by Iain Overton
Like the best propaganda, the world of the assassin does not easily show its true face. But glimpses of it fascinate and endlessly inform the subject of films and dramas, which, in a way, seems ironic when you read that the father of Woody Harrelson, the star of Natural Born Killers, was actually a contract killer. Charles Harrelson was given two life sentences in 1981 for the assassination of district judge John H. Wood, the first murder of an American judge in the twentieth century.40 The killing was carried out with a high-powered rifle in return for $250,000.41
Other shadows emerge from this world, such as the thirteen-year-old hitman working for the Mexican drug cartel. In 2013 Jose Armando Moreno Leos confessed he had participated in at least ten homicides, hired for his skill at shooting a high-calibre weapon. He was freed, because the Mexican constitution prohibits the incarceration of those under fourteen, but a few months later Jose too was found murdered, execution style.42
Or there is the story of infamous Russian hitman Alexander Solonik, better known as Alexander the Great, who confessed to assassinating a string of Moscow underworld figures in the 1990s. He had a unique skill: he could shoot with both hands.43 Or the time when, in 2011, Indian police arrested one of their most notorious contract killers, Jaggu Pehelwan, a man believed to be behind the deaths of over 150 people. He charged, it was claimed, between £12,500 and £32,500 for each kill and had even done a deal agreeing to two dozen murders for £200,000.44 He died as he lived, shot by rival gang members in 2012.45
Even Britain, with its hard gun laws, has had its share of hitmen. Santre Sanchez Gayle was Britain’s youngest, just fifteen when he shot a young mother for £200 in Hackney in London.46 He was ripped off. Researchers found the average cost of a hit in Britain between 1974 and 2013 was just over £15,000. The highest was £100,000, £200 easily the lowest.47
The assassin’s bullet, of course, is used for many reasons. For the assassin, cash has to be their sole motivation. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ is their cinematic shrug as the gunman leads a cowering accountant into a secluded wood with a shovel.
But what happens when the killer’s art is used for a darker purpose – for the pursuit of power?
It was a question that led my focus and research away from the depraved minds of psychotic killers and guns-for-hire towards the more calculated horrors of gangland murderers – the domain of the criminal with a gun.
6. THE CRIMINALS
A surprising video and gangland killings – El Salvador – meeting ‘the Shooter’ and drinking to the Beast – tea with a spook – secret graves and grave secrets – Holland and Ecuador – personal trauma of guns recalled – memories of Papua New Guinea – a gunpoint mugging and hard justice seen
The video was of a New York that no longer exists. Mean streets against a dripping industrial grime. So far removed from today’s Manhattan’s chic and West Village bearded hipster irony, it wasn’t even New York. They called the song ‘Gotham Fucking City’. The three-minute, twenty-second video was the story of Paris Lane’s death – a suicide captured in song. A eulogy in gritty rap by the singers Smoke DZA and Joey Bada$$, with lyrics as hard as the story it was telling.
Life’s a gamble need my own pair of dice this time,
All I ask is for friends without parasitic minds,
But that’s as seldom as Paris city crimes.
The video told how Paris Lane had not killed himself in that New York lift lobby because of depression or demons or other silent assassins, but because of a drugs deal gone wrong. Having read the comments under Paris’s suicide video, I had searched some more and found this rap video. It was not a story I had visualised. Only the ending was familiar. The last frames in the music video showed the image of a young man stood before a closing lift, a gun in his mouth, but this scene was intercut with others: young thugs with guns seeking vengeance, lurking at the tower block’s doorway.
The hooded men were shown in the film being robbed twice. The first time Paris had seized their drugs. The second time he had denied them their chance at dispensing a brutal form of street justice. Perhaps Paris knew, schooled as he was on the city’s sidewalks, that he couldn’t get away with what he had done, so he chose a different road.
The comments below the online video were illuminating. ‘R.I.P. paradise he killed his self before everybody he robbed killed him first,’ someone had written. Underneath it another said: ‘Supposedly he wanted out of a gang and they were going to kill him so the last thing he did was say goodbye to his girl before leaving on his own terms.’
Perhaps it wasn’t a suicide at all. Not in the strictest sense, at least. Rather just the bloody ending of a gangland disagreement. Something that had gone so far south that the only way for Paris to find a way out was to put gunmetal in his mouth.
Truth is sometimes hard to see. It’s even harder when there’s a gun in the way.
I began to search for the people who wrote the comments. They had indurate street names. One emailed a reply but I won’t say who because in the world of street gangs, that can be as good as chiselling a name on a gravestone. He told me Paris was in no mood for suicide.
‘i [sic] can’t tell you who he was in trouble with. Some guys from the hood. I heard his old gang friends tried to get him but nobody talks about this shit.’
I looked at five of those tight words and realised I had been expecting them all along. Some guys from the hood – because you can’t travel into the closed world of the gun without meeting the gangs who run the city’s night streets.
There are an estimated ten million criminal gang members in the world, and it was clear I had to meet some of them.1 To really understand the world of the gun I had to cross over into the criminal badlands.2 The question was: where?
Considering this, my eye had fallen back on Latin America, because one in seven of all homicide victims globally happens to be a young man aged between fifteen and twenty-nine and living in the Americas.3 And in Latin America 30 per cent of all homicides are linked to organised gangs.4
At first, Mexico seemed a good choice. Mexican cartels’ firearms of choice include .50-calibre sniper rifles and a Belgian bulletproof vest-piercing pistol they call the ‘cop-killer’.5 But I had once reported on just how badly the gangs there tortured people, and I feared them. Nothing is worth being skinned alive for.
Then I read how El Salvador had 60,000 gang members in a country with a police force of just 25,000. About 80 per cent of all murders are with firearms; there were over 3,000 gang-related deaths in 2009 alone.6 This worked out at a thousand more gang-related deaths in one year in El Salvador than in the whole of the US, a country fifty times its size. My curiosity was piqued.
I learned that El Salvador has two main gangs. There’s the 18th Street Gang, or the 18. Having originated in California, the 18 had grown to become an international gang with 65,000 members in 120 cities. They are renowned for rituals like having large tattoos of the number 18 inked across their faces, or initiating gang members with a vicious ‘18 seconds’ beating’. Their rivals are the Mara Salvatruchas, the Maras, or the MS-13. They have over 70,000 members worldwide and are heavily involved in black-market gun sales, human trafficking and homicides, especially of law enforcement officers.
On 8 March 2012, the leaders of these two gangs in El Salvador had called a truce to the bitter war they had been fighting. In exchange for peace on the streets, they wanted a promise from the state for an improvement in the living conditions of their gang members in jail. The government, in an unprecedented act, was said to have negotiated with the gangs and come to a deal.7 Whatever the reason, a truce was struck. Almost immediately, homicide rates dropped off a cliff; the usual seventeen killings a day fell to an average of just over five a day.8
It was a laying-down of arms that created an opportunity I felt I could seize. Often gangs can be so caught up in a vortex of their own violence that even talking to them drags you into their chaos, but in El Salvador things seemed to have calmed down enough to get
a glimpse of gang life close up. So it was that I decided to travel there to see what gangs and their guns can really do to a country.
The country was preparing for elections, and the humid streets had taken on a festive air. Banners fell from windows, and vibrant flags in red stars and blue stripes fluttered in the sporadic breeze. The occasional political advertising car drove past, loudhailers promising a better future – at least a better one than this. All the parties were running on the same ticket: security. But political promises had been broken so often in this Central American country it was hard not to shake your head at the cars passing.
I was not here to report on politics, though, at least not directly. I wanted to meet gang members and had asked for the worst my American-Salvadoran fixer could manage. He said he would not disappoint.
He arranged for two to come to my hotel in a crumbling northern district of the languid capital of San Salvador because the alternative was for me to travel to them. He knew I wanted to talk to them about guns and death, and as words quickly transform into actions in these men’s lives, so we met where an illusion of safety could be kept.
They arrived on time. They were both Maras, two of an estimated 25,000 in Salvador. They were in their late twenties, old for some of the gang members here – many died much younger. The taller of the two was called ‘the Shooter’ – he was dressed in a neat black polo shirt, his slim frame and supple hands belying the fact he had killed so many. His friend was quieter, softly spoken; his blue striped top and neatly cut hair made him look like a shopkeeper, not a killer.
We shook hands and sat beside a swimming pool lined with rich lotus flowers, and thumb-sized insects buzzed among their sweet petals. Around us spots of sunlight marked the tiled floor and we pushed ourselves further into the shade and talked in low voices. They ordered strips of beef and corn-brown tacos and drank from sweating glasses of Coca-Cola.
‘When it comes to having to bury the body,’ the Shooter said, pulling apart his meat with a fork, ‘you don’t want a long tomb, so you cut off the head and the arms to bury the corpse. We bury it like an animal, like it’s rubbish. The only reason we bury the corpse is because of the police and the evidence. Otherwise, we’d just leave it to the dogs.’
There was no small talk. Within minutes they were explaining how the gangs here sold crack cocaine, prostituted twelve-year-olds, extorted businesses. They ran brothels where you paid a set fee before you went up with the girl of your choice. When I asked how many of them had spent time in prison, they just laughed.
They carried on eating and, in between mouthfuls, explained how they treated their enemies like animals. They once killed a three-year-old because his father was not at home for the punishment they wanted to dispense. They would kill you for any reason: they’d shoot you if you were gay; they’d kill you just because someone asked them to, without question. And now they insisted that those who wanted to join their gang killed too.
‘Before, when you wanted to enter the MS, you had to be kicked, beaten for thirteen seconds,’ the Shooter said. ‘But now we give you a name, a target and you have to shoot them. We do this to show you have the balls to confront your enemy and to enforce your loyalty to the gang.’
An insect landed on his face, but he did not swipe it away. ‘We give these targets to boys, twelve, thirteen years old. The victim could be anybody, but it is normally an enemy: a guy from the 18 gang. It could be someone we have kidnapped, someone who has stolen money from the gang. A Mara even: a snitch.’
He carried on talking, pausing to scoop rice and beans into his mouth. ‘Last year we had a guy who wanted to be in the gang, and his target was chosen at a nearby school. Next to the school was a police station. In this case the new guy waited for the 18 gang member until his class was over and then, as the target left the class – ‘boom’ – he was hit. We chose it there because the recruit was forced to do the hit in front of the police.’
The killer was fourteen years old.
Like other gang members I had met, the Shooter enjoyed telling me these things, because he took pride in how they killed and he mistook my interest for admiration. I asked what happened if someone didn’t follow through with a killing.
‘If you don’t do the hit, then they’ll kill you, as you violated the code.’ I imagined a thirteen-year-old losing their nerve at the last moment, refusing to pull the trigger. And that being the last good thing they ever did.
‘If someone was in the MS and then told the police about a killing, what would you do?’ I asked. I knew the answer, but sometimes you ask obvious questions to hear what people have to say.
‘It would be a tougher, more brutal death,’ the Shooter said. ‘We’d take the snitch out to a secluded place and tell them that they were going to kill an 18 member. Then we’d hack him to pieces with a machete, not using a gun, because a knife is a harder way to go.’
His voice was low and full of menace. ‘I’d kill a whole family, you know. I’d kill them because if I just kill one and the others grow up, they’d kill you.’
In the still of that space the words sunk in. The sun was charting across the sky and pushing us further into the shaded corner. The air had grown sauna-hot, and the insects had started biting. I was struck by how young the gang members were. Perhaps the gun makes their killing easier – a knife might be too personal, more difficult to do. But a gun? You turn your face, pull the trigger and it’s all over. Guns just made life cheaper.
‘Do you have nightmares?’ I asked.
‘Only at first, after the first kill, I had a few days like that. But now? No. It has just become usual. You just get used to it. You become anxious if you aren’t killing.’
Then, like a shopping list, he told me what guns they used. ‘We have the usual: AK47, M15, .45 – you know. Every type of calibre. We need to be well armed.’
So the police armed themselves against the gangs, and the gangs armed themselves against the police. With such logic, it was no wonder that there were over 225,000 illegal guns in this country.9 And the vast majority were simple, inexpensive weapons – cheap revolvers and semi-automatic pistols made up 78 per cent of the guns seized by the government in 2011.10
‘A few months ago I got a call. Someone had got their hands on an AK47 with a telescopic sight. It cost about $3,000,’ he said. Of all of these weapons, the most coveted was the AR15 semi-automatic. They brought these in from Texas, and they could fetch as much as $5,000 each.
The Shooter’s conversation about guns was measured and cold. Their cost, the way he got hold of them, the things he used them for: he spoke without passion. The gun to him was just a tool. In fact, the only time either showed a spark of life was when they described how, after each killing, they would drink to the Devil.
They splayed out their hands in the signal of the MS, little fingers and thumbs spread out like horns.
‘To the Beast,’ they said, and they finished their drinks.
The middle-aged man did not look like someone who worked for the intelligence services. His swept-back, receding hair, Kitchener moustache, blue jeans and cream short-sleeved shirt gave him the appearance of a used-car salesman. But he was one of the best-informed agents on gangs in Salvador, so I accepted his offer of gritty coffee under the photographs of his fallen wartime comrades that hung upon the grey walls of his dimly lit office. I pulled up close to catch his quiet words.
‘Basically, this country has been overtaken by organised crime,’ he said, our cups delivered by a secretary wearing a tight skirt that caught his gaze, ‘and weapons play an important part in this because they give the gangs power. They get their guns from Honduras and Guatemala – illegally trafficked in. They come in via corrupt border officials.’
He had been in the Special Forces during the war, on the side of the right-wing government. His war was not really over. In his mind, the forces of evil, be they the anarchists of the left or the cartel-backed gangs, threatened his way of life.
He drank the hot co
ffee fast and put down the cup neatly. The main problem, he said, was the guns left over from the civil war. Here, in the 1980s and ’90s the US had flooded the country with countless arms, supplying the El Salvadoran military alone with over 30,000 M16 assault rifles.11 On top of this, there were an estimated 100,000 pistols and rifles kept behind by the left-wing revolutionaries.
You believed him, not because he was likeable but because he was precise. His napkin was neatly folded beside his aligned cup of coffee. His pen and his phone laid out in parallel next to each other. The private habits of a man say a lot about him.
He had asked me not to use his name, and then, as we talked, he grew conspiratorial, and his fingers fluttered to his moustache. Some of the gang’s guns also come from the military, he said. ‘About 60,000 rifles were handed into the military armouries after the war, but even they are not secure. And some soldiers are corrupt, too.’
He began to rattle his pen angrily against the handle of his mug. El Salvador had, he felt, become a country where it was questionable if the state was truly the main power centre. It had become so linked to a web of illegal activities that at times the government itself was the criminal enterprise. ‘The gangs are a violent force to the state, and they should be treated like a national security issue. They respect nothing, they have no codes, discipline. National laws here are not as important in some areas as gang laws,’ he said. ‘The unspoken laws that hold gangs together are harder, more enforced, than the national laws.’
He had a point. Certainly, talking to experts and gang members around the city, I had found that the truce between the gangs was not working – that the number being killed was more than publicly stated. People said the leaders had used the truce to put themselves on an equal footing with the political leadership. The truce had given the gangs legitimacy, even.