damned if you don't in that situation. They're committing crime out on the streets, they're killing each other if they're in jail, and then if you do the only option which is left to kind of segregate jails based on gangs, then you essentially end up with a paid for headquarters. And it seems like most of those jails are kind of fairly hands off for the guards. I saw Ross Kemp in an MS-13 run jail. Pretty terrible conditions. They're talking about how all of their homies have all got diarrhea

and stomach upset. And it's really dirty and there's people hanging from hammocks and like 20 people per cell, 30 people per cell, it's absolutely packed. But at least they're safe from their enemies, right? And the guards just kind of, the guards take the, take Ross up to basically the front gate. And then they're like, okay, now we're gonna hand you over to the guy that runs this, but the guy that runs this isn't some commissioner from the prison, it's the head inmate. Yes, that's exactly right.

I mean, I haven't, I have never been in an MS-13 controlled jail in El Salvador, but I went into an 18th street one, and it was the exact same experience. They, the guards open the door and then close the door behind you, and then that's the space you're in. It's super easy. Yeah, I mean, it's a, it is a strange feeling.

And they're living in, I mean, horrible conditions. I mean, horrible conditions. The squalor. Yeah, it's squalor. One hammock above the other and sleeping over the toilet. And yeah, it's not fun either. So no, the prison question is, I think, a sort of forgotten element of this.

And going back to the Mexican mafia, even their operational style in the US and many other prison gangs that are operating in the US. We just think that we can lock them up and throw away the key and we're done with it and it's just so not the case. And I just don't know when when we're going to come around to that realization, maybe never. What would the authorities and Elf Salvador trying to do to crack down on this because it's going to just become a war in the streets. If you send the cops in, I've seen videos. I think it might have been Ross Kemper, maybe a vice news documentary. I watched today about MS-13 where they use raids as an opportunity that's almost like a PR stunt

to give this show of force to anybody that's nearby in the neighborhood. So they'll send 250 special forces and armed soldiers in to take down a relatively small number of people, but it just seems like that's a mess. And then there were jailing people for just having affiliation tattoos and clothing and colors of clothing at one point, it seems like a mess. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the legislation around dealing with gangs really emerged in California in the 1980s when they were dealing with this epicenter of gang activity in the United States. You know, the place where the MS-13 was born had about 400 gangs operational in that area.

And what they did was they created special units of the type that you're talking about. The most famous of which in Los Angeles was called Crash, which included the word hoodlum in it, in the acronym, which is something you wouldn't necessarily get in a sort of special unit these days. So you had that, and they would do very similar style operations, very much kick the door down, you know, flashy type of things and, you know, sort of bring them all in jail, but we know what happened to them in jail. They became part of the Suraños

and part of a larger network were deported back down, etc., etc. We know that part of the story. But parallel to that, they're also creating databases, and those databases have all kinds of problems associated with them since they're, you know, it's very much a kind of the criteria upon which you are included in those databases are very flimsy to say the least. There was a database, the most famous database, which was one of the first in California, and an analysis of that in 2014, I believe. There were a couple of four-year-olds

that were on the database, a gang database. So it's that sort of thing. And then they create legislation, which allows them to enhance penalties, sentences. And the legislation has, and this is perhaps the original sin that you were referring to earlier, a notion of gangs, which they essentially copy-pasted from the United Nations definition of organized crime.

But if you take my word for it, they're not organized crimes. Oh, no, organized crime. If you you take my word for it, they're not organized crime. Oh no, organized crime. If you are going to like start, if that's your premise upon which you are building out legislation, then we're in trouble. And not just that, but over the years, all of the states have developed their own laws regarding the gangs. And they have have there's no single definition of what a gang is. There are and we counted these when we were doing a report at Insight Crime. There were 40 out of 50 states plus DC, they were, you know, plus the District of Columbia, there were 44 different definitions of gang plus DC's definition of gang. So 45 out of 51 of these jurisdictions had different definitions

of what a gang was. So where are we going with all this? It eventually not only is it sort of replicated in mass in the United States, but we export that same model to places like El Salvador. And what do they start doing? They start arresting them for the same flimsy style reasons. They start creating databases. They start overpopulating their jails. And lo and behold, they have not just the same problems and many regards much worse problems. And why are we surprised? I mean, it's just, for me, it's kind of baffling how we turn

away from what the story tells us, what the data tells us, what we can prove empirically about what works. And maybe more importantly, what definitely does not work. So, I mean, this is kind of the lesson that we see over and over again, and then we're surprised that this gang has been around for 40 years. Why are we surprised? When we keep doing the same thing as it relates to them, I'm not saying it's easy to wipe out any gang, but we can certainly mitigate them with much more effective policies that

are much broader in scope than simply thinking about it in a punitive way. I put Stephen Dudley in charge, I say, right, you've got the resources at your disposal. What do you do? Look, I think I think you can't, I'm not going to get rid of the law enforcement component that's already there that has its own inertia. Who's going to fight that battle? Nobody, right? But you already, you're already talking like a politician. You have to exactly, I've already backtracked. He's actually, I'm already like swallowed all of it I just said five minutes ago.

Now the middle section of this is what do we do now for the people who could be potentially brought into these organizations, these communities. I think we need to work more on creating alternative communities, right? We need to create competing communities, things that can compete with what the gang gives them. And that includes everything from thinking about how do we protect people, to how do we involve them, to how do we make sure that

they're crossing their interests with other people's interests, and like-minded interests, and maybe that includes nationality, ethnicity, and race, and all that other stuff. I think we need to think about all these things. When we create these alternative spaces, one of these alternative or de facto alternative spaces are the church and we need to study why is the questions that you were asking me or that why is the evangelical church? Why is that even acceptable to them? That's a competing community, you know? And so that that's the type of thing I think we need to think about in this sort of medium term is how to create these competing communities. And then in a very, very long term, we need to think about how you deal with violence,

particularly violence in the home. So we don't put near enough resources towards early family intervention. And I'm talking about dealing with families that have a lot of situations of abuse, physical and sexual abuse in particular. So hyper focus on that because what we know about people who end up in jail is that a huge portion of them have been, were abused in their home. So this is something we need to consider when we're considering long-term how are we changing the way people approach or interact with other human beings.

So I think there's a lot of different things. A sort of immediate term is certainly we have to deal with the problems that gangs pose and much of those problems are related to law enforcement. We have to deal with the issues in terms of the way in which they've created this very attractive and obviously anti-social but very much attractive community. We have to deal with the problems, the core root problems that happen inside the home, you know, that very often lead people to join those spaces. It's interesting.

I am. It's not an easy task, sadly. And this is why every time that I get exposed to work like yours or Sean Atwood's true crime podcast, these big podcasts from the UK often has a lot of guys from ex gang affiliations on there. Whenever I listen to that, I think, God, like this is such a big behemoth, such a Leviathan of a problem to try and fix. And then when you hear politicians that come on

and throw buzzwords like tough on crime or like crack down on criminals, you think What does that even mean? Like it's so long. It's it this isn't a task that even the president that gets into office next time is The next term is going to fix this is the thing that aims to be fixed in 50 years or so Um, what are your predictions moving forward the future of El Salvador?

Obviously we've seen this decline in murder rate, but that could be the gangs basically fettling the figures. What do you think we'll see over the next decade or so from MS-13? I fear a little bit the next decade in one respect in that. I do see the beginnings of kind of an evolution of the MS-13 in a way that I hadn't seen. Does this more sophisticated criminal enterprise? They're becoming more sophisticated.

Leveling up. They're leveling up. They're getting more sophisticated. They're beginning to understand in a way they hadn't shown before. On both a criminal level, so they're understanding of how to deal with excess resources, put those resources to work, get involved in other types of economic activities, so more legitimate businesses, money laundering activities, which shows you as sort of an element of how much they're accumulating as well.

And also on a political level, they're understanding where their leverage points are, and how to pull those levers. I mean, that's what they're really getting when they're interacting with these governments, is they know when to pull those levers. I mean, that's what they're really getting when they're interacting with these governments. Is they know when to pull these levers, they know how to, they know how to create the effective communications channels and send the messages that they want and get what they want.

So anyway, we're seeing that. So I feared a little bit in that respect. On another level, I say to myself, you know what? This is how criminals become legitimate parts of society. No matter what country, you know, every single criminal group, whether we're talking about the, you know, Irish mafia or the Italian mafia or any other sort of criminal group, whether we're talking about the Irish mafia or the Italian mafia, or any other sort of criminal group, is they become sophisticated and they over time pieces of them or their sort of generations below of moving up the social ladder. How else do we expect them to become part of legitimate society other than criminal activities?

And it's not limited to gangs, but I feel like the gang, mostly we're talking about El Salvador, is beginning to kind of see that. It's kind of crystallizing in front of them in El Salvador. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now we have a much different MS-13, just in El Salvador. I know, I'm not don't think maybe parts of Honduras, but you know, just in El Salvador. And if not an MS-13, you know, clicks. I like to talk about gangs within a gang. The gang is so big, these clicks are so big, some of these clicks have thousands of members themselves

and they're operational on an international scale. And because my loyalty is very often with my click, these clicks could evolve into criminal organizations in and of themselves, much more sophisticated. So that's kind of what I see as a possibility. But on the other hand, I say, maybe this is the process whereby they become part of legitimate society, less violence, certainly illicit proceeds will tilt the playing field in their favor on the economic grounds, on political grounds. That's not fair, but criminal groups do this all the time, and they've done this all the time throughout history. So we should not be surprised if that's the path

that they're beginning to take. And maybe we shouldn't get there way. I mean, maybe, well, hasten their arrival to legitimate society will lower the amount of carnage, extortion, murders, forced recruitment, rape, everything else that is related to, you know, the activities of this gang, and they are numerous, numerous. And so maybe, maybe if we hasten that, that trip, maybe we might be better off, because we're certainly not doing anything to slow down the other, you know, 40 years, same amount of same numbers, at least the same numbers, if not more, greater presence in more countries now. What are we doing?

We're not doing much to mitigate what they are. So, we need to rethink this, maybe. I don't know. I'm getting lost in my own thoughts right now. Man, that's a tough pill to swallow, that permitting them to act more effectively as criminals is the most expedient way to get them out of the worst types of criminality that we want to get rid of. Yeah, it's, you know what it is, I actually think it's a, I'm going to show whether it's true, and I'm glad I'm not in the position to have to make the call. But there's part of me that

does make sense, and it comes back to what you said at the very beginning about them being this sort of hand-to-mouth organization. Part of what makes them feel quite jarring to, I think, me when I think about it and probably a lot of the listeners as well, is this level of poverty around them? It makes you think kind of like the Rwandan genocide, they even use machetes as well, right? It's this sort of low grade, low rent, unsophisticated, wanton violence. And I would imagine that when there aren't these opportunities, if you've got enough money for a car and a house and a mansion and these sort of things, you're not bothered about running around just killing people over petty turf wars because you have

bigger things on your mind. I guess the inevitability of the criminal enterprise is that there's a lot of operations that need to be looked after that take time away from being on the street doing stuff. I wanted to ask you this story as well that I heard last year. I can't remember if it was in Brazil or Venezuela or somewhere else. Someone was trying to enact or someone refused to enact a 6 p.m. curfew for COVID. And the gang made a public statement and said if the government won't act, we will. And they enforced a COVID curfew. And that story stuck with me while I was reading your book because it made me think,

oddly, and you hear these stories about, I don't know whether it is El Chapo or another one of the sort of big Mexican cartels who would get gone, give money to people, they would fund schools, they'd have roads, things named after them. I'm aware that there are better saints to put on a pedestal. But my point is that you, as the gangs become more sophisticated,

they actually integrate themselves into life in a more productive way. Yes, sure, they're still extorting people and doing all of these bad things. But it really does feel like, you know, Seth Gordon's the dip, you know, that kind of the area where you have real lack of capacity to do stuff, it feels like MS-13s in that. It feels like they haven't got

the resources to integrate and get any of the good things, look at me talking about the good things of criminal enterprises. I haven't got any of the advantages that come with a sophisticated criminal organization, but they have all of the aggression and the members and the free time in the world and the enemies to have these territory wars. Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess, kind of, how do we, how do we change the equation? And, and who are we changing the equation for? You know, I think there are a lot of different, when we talk about the gang, we think about sort of one, one sort of narrow strip of population, but, you know, really, you know, almost we were talking about like

kids from, you know, kids, I say young adults 18 to 25, right? That's your gang strip right there. So that's your kind of target. But maybe that's not the right target, you know? I mean, I don't know. It's so hard to say where to put the emphasis. But I think in your description of it, what I think about is how do we change the calculation? And if you can change the calculation from, it's in my interest to send four guys out

with machetes after this guy. And it doesn't even mean that I'm going to win that drug corner. It has nothing to do with that. It's just because he's the other side of, he's the other gang. If I can change, start by changing that equation, that it's not in my interest to do that, then we're moving in the right direction.

And of course, that is like the lowest bar. I mean, you know, stop chopping people up. Stop chopping people up. That's the first thing we wanted to have to happen. Exactly, stop making that be your rewarding experience. Why is that a rewarding experience? And part of that, of course, going back, part of that is a law enforcement equation, but part of that is sort of shifting the direction of where they could be putting their energies.

of where they could be putting their energies. It's a incredibly difficult question to answer in the whole, right? But I think that there's so many resources that are already in place that can answer it on the micro level. That I think a lot of it is just trying to figure out where to harness the existing resources that are already at play. I don't think we need any extra resources in that regard. I don't know. We're trying to solve the gang problem here in an hour-long podcast.

It's a tough one. Rightly so, if there are two men on this planet to do it, Stephen is me and you. Stephen Dudley, ladies and gentlemen, people want to check out some more of your stuff. Where should they go? You can go to StephenDudley.com or you can go to insightcrime.org. That's the organization that I co-direct. And we cover organized crime in the Americas. So have a look. Thank you very much, man. I appreciate your time.

MS-13, the making of America's most notorious gang, will be linked in the show notes below as well. Cheers, man. Thank you very much, Chris, for having me. Yeah, I'm fed.