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

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 #gangs #truecrime #cartel - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 comes down to that. And like, and if you are managing a very sophisticated criminal organization, why would you align yourself with them? They're totally visible. They they fall in the radar of of law enforcement nonstop. They're all tattooed up and they're really bad at what they do. And there's so many possible leaks of information. And it just doesn't make sense on so many levels to align yourself with them.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  How do you describe what you do for work?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  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 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,

• 1:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:38Chris Williamson?

  That's where the interesting stuff is.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. So I'm a specialist in the gray area.

• 1:45Chris Williamson?

  I get that. You've been focused on MS-13 for quite a while now. What is MS-13?

• 1:52Speaker 00

  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, in the deep heart 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, or at least their sort of common bond was initially heavy metal music of all things. So that's, I guess, innocent enough.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  And that evolved. 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.

• 3:19Speaker 00

  So, you know, three to four victims, what would be considered sort of a massacre in international standards. You know, those sorts of things. And very often in public. So they have this, you know, fearsome reputation. But they're really kind of a haphazard, loosely knit network. They're grouped under this umbrella, the MS-13, but they're linked, they're more closely connected to what are called cliques, or their sort of 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 where it comes from. And the fascination around them comes from just mostly, I would say, this gruesome way

• 4:04Speaker 00

  in which they go after their rivals or perceived rivals. Do they have a leader? They have leaders. Each of the cliques that I mentioned has a leader. Underneath, or I should say above the cliques, they have what are called programs. And those group a number of cliques. And there are probably in the range of thirty-five or forty programs. And this is in a 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, kind of geographically speaking.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  So you have a board of directors, or what they call a mesa, or a table, of directors in L.A. You have another one, which is probably the most powerful one, in El Salvador. It's known as the Rampla. They call it the Rampla Historica, which means, quite literally, the translation would be "historical wheel." Rampla is wheel. It goes back to their origins in L.A., 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 Rampla, right? Let's get the Rampla, right? So they take that, and it's transformed in sort of, it's referred to as the wheel,

• 5:31Speaker 00

  or the leadership circle. And Historica is "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-

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  There's no El Chapo, there's no-

• 5:57Speaker 00

  No. There's no one single leader moving these guys around like chess pieces. You know, very common misperception about what the gang is. It's very loosely knit network. And they are mostly loyal to their cliques and their clique leaders. In particular, the person who administered, they're beating in. So they have rituals to enter into the gang. And one of them is this sort of beat-in ceremony that lasts, well, they say thirteen seconds, but that's a long thirteen 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.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  So it's a, it's, it's a very, very sort of difficult thing again to wrap our hands around.

• 6:49Chris Williamson?

  What's it got to do with the Mexican mafia? There's affiliations there as well, isn't there?

• 6:54Speaker 00

  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

• 7:35Speaker 00

  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. 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 an 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,

• 8:16Speaker 00

  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 sureños. So they're part of this Mexican mafia umbrella group, which gives the Mexican mafia this sort of control and leverage over the comings 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, sort of a member of the Mexican mafia. It's anywhere between 100 and 130 members.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  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. So they're able to, in essence, sort of extend their criminal networks via these gangs like the MS-13.

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  I suppose if you're in jail and the choices between striking out on your own or finding a partnership with your people. If the Mexican mafia 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 you, the 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?

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Not currently. It has gone down considerably since your murder a minute statistic probably came out. It was, 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, 100, 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

• 10:32Speaker 00

  the current government and mostly, in this case, because the MS-13 isn't the only gang there, but mostly the MS-13 because it is the most powerful gang. In El Salvador. And what does this pact entail? 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, disappearances, forced disappearances, by the way, are going way up.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  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 matters. You know, it's probably not a fair proxy, but that's the proxy we use. So, that goes down, great. So, you know, foreign direct investment and all the other things that come along, you know, 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.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  And I work, I should say, I work for Insight Crime, which is a think tank that covers these matters. You know, it includes this sort of, you know, maybe quid pro quos 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. You know, visitation rights for family members, as you know, that is super important.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  You know, and then also their ability to control the administration of special assistance, and 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 arguably super important thing, especially from the political

• 12:52Speaker 00

  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? You know, 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.

• 13:33Chris Williamson?

  Wow. I can't believe that what they gave the government was, we'll make the bodies disappear. 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, yeah, 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 their goal?

• 14:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, 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, you know, 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,

• 14:53Speaker 00

  or they have 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. In that we put the criminal economy in front, and we say, this is what drives them. No, 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

• 15:34Speaker 00

  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, you know, six different countries. And we're talking about, you know, 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.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  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 antisocial 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,

• 17:01Speaker 00

  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 is, it's, it's very hard for us to wrap our heads around this because, and 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.

• 17:36Chris Williamson?

  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, are they running rackets like the New York mafia? Are they, are they in the concrete game? Are they in the drug game? Are they in the people trafficking game? That's the interesting thing about MS-13. I think you call them this, this hand to mouth organization that, for want 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.

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  I don't know how I feel about that. I wonder whether it, 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, the purpose feels more human, but that also makes the killing and the violence seem more wanton. Does that make sense?

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And these are the... That's sort of a central paradox in all this. You really hit a central paradox with the MS-13 is that they are victims in a certain way and they are victimizers, you know, they embody both of these things constantly.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  We can pick out the victim's 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.

• 19:36Chris Williamson?

  It's almost purposeless, isn't it?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  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 mind.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  Cohesion, binding them together as a group, shed sacrifice.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  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. And, you know, there are some cases of sophisticated activities, you know, 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,

• 20:30Speaker 00

  I want to say 100 tons of marijuana. That was the most, not 100 tons, sorry, 100 pounds of marijuana.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  You know, this is like a class.

• 20:39Chris Williamson?

  Fairly low level stuff when you're thinking about the grand scheme of cartels. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  It's not a cartel. Exactly. It's just not, they just don't get there. And when the guys who do start to get there, what they do is they liaise with the guys like the Mexican mafia. They start to interact with them.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  They are trying their best to.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Get accepted into the Mexican mafia, the six or seven cases that at Inside Crime that we've chronicled over the years that illustrate these international drug trafficking schemes, you know, commandeered by leaders of the MS-13, they're almost invariably connecting with and working with the Mexican mafia, not with their own gang.

• 21:29Chris Williamson?

  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, 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?

• 21:55Speaker 00

  I mean, there, 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 things that are part and parcel of the gang. This is, this is kind of one of them, you know, like 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

• 22:35Speaker 00

  like that to me, has 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.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. A little bit of artistic license, like you might use to embellish the features of a product. The features of their product are their scariness and their viciousness.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  And it helps them. 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, with these kind of, you know, these little teeny myths that kind of percolate about, about these organizations. You know, I think just one more thing, going back to the, the social aspect that I think we have to keep in mind. Is that it 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. Um, and you are going to thus remove their sort of core element of being.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  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 moved their operations uh to El Salvador and other places in Central America.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  I suppose they're kind of like Bitcoin. They're such a decentralized structure. They don't have one single operator. Uh structurally in terms of the way that the hierarchy is 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. Then this bus driver is 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.

• 24:52Chris Williamson?

  Income stream that can be chopped away. When it comes to who they're recruiting, who, where are they getting their members? Who are they recruiting?

• 25:01Speaker 00

  I I think that they're they're recruiting where um where gangs recruit, you know, youth in the neighborhood. At the schools, playing soccer.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  So you're talking like children?

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. They are um.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  You know, so 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 my own self, to keep myself safe, is to join them or to collaborate with them in some, in some respect. Or maybe to think that I'll keep my, myself, maybe not safe, but maybe my brother's safe, or my sister and my family and all the rest, you know. So I think there's a lot of different motivations that go into this. What, what I hear, what I've heard over the years

• 26:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  And how so many of these guys don't want to be in their house. Um, 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. Um, and it could be, you know, physical violence, or it could be sexual violence. So.

• 27:36Chris Williamson?

  It's a literal second family then, a literal surrogate family.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And again, going back to this social, this social aspect, it is definitely their, their surrogate family. Uh, 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. Uh, in, in that, in that core element, that family allows them to speak their own language. And in, 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 boss.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  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, it, we think of, we don't necessarily think of these things, but I think they play a big role in, in drawing these, these groups of people together into this, into this community.

• 28:44Chris Williamson?

  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 going to get in. And then there's some other steps. How does it work?

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Quick parentheses would be that women are no longer allowed into the MS-13. Sometime in the early 2000s, they made a kind of collective decision.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  Bloody patriarchy, bloody, bloody patriarchy again.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  It is the bloody patriarchy. And, uh, you know, yes, there were very, as far as, uh, female initiates, you know, that I, and I, I spoke to, um, a few of them. One of them is, is chronicled in my book. There is this sort of, you know, there's kind of two avenues. You're either sexting where you have to have sex with multiple members of the, of the gang, the clique in this case. Or you're beaten in. So, you know, the ones that I spoke to both said that they they had been beaten into the the gang because if you're sexted in, then you're really never a member of the gang. Um, anyway, but in terms of the the way in which you reach that that stage, because there's really a long

• 29:51Speaker 00

  process, or there can be a long process before you reach the initiation stage where you're beaten in. And that that differs, uh, depending upon geography. Um, 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 a couple of years. Um, and that included sort of, you know, starting you out, doing very basic services, you know, uh, keeping an eye out, uh, those sorts of things, maybe starting to messenger um, things back and forth. You know, maybe you're involved then into, you know, you can see kind of it's sort of escalating. Maybe you're involved in sort of collecting, uh, for the, you know, the money from extortion.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  You know, those sorts of things, and it steadily escalates to the point where you're you're at a certain point required to, or at least asked to participate in a murder or two. Um, you know, 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. Um, 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 fi- far higher costs to being a violent gang

• 31:19Speaker 00

  than being a violent gang in a space like El Salvador. So there are kind of differing ways in, but it's sort of this sort of, uh, rising scale of of activities till you reach the point where, okay, now you're going to be a member. They'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.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Just this illustration of group cohesion, just this illustration of we are the strongest. Um, 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 non-stop. They're all tattooed up. I mean, you know, and they're, and they're really bad at what they do. And there's so many possible leaks of information, you know, you just,

• 32:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe. What about leaving? How hard is it to leave?

• 32:52Speaker 00

  I think, I think again, it varies from place to place. I think it's much harder to leave in spaces like, like El Salvador. Um, it's a smaller space. Uh, the circles are smaller. Everybody knows each other. And, you know, it is, it's, it's difficult to leave, um, in then that, 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. Um, and even if they, um, sort of go through the process and there is a process whereby you are basically supposed to ask for permission.

• 33:32Chris Williamson?

  How does that go?

• 33:33Speaker 00

  You have permission. So you, 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, you're given sort of permission and you be, you become basically what they call a, a calmao, you know, you're calmed. You're retired. Now, here's the thing, you can be called 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 gonna 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

• 34:18Speaker 00

  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. And then the third way is you run out, you run away. That's the third way. You get out, you 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.

• 34:45Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 34:59Speaker 00

  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,

• 35:22Speaker 00

  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 are obviously many, many evangelical churches and strains. They have this acceptable avenue of, of, of escape. Again, as long as you dedicate and you illustrate that you are committed to that, you know, 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.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  So they have this relation, this, this, this reverence for that, that they don't have for the Catholic Church, and they allow that.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  And yeah, we know, again, just going back just quickly about the similarities. You know, 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.

• 37:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm not surprised that they're not getting much crime done or much money made. They're too busy. They're constantly at meetings or in church singing hymns and stuff. I'd have, 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?

• 37:25Speaker 00

  So he goes to the United States, running from the gang.

• 37:30Chris Williamson?

  He wanted to, 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 ran.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Yes. So he, he's escaping, he escapes one attempt on his life by the gang. And then the, and the police nearly kill him as well. So 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, 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 Rampla Historica, right?

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Which is basically the leadership council is calling him up. So he runs and his family comes in, you know, kind of behind him. And his family hands, they hand themselves over to the United States authorities at the, at the Texas border. He doesn't have that option. Um, 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.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  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, deport somebody back to, would be so dangerous, um, 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

• 39:49Speaker 00

  the prison system, for example, um, or torture him. Right, is there a greater than 50% chance that that's going to happen? That's what the judge is evaluating. So that's why the part about him, you know, escaping, narrowly escaping death to the hands of the police is so fundamental. Um, and in that case, if the judge finds that, he is obliged, because the United States is a, 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,

• 40:26Speaker 00

  You know, and he is a gang member too, which obviously this is the, this is the tension. You know, 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, and say, you know, hey, I'm here, I'm living here, you know, 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

• 41:10Speaker 00

  the rest of their lives, you know, cat relief and stay, and stay the rest of their lives in the United States. So it could happen with Norman as well.

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  That's terrifying. Not only do your enemies hate you, but your old friends hate you and they want to 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 going to kill you. It's, um, 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?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's important to consider that when the gangs, um, 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, uh, in huge numbers. And that's what establishes the base for which, uh, 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 a late 1990s, early 2000s, they are at the, they are at the disadvantage.

• 42:30Speaker 00

  They, they are smaller in number than some of their rivals, including the rival gang, the 18th Street, but also the, the most powerful, uh, criminal prison gangs at the time.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  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. So Norman gets ushered into a cell, and in this cell, he is, he's in front of another

• 43:27Speaker 00

  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, this is his, this is his initiation into the jail. Of course, this is something that is, you know, a, 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

• 44:06Speaker 00

  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, you know, rapes inside of those prisons, but is extorting them, is extorting their family members, is assaulting their, their family members, including sometimes sexual assault, you know, is beating them openly, you know, with the guard's support, because, you know, there are these kind of informal pacts between guards and, you know, you know, strong prison gangs, you know, in a lot of ways, in a, in a very perverse way, it kind of makes the

• 44:46Speaker 00

  prison guard's job easier if there is a, you know, one sort of master. Self-enforcement. 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.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  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, um, you know, the fighting begins. And then the fighting gets so bad that the government makes a strategic decision to begin to, um, 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.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  So you can see the logic behind it, you know, it's an effort to slow the violence, but the, the, the, the sort of ripple effects thereafter, they didn't foresee.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  It's so, you're damned if you do and 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, um, in an MS-13 run jail. Pretty terrible conditions, they're talking about how all of their homies have all got diarrhea and stomach upsets.

• 46:31Chris Williamson?

  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, right, okay, now we're going to 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.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, I, I haven't, I have never been in an MS-13 controlled jail, um, in El Salvador. But I went into an 18th Street one and it was the exact same experience. They, the guards, um, open the door and then close the door behind you. And then that's the space you're in.

• 47:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, it's a, it is, it is a strange, strange feeling. And they're, they're living in, in, I mean, horrible conditions.

• 47:29Chris Williamson?

  Squalor.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, it's squalor. Um, you know, one hammock above the other and, you know, sleeping over the, the toilet and, uh, yeah, it's not, not fun either. So, no, the, the prison, the prison question is, um, I think, you know, a sort of forgotten element of this. And, you know, going back to the Mexican mafia, even their operational style in the U.S. and, and many other prison gangs that are operating in the U.S. Um, we just, we just think that we can, you know, 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.

• 48:15Chris Williamson?

  What were the authorities in El Salvador trying to do to crack down on this? Because it's gonna just become a war in the streets if you send the cops in. I've seen videos, I think it might've been Ross Kemp or 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 they were, they were jailing people for just having affiliation tattoos and, and clothing and colors of clothing at one point. It, it seems like a mess.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of the, um, legislation around dealing with gangs, um, really emerged in California in the 1980s when they were dealing with this, um, 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, 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, you know, something you wouldn't necessarily get in

• 49:42Speaker 00

  a sort of special unit these days. So you had that, and they, you know, they would do very similar style operations, very much kick the door down, you know, flashy type of things and, and, you know, sort of bring them all in jail. But we know what happened to them in jail. They became part of the sureños and part of a larger network, were deported back down, et cetera, et cetera. 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.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  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, you know, there were a couple of four-year-olds that were on the database, you know, a gang database. So, you know, 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 crime.

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  An organized crime.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  If you are going to like start, if, 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 haven't, 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 forty, out of fifty states, plus DC, there were, you know, plus the District of Columbia, there were forty-four different definitions of gang, plus DC's definition of gang. So forty-five out of fifty-one of these jurisdictions had different definitions of what a gang was.

• 51:54Speaker 00

  So where are we going with all this? It eventually, not only is it, 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, in many regards, much worse problems. And why are we surprised? I mean, it just, for me, it's kind of baffling how we turn away from what, what the, the story tells us,

• 52:37Speaker 00

  what the data tells us, you know, what we can prove empirically about what works, and maybe more importantly, what definitely does not work. So, I mean, this is, 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 forty 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.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  I put Stephen Dudley in charge. I say, right, you've got the resources at your disposal, what do you do?

• 53:18Speaker 00

  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 have to expand that.

• 53:29Chris Williamson?

  You're already talking like a politician.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I've already backtracked. Exactly. I've already like swallowed all of what I just said five minutes ago. Now, the middle, the middle section of this is what, what do we do like, you know, now for the people who could be potential, potentially brought into these organizations, these communities? I think we need to work more on, you know, creating alternative communities, right? We need to create competing communities, things that can compete with the, 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, you know, their interests with other people's interests and, you know,

• 54:14Speaker 00

  like-minded interests and maybe that includes nationality and ethnicity and race and all that other stuff. I think we need to think about all these things. And 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 earlier, why is, 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 the very, very long term, we need to think about how you deal with violence. You know, particularly violence in the home.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  So we don't put near enough resources towards early family intervention. And I'm talking about dealing with, you know, families that have a lot of situations of abuse. You know, 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, this is something we need to consider when we're considering, you know, long term, how are we changing the way people sort of approach or interact with other human beings? So I think there's a lot of different things. There's sort of immediate

• 55:42Speaker 00

  term is, you know, certainly we have to deal with the problems that, that gangs pose, and much of those problems are related to law enforcement. We have to deal with the issues in terms of, you know, the way in which they've created this very attractive and obviously, you know, antisocial but very much attractive community. And we have to deal with the, the problems, you know, the sort of core root problems that happen inside the home, you know, that very often lead people to, to join those spaces.

• 56:14Chris Williamson?

  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, he's a big podcaster in 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 crackdown on criminals, you think, what does that even mean? Like, it's so long. It's, this isn't a task that even the president

• 56:56Chris Williamson?

  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. 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, the gangs basically fettling the figures. What do you think we'll see over the next decade or so from MS 13?

• 57:22Speaker 00

  I fear a little bit the next decade in one respect, in that I do see the beginnings of a kind of an evolution of the MS-13 in a way that I hadn't seen in the past.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  This is more sophisticated criminal enterprise.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  They're becoming more sophisticated.

• 57:42Chris Williamson?

  Leveling up.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  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 their understanding of how to deal with excess resources, put those resources to work, you know, get involved in other types of economic activities, so more legitimate businesses, money laundering activities, which shows you a sort of an element of how much they're accumulating as well. And also on a political level, they're understanding what their, where their leverage points are

• 58:23Speaker 00

  and how to pull those levers. I mean, that's, 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, you know, create the effective communications channels and, you know, send the messages that they want and get what they want. So anyway, we're seeing that. So I fear it 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

• 59:04Speaker 00

  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, is they become sophisticated and they over time, pieces of them or their sort of generations below them become legitimate, you know, and this is how it works. Because there are not these sort of traditional avenues of, of moving up the social ladder.

• 59:35Speaker 00

  How else do we expect them to, you know, 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. You know, it's kind of, 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, you know.

• 1:00:08Speaker 00

  You know, I don't think, maybe, maybe parts of Honduras, but, you know, just in El Salvador. And if not in MS-13, you know, cliques. I like to talk about gangs within a gang. The gang is so big, these cliques are so big. Some of these cliques have thousands of members themselves, and they're operational on an international scale. And because my loyalty is very often with my clique, you know, these cliques could evolve into criminal organizations in and of themselves, much more sophisticated. So that is, 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.

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  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 in their way. I mean, maybe we'll hasten their arrival to legitimate society. We'll lower the amount of carnage, extortion, murders, you know, forced recruitment, rape, everything else that is related to, you know, the activities of this gang, and they are numerous, numerous.

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  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. You know, greater presence in more countries now. What are we doing? You know, 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.

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  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 um, do you know what it is? I actually think it's a, I'm not sure whether it's true and I'm glad I'm not in the position to have to make the call. But it, there's part of me that does make, 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,

• 1:02:41Chris Williamson?

  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're, 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. The, 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, this story as well that I heard last year.

• 1:03:25Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember if it was in Brazil or Venezuela or somewhere else.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  Someone was trying to enact, or someone refused to enact a 6pm 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 go and 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,

• 1:04:16Chris Williamson?

  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 Godin's The Dip? You know, that kind of, the area where you have real lack of capacity to do stuff. It feels like MS-13's 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. 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.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's, I guess, kind of, how do we, how do we change the equation? 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, most we're talking about like, kids from, you know, kids, I say, young adults, 18 to 25, right? That's your, 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, it's so hard to say where, you know, where to put

• 1:05:42Speaker 00

  the, the emphasis. But I think in your, in your description of it, what I, what I think about is, how do we change the, 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 won't even, it doesn't even mean that I'm going to, you know, 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. Um, you know, and of course, that is like the lowest bar, I mean, you know.

• 1:06:24Chris Williamson?

  Stop chopping people up. Stop chopping people up. That's the first thing we wanted to have happen.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Exactly. Stop making that be your, a rewarding experience, you know? Why is that, why is that a rewarding experience? You know? And part of that, of course, you know, going back, that part of that is a law enforcement equation, but part of that is sort of shifting the direction of where, where they could be putting their energies. It's a, it's a incredibly difficult question to, to answer in the, in the whole, right? But, but I think that there's, there's so many resources that are already in place that can answer it on the micro level. Um, that I think a lot of it is just trying to sort of figure out where to harness the existing resources that are already at play. I don't

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  think we need any extra resources in that regard. You know, I don't know. It's a, you know, we're trying to, we're trying to solve the gang problem here in a, in an hour-long podcast. It's a tough one.

• 1:07:25Chris Williamson?

  Rightly so. If there are two men on this planet to do it, Stephen, it's me and you. Stephen Dudley, ladies and gentlemen, people want to check out more of your stuff, where should they go?

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  You can go to stevendudley.com or you can go to insightcrime.org. That's the organization that I co-direct. Um, and we cover organized crime in the Americas. So have a look.

• 1:07:49Chris Williamson?

  Thank you very much, man. I appreciate your time. MS13, The Making of America's Most Notorious Gang will be linked in the show notes below as well. Cheers, man.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  Thank you very much, Chris, for having me.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:08:18Speaker 00

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:08:25Speaker 00

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle up parent.