This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha

by Samuel Logan

  The threat assessment was only the beginning of processing anyone into witness protection. A U.S. attorney must also sponsor the witness, providing in detail the reasons why an individual should be allowed into the program. This was where Walutes’s participation was crucial. The final decision rested solely with the attorney general, a considerable bottleneck in the process, given the busy schedule of the nation’s top lawyer.

  Brenda and Greg met Alexander and Walutes five days after the initial meeting in the Massey Building. Walutes knew of Brenda through his FBI connections and from local police officers. All had vouched for her. At the meeting, Walutes told Greg that he was willing to sponsor Brenda’s entrance into witness protection. He clarified his intention by stating that her entrance was not conditional upon her testimony against Denis Rivera in the upcoming Joaquin Diaz murder trial.

  She could still be helpful. Like the icing on the cake, Brenda could take the stand and place the facts of his prosecution against Denis in a broader context. Her knowledge of the gang grounded the confessions of some of the gang members who had decided to become federal witnesses in exchange for a reduced sentence, Walutes explained. Brenda’s testimony could also establish the fact that Denis was aware of his own guilt. Even the mention of taking the stand against Denis made Brenda nervous. Greg picked up on the subtle change in her attitude during the meeting, and made a mental note to revisit the issue with Brenda in private. This was a serious meeting, even Brenda wasn’t kidding around. It wasn’t the time or place to explore Brenda’s feelings about testifying against her boyfriend.

  Walutes wanted to prosecute Denis and Fiel, the clique leader who had backed him on his decision to kill Joaquin. The U.S. attorney said that as the government moved forward with other MS prosecutions, Brenda could also be very helpful. Federal prosecutors in northern Virginia believed the best way to dismantle the Mara Salvatrucha was by treating the street gang like an organized criminal group.

  Walutes was thinking of the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. Since its inception, it had been used successfully to break apart organized criminal families like the Cosa Nostra in New York, the Hells Angels, and others. For a RICO charge, two overt criminal acts needed to be connected to a criminal organization. Homicide, a drug enterprise, or rape all qualified. Proving the overt acts was easy. Proving the actors were part of a criminal enterprise that conspired to commit those acts was much harder. As a legal tool, RICO was essential for dismantling organized crime because it allowed prosecutors to focus on the criminal organization, not necessarily the crimes committed by individuals within the organization. In any RICO case against the MS, Brenda could provide the details that would help the prosecution establish the MS-13 as a criminal enterprise that conspired to commit federal crimes.

  Before the end of the meeting, Walutes made it clear to Greg that Brenda’s age presented a complication. Witness protection normally only accepted adults. Kids did enter the program, but an adult, usually a parent, always accompanied them. Unaccompanied minors in witness protection were an entirely new concept, and Brenda was still sixteen. Walutes and Greg agreed she would have to be emancipated, or legally declared an adult, before they could pass her witness protection application to the attorney general’s office.

  Greg felt determined after the meeting. He finally had a goal and the path was clear. He had to have Brenda emancipated, and then he could pass her over to the U.S. Marshals, who ran witness protection and had a well-known reputation for never having lost a person under their care. If accepted, Brenda would be the first minor allowed into witness protection.

  Before he could focus on Brenda’s emancipation process, Greg had to first finish his business with Detective Oseguera. Since the final weeks of summer, Greg had been in touch with Oseguera, and had butted heads consistently with the Dallas County prosecutor, who insisted that Brenda be extradited to Texas to answer questions about the night Javier Calzada died. Greg felt no pressure. He knew the legal fiction he signed with Porter to keep Brenda in Fairfax County would hold.

  And it did. The Dallas County prosecutor finally agreed to give Brenda immunity in exchange for a signed statement. With his case nearly completed, Detective Oseguera traveled with Sergeant Patton to Virginia only days after her first meeting with Walutes.

  Greg invited Alexander to the Massey Building, where they arranged to meet with Oseguera and Sergeant Patton. The two listened as Oseguera asked Brenda questions. Patton took notes. Brenda provided a detailed account of the night Javier Calzada was murdered and identified from a group of photos Little Zico, Veto, and the other three men who were all at the top of Oseguera’s suspect list. Unlike the other two times she had met with Oseguera, Brenda was forthcoming with the information and was willing to sign a four-page statement.

  After four hours of question and answer, she corroborated nearly everything Oseguera had learned prior to the interview. He now had enough information to take to the Dallas County prosecutor. With Brenda as a witness for the prosecution, Oseguera was confident his case was all but closed. At the end of the interview, Brenda confirmed that one of the men present when Veto shot Javier had taken Javier’s shoes. She also said it was possible Veto had worn Javier’s white Adidas shoes. That statement stuck in Oseguera’s mind like a sliver of splintered wood. He had to get back to the Dallas County Jail to look for those shoes.

  Patton walked out of the meeting slowly shaking his head, thinking Brenda knew too much for her own good. He knew what her gang had done in Grand Prairie, and from what he’d learned, MS-13 had a much stronger presence in Virginia. Brenda could be killed if she wasn’t careful, but Patton kept his thoughts to himself. They had gotten what they’d come for. With the taste of success in their mouths, Oseguera and Patton finished the meeting, then spent the evening at a baseball game in Baltimore—Baltimore Orioles versus the Texas Rangers. They might as well make use of the one night they had on the East Coast before boarding a plane for Texas at BWI Airport in the morning.

  Back in Texas, Oseguera wasted no time driving to the Dallas County Jail, where he requested to see the personal effects of Veto and the four men arrested with him. He carefully searched through the belongings until he found the shoes he was looking for. It was a moment of clarity when Oseguera held in his hands the evidence he thought would finally close his case. It had been nine months since he took on the Calzada murder investigation, and in this moment he could see the end.

  Oseguera immediately wrote up a request to take a DNA sample from Veto and the other four men. Within hours his request was approved and a lab technician took mouth swabs that were submitted to the Dallas County DNA lab along with the shoes. The results showed that three separate strands of DNA removed from dried sweat in the shoes matched the DNA of Javier Calzada, Veto, and the inmate who had been wearing Javier’s shoes when he was arrested.

  As he suspected, the DNA match was Oseguera’s strongest evidence against Veto and at least one of his accomplices. There were also soil samples, fingerprints, and Brenda’s affidavit. Within weeks of having interviewed Brenda a third time, Oseguera was prepared to make his case, largely due to her tip-off about the shoes.

  The day after Brenda spoke with Oseguera, she agreed to speak off the record with another detective from the Dallas area. The two-day meeting stretched across Saturday and Sunday. It was held in the same conference room in the Massey Building. During the marathon interview, one with little more than an overnight break to sleep, Brenda met the detective’s long list of questions head-on. There were some questions she couldn’t answer, but the information she did have was detailed, as usual. Brenda talked about how a group of MS set out to rob a bank a couple of states over from Texas. They had left Dallas in a borrowed car and parked it in Arkansas. Then they stole a car, drove to another state, and robbed a bank. They stole another car before driving back to Arkansas, where they ditched it and got in the borrowed car before heading back to Dallas.

  Brenda also descri
bed how her homies in Texas had stolen baby formula to sell it to undocumented immigrants. The baby formula was parceled out into smaller portions, affordable for their black market customers.

  On Sunday afternoon, after three long days of interviews, Brenda finally described a murder that had haunted her for months. One night in Dallas, shortly before Calzada’s murder, Brenda was with Veto and other MS members when there was a shoot-out between the MS and a rival gang. One of the rival gang members was shot but not killed. Not wanting to waste bullets, the MS members had decided to use a car to finish him off. Brenda and the others sat in the car as they repeatedly ran over the wounded chavala until he quit screaming.

  The detective told Brenda the kid was still alive. Her eyes widened. She didn’t believe it. The detective then produced a photo of the kid. Brenda took in a deep breath when she looked at the photo, and then sharply turned her head away. The sight affected her deeply. What was she thinking at the time? How crazy had she been? Greg was shocked that anyone would do such a thing. For him, it was another moment when he looked directly at the evil things some members of the MS-13 did. The kid’s face was a mess. He was barely recognizable. It was a disturbing conclusion to an exhausting three-day ordeal with the detectives from Texas. On the way back to the detention center, Greg detected that Brenda was emotionally spent, but he listed the weekend as a major victory for her. Brenda probably wasn’t thinking about it at that moment, but she was clean and free from the Texas murder that had been haunting her for so many months. That night, Brenda didn’t sleep well. The sight of that boy’s face had triggered a long list of memories she thought she had successfully forgotten.

  CHAPTER 27

  The most remarkable interview Brenda gave occurred days later in one of the same conference rooms where she and Greg had had so many of her previous interviews. The room was long and narrow with a blackboard on one of the end walls. On it she had once drawn a diagram of the MS organizational structure in Virginia, Texas, and across the nation. There was a conference table in the middle surrounded by surprisingly comfortable chairs, complete with padded armrests, wheels, and adjustable hydraulics. The walls were covered with a tightly woven upholstery that looked like processed straw. The room could have been in an elementary school, except for the Spartan décor.

  Brenda sat cross-legged at the front of the room, in a chair between an open door and a white dry-erase marker board. She fiddled with one of the black markers in her hand. A brown hair-band was on her right arm, comfortably resting just below where she had the name VETO tattooed on her wrist. Her curly brown hair was tucked behind her ears and flowed halfway down her chest. Brenda was dressed in a loose-fitting red shirt and blue sweatpants. She looked like a teenage kid ready for an afternoon at the park or a stroll in the mall, not a taped interview where she would talk about one of the nation’s most dangerous gangs.

  Brenda was a little nervous seated in front of the top street gang detectives for miles around, including two federal agents. Just after Porter pressed the record button on the video camera, Brenda giggled. It was a way for her to break the tension in the room with all these serious adults.

  “What do you want me to say?” she asked, flashing her trademark smile at Porter and twirling the marker between two fingers.

  “Tell them…tell them what gang you’re with,” he began with a deadpan voice, all business but calm, not pushy.

  Nervous, Brenda looked at the red blinking light of the video camera, then directly at the lens.

  “MS-13,” Brenda replied, matter-of-factly. Her Spanish accent contrasted sharply with Porter’s deep southern drawl.

  “What clique?” Porter asked, moving forward with the most basic questions. These were the answers she was most comfortable giving.

  “Normandie Locos Salvatrucha—NLS. The first clique in MS started way back in the day in El Salvador,” Brenda said with some pride. She bounced in her seat when she said it, projecting her smile across the room.

  “How long have you been with MS?” Porter asked. It was a controversial question.

  Brenda looked up at the ceiling and sighed before answering. “I’ve been affiliated since I was eleven and in the gang since I was thirteen.” She had told that lie so many times, she was beginning to believe it was true. It was one of the lies she most repeated. Brenda was never affiliated with the MS before she met Veto in Texas. It was a truth she kept close—something she even kept from Greg. On film, in front of her lawyer and the entourage of detectives, it was the last place Brenda would tell them she had only been a member for less than a year before she was arrested that summer.

  “And how did you get into the gang?” Porter asked, staying on familiar ground with Brenda.

  “I got jumped in to the gang, and then I got jumped in to another clique, and then got jumped out and got re-jumped in to MS Normandie clique,” Brenda said. It was a second lie, backing up the first. Though Brenda’s lies were believable in the don’t-ask-questions world of the MS, her fabrications were harder to pull off in front of experienced investigators. She could keep the false information straight but had a poor delivery in front of the cops. Fortunately her smile often came to the rescue. Yet there was some truth to her second answer. Any MS member who wanted to leave one clique to join another had to be jumped out of a clique with a thirteen-second beating before being jumped in to the next clique with another thirteen-second beating.

  “Can you…ah…do the MS hand signs? Can you spell out, can you show us the MS hand signs?” Porter jumbled out the sentence, referring to stacking, a practice among street gang members that was something akin to sign language, using both hands to spell out words in a rapid succession of finger twists, curves, and seemingly difficult feats of pinky and ring finger dexterity. Brenda had stacked for the Grand Prairie detective, Rick Oseguera, when he had first interviewed her. She had also viewed some police surveillance tapes with Greg and Porter when MS members in the video stacked in front of the camera. Brenda could read their hand signs like a book. It was a complicated and fascinating method of communication that Brenda had perfected.

  She knew the hand signs, and after placing the dry-erase marker in her lap, she readily showed the camera and the men present how to spell out the name of her gang, moving forward letter by letter beginning with the Spanish word La and moving on to Mara, then Salvatrucha. She made the hand symbol of each letter just as fast as she was talking.

  “The L is for loco. The A is for arsonist. The M is for maldito. The A for arsonist. The R for robo, which in English is translated to robbery. The A for arsonist. The S for Salvatrucha. The A for arsonist. The L for loco. The V for violar. That means rape. The A for arsonist, again. The T for…God, I forgot.”

  “Trece,” Porter suggested, thinking the T in Salvatrucha could mean trece, the Spanish word for the number 13.

  “Trece,” Brenda agreed, smiling at Porter for the help.

  She continued. “The R for robo. The U for united. The C for controlador—controlling. The H for Home Beat, Homeboys. And the A for arsonist. And the 13. That’s sureños. We’re from the south side. That’s why we carry the 13; we just adopted the 13. There’s also sayings in MS that it comes from the Bible. I really don’t know what passage or anything, but in MS, they affiliate themselves with the Bible a lot.” Brenda was starting to open up. Her extroverted nature was beginning to shake loose the grip her nerves had on her tongue. Soon, Porter thought, Brenda might tell the men in the room information they had never heard about the Mara Salvatrucha.

  “There’s a lot of different stacking and when you’re taught how to stack people do it differently. People stack their cliques, the gang. Like I’m spelling out my whole clique,” Brenda said, using her hands in fast motion to spell out Normandie Locos Salvatrucha. Each letter required a specific hand pose. She shifted her weight in her chair to accommodate inverting her arms to place her elbows above her shoulders or quickly alternate the position of her wrists. Brenda stacked equally well with both h
ands.

  “Everyone’s taught how to do it differently, but the more significant ones are always with the M and the S and the 13,” Brenda explained, making an intricate sign for M before positioning her pointer finger under her middle finger and curving her thumb to make an S. She crossed her ring finger and thumb and spread her other three fingers apart to make an X and a 3 for the number 13. She stuck out her tongue a little to help concentrate. Her fingers were chubby and short, not ideal for stacking. But she never used her left hand to put errant right-hand fingers in the correct position. Her fingering was smooth and precise.

  “Who teaches you to stack?” Porter asked.

  “When you get jumped in your clique leader teaches you the basics and you learn from how you’re always with your homeboys. They also do the M, this is M,” Brenda said, slightly leaning forward and positioning both elbows above her shoulders to make the effect of an M. “And that’s the S,” she said, curving her arms and placing the fist of her right arm just below the elbow of the top arm, which extended over her head to make a crude S. “That’s the 13—X, 1, 1, 1,” Brenda said. She made a ninety-degree angle with one fist against the inside of her other elbow, alternating fist and elbow, left and right, each time she said “one.”

  Her pride in the Mara Salvatrucha, even after she had been away from the gang for over three months, was clear-cut. Brenda broke into a broad smile. Her confidence swelled. After showing the men some stacking, Brenda composed herself a little. She straightened her hair and picked up the dry-erase pen for more fiddling.

  Porter noticed Brenda was now considerably relaxed. It would soon be time for more interesting questions. The men in the room were all seasoned gang detectives. They had known about stacking for a long time, but were also patient. They all had managed informants in the past and were content to let Porter run the show. But then Greg stepped in.