This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha

by Samuel Logan

  “What do they say when they do this stacking?” Greg asked. He wanted to make sure the men in the room knew the MS-13 motto.

  “La Big Time Mara Salvatrucha Trece, for mata, controla, viola,” Brenda said, stacking again until she got to the word viola, Spanish for rape. It tripped her up slightly, and she momentarily looked at the ceiling before shifting her weight in the chair.

  The Mara Salvatrucha’s saying, “kill, control, rape,” was more than just words; it was the foundation of gang members’ behavior. Many members took the words to heart, forcing others, like Brenda, to watch. More than anyone else in the room, Greg knew what Brenda had seen and been through with Veto, and he knew how it had affected her. He had risked the whole interview by asking her about those three words—kill, control, rape—but it was important that the men in the room were all on the same page. There were members of the Mara Salvatrucha who meant business and were serious criminals. By showing the men Brenda’s reaction to those three words, he demonstrated in a subtle way that Brenda had been close and personal with some of the gang’s ugliest realities.

  After the awkward pause, Porter pushed forward. “And if MS wants to attack an officer they use hand signs?” he asked. It was time to get into something more interesting and out of what the men in the room considered everyday information about the gang.

  “For attacks I guess officers and other gang members, it’s very significant, they take their shirts off, they always go like that,” Brenda said, slightly lifting the horizontal stitching of her shirt at points on the top of her shoulders, “signifying that they’re going to get into battle. They’ll do this when they’re going to shoot,” Brenda said, rubbing her stomach side to side with her right hand. “It’s different, everyone where MS is located they use different signs but these are the ones that everyone usually always knows.”

  “Okay,” Porter said. He pushed on. “How do people get recruited into MS?”

  “The most common recruitment is when you know an MS member. You hang around them, you like what they, what you, see. You like the action, so you’re recruited. There’s other recruitments gangs do. Drug dealers—if they sell drugs and you want them to be MS you’ll keep stalking and bitching at that person until you get them to be MS. In jail they’ll keep beating a person up until that person wants to be MS or allows themselves to be MS.” Brenda didn’t have much experience with recruitment. But she knew what she had heard from Veto and Denis. Recruitment was always on their mind and a constant focus of the gang.

  “How about schools? How does recruitment work in the schools?” Porter asked.

  “Well, teenagers seem to always want to be influenced by gangs, so they kind of recruit themselves into being in the gang.”

  Brenda had joined the gang this way. Most MS members like Brenda were self-selected, just floating into the periphery of the gang until one day a member makes an offer on joining. The offer Brenda received wasn’t just from anyone. It was from a high-level leader, and that made her involvement with the MS intimate and intense from the beginning.

  Brenda continued. “But sometimes MS will look for the people who they think are going to be more vicious, the stronger type.” Brenda was referring to the young soldiers like the guys who were with Veto the night he killed Javier or with Denis the night he killed Joaquin. They were eager to prove themselves.

  “Is MS recruiting in a Fairfax County school?” Porter asked.

  “Yeah. MS is recruiting in every school around here. MS recruits wherever MS stays.”

  “High schools, middle schools, elementary schools?” Greg asked. He wanted her to get more specific.

  “High schools, juvenile detentions, middle schools. I’ve known of MS wanting to get younger kids into getting affiliated so by the time the kid gets to high school the kid’s so into MS that his whole life is MS. That’s how they become the great hit men that some of them are,” Brenda said.

  “Who recruits? Anybody recruits? Any member…” one detective asked from the back of the room. Brenda cut him off.

  “Any MS member. Any MS member can recruit. It’s not really up to anybody to recruit. It’s just the ones that are out there having more communication with everybody else. There’s some MS that keep low profiles. And a few people know they’re MS.”

  “What about prostitution? Does MS prostitute girls?” Porter asked. He wanted to complete the recruitment picture for the men in the room.

  “They do,” Brenda answered, looking away from Porter toward the back of the room, seemingly to nowhere before she started talking again. “They’ll prostitute girls that get bumped into MS. They’re not considered MS to the members. Nobody considers them anything, but somehow the girls feel they should do something for the gang.”

  Brenda talked about the girls who were sexed in. They become a sort of member, looked upon with little respect. As one of the few female members who decided to take a beating, Brenda occasionally talked back to the male members, something few female members got away with. In most cases it would mean instant retaliation for disrespect.

  “They let them think that they’re MS, but they’re not,” Brenda continued. “So they go out there and prostitute themselves and prostitute their friends for nothing. MS kind of pimps them.”

  “Does MS move these girls from state to state?” Porter asked. He wanted to establish the MS national level activities as much as possible. It wasn’t just a northern Virginia problem.

  “Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. If it starts getting hot, if the cops are noticing that something’s going on or if they’ve killed at that time or if they’re wanted for any reason, they’ll move. And they take the girls with them.”

  “Where do you personally know of that MS has moved the girls from Texas to?” one detective asked.

  Brenda finished his sentence. “Colorado, from Idaho to Virginia, and then Virginia back to Idaho. LA to Nevada, ’cause there was a lot of LA girls that were getting prostituted in Las Vegas. Oklahoma. I know of a couple of girls that moved to Oklahoma. North Carolina, they moved from Texas to North Carolina, but they were in Virginia first,” Brenda said, looking away still. She squinted when recalling the states. She never said the girls’ names but knew exactly where they had been. Brenda was uncomfortable talking about other women in the gang. Maybe there was a bad memory in there Brenda didn’t want to access. Porter shifted the questioning.

  “So once you become a member, what are your requirements? What do you have to do?” Porter asked. It was important for him to establish these facts for those listening. Brenda had their attention now. Alexander was taking notes.

  “Well, they tell you the thirteen rules when you get jumped in to MS. Your first requirement is to follow them. You follow the rules like a book. Just like anything else, okay, commandments, I guess. And then you have to put in work for the neighborhood. You always have to do that,” Brenda said. She shifted her weight again in the chair.

  “When you say ‘put in work,’ can you be more specific?” Porter asked, prying a little.

  “By ‘put in work’ I mean you have to go out and recruit,” Brenda replied. She started fidgeting again. “You have to go out and kill. You have to go out and shoot. Bring money in for the gang. You have to let everyone know you’re in the gang. That’s how you put in your work.” Brenda didn’t like talking about putting in work. Although she could play the role and keep up the mask of a hardened gangster, she didn’t have what it took to be a killer, or even someone who would harm people. Her history as an MS member was peppered with instances when Brenda had revealed her sensitive side despite herself.

  Remembering her interview with Detective Oseguera in Texas, it had hurt her to see him lower the pictures of his family members when she walked into his office. She didn’t want him to think she was someone who would hurt children. Once she had arrived in Virginia, Denis had taken her out to do work, telling her she had to shoot the father of a chavala. That was the time when, mom
ents before the hit, Brenda told him she couldn’t do it. Then, when they were out shopping for Hondas, Brenda wouldn’t steal a car with a baby seat in the back. This sensitivity was a weakness in the MS. Deep down, she was a caring, sensitive girl. She liked being part of all the MS parties, but like most members of the Mara Salvatrucha, she resisted doing the real work that made rank in the gang. Brenda had only made rank by dating the leaders and earning respect with her intelligence.

  Porter broke the silence with a new set of questions. He was curious to know about what he heard was a growing trend for MS members to keep a low profile, especially the leaders.

  “You mentioned that some MS members work. Do members tend to maintain a regular occupation?” Porter asked.

  “The smart ones, the ones that are actually out there committing crimes and the ones that are out there actually wanting to look more like a citizen than anything else, those are actually the ones who probably are the hit men for MS or are actually the killers for MS, the clique leaders. They all maintain a job so they can keep a low profile,” Brenda finished. Pens in the room scratched out notes.

  With that comment still hanging in the air, Porter thought it was a good time to take a new direction and talk about the gang’s inner workings.

  “The meetings with MS,” he began.

  “There’s different meetings,” Brenda said, cutting him off. “There’s clique meetings, there’s leader meetings, and there’s generales.” Brenda had never been to the meetings. Girls were not allowed. After dating both Veto and Denis, she was very familiar with what happened at the meetings, down to things that had been said at a number of them. Veto and Denis had often asked her to remember information.

  The clique meetings were called misas; the men in the room knew that. A few had heard of the generales, or mass meetings with any number of cliques gathering together, usually after dark in a large park. None had heard that clique leaders had meetings. They were secretive affairs, and Brenda had only heard of them happening. She never knew when or where.

  Brenda continued. “You go to your clique meeting regularly every Saturday or Sunday, every week. And you take your tax money. Taxes can wind up from $10 to $200, depending on what your clique leader wants. A clique leader holds those meetings, and if he doesn’t go, it’s canceled or it’s not. He might have someone below him do it. And in every clique there’s a treasurer. And every clique has a head man, a spokesperson that talks for the clique.”

  “Does the treasurer keep a book, an accounting book or something that shows who’s paying and who’s not?” Greg asked.

  “If you don’t pay, you’re not at the meeting. So if you’re not at the meeting, you get into trouble. So either way no written files are kept because cops, I guess, they don’t want no one to know how MS runs. But it’s mostly a mental thing. So you know how much money you have, and you know how much money you get every meeting, so you know how much money you should wind up with.”

  “So who runs the meetings?” Greg continued.

  “The clique leader,” Brenda said matter-of-factly.

  “And what about the general meeting?” Greg asked. He knew the men in the room were most interested in the generales.

  “Generales are when all the cliques come. But let’s say someone from LA comes, he can run the meeting. If he wants to intrude, he can run the meeting ’cause he has respect. But Bam-Bam gets to run the Virginia meetings. He’s respected, he’s been in MS a long time and he’s from El Salvador, so that kind of makes him a little bit more of a leader. He takes leadership and runs it. The meetings are set up like this: Everybody waits for each other. Everyone has to be there. No one can be late, no matter what. So you go to the meetings, you give your thirteen seconds. That’s you bow your heads and you give thanks for being alive and all that, good stuff, you know, ‘Forgive me God, I have sinned’—whatever. You usually always throw the MS sign while you’re doing it for the thirteen seconds. After that everybody collects the money. Then you say, you watch out to see who’s not there. And then everybody who’s not there is noticed at that time. After that you talk about what’s going on. You talk about if anyone’s got arrested, if they need money to get anybody out. Whatever’s going on at that situation of that week, you talk about it. If there’s anyone you’ve got to kill, if there’s anyone you have to hit, you talk about it.”

  “And what are you told about dealing with your enemies?” Porter asked, taking over for Greg. There was a specific point he was driving toward, something Brenda hinted at during a previous interview.

  “You kill them,” Brenda replied with a serious look. It was a simple answer, but Porter wanted more. He kept silent, and as he had hoped, Brenda filled the silence with revealing information.

  “Well, I mean if you’re dealing with an Eighteenth—if you go to school with some guy who, let me just say for example, right? You go to school with some guy who is an Eighteenth Street leader, he’s not going to be waiting for you to just kick his ass. You’ve got to come up with a way to kill him,” Brenda said. Porter kept silent. She continued. “He’s an Eighteenth Street leader, he’s in your territory, he’s in your common place. But if it’s just another chavala, you just kick them. You fight them, you do anything to put them down and belittle them.” Brenda made a clear distinction about how a leader is treated. The Mara Salvatrucha planned that kill. Porter wanted to drive home the point of discipline and organization.

  “If MS-13 wants to kill somebody do they plan the attack?” Porter asked.

  “Not all the time because a lot of MS people just act on reaction. But when it’s a big crime that they want to do…they, they plan. They think about it, in meetings they bring it up. They think of how they’re going to kill them. They don’t just do it. But if it’s just in the random street, if he just walks down the street and you walk next to him and he throws another gang sign and you have a gun on you, you just shoot and kill.” The words fell out of Brenda’s mouth in a nonchalant manner. Most of the officers in the room tensed, bristling at the information coming out of this sixteen-year-old girl, the most unlikely of informants. She was relaxed, having a conversation with Detective Porter, someone she grew to like over the weeks. He pushed ahead.

  “How about murder for hire? If I know an MS member, even though I’m not MS, maybe we were friends from work or something, can I hire somebody from MS to kill somebody?” Porter asked.

  “Yeah. They always do. Money talks in a gang. Money talks,” Brenda said with a shrug. For her it was a matter of fact. For the officers in the room, the possibility that members of the Mara Salvatrucha would kill people simply for money was deeply disturbing.

  One of the detectives in the room couldn’t contain himself. He had to ask. “If I wanted MS to kill somebody tomorrow, or if I wanted somebody killed, how long would it take MS to send somebody here if I paid them?”

  “How long will it take you to give us the money?” Brenda asked, looking in his direction. She was serious.

  “If I gave you the money today, how long would it take MS to come up here and…” the detective continued.

  “A couple of hours,” Brenda said, still looking at him. “We’ll throw a meeting like that”—Brenda snapped—“just to get a person to do it. Someone’s always going to do it for the money.”

  “Would it be somebody local or would they send somebody from out of state?” the detective asked, still not believing what this girl was saying.

  “It depends who you want to kill. If it’s just a nobody just anybody local could do it. If you’re talking about killing someone who people are going to give a fuck about, a cop, anybody like that, then we’d probably get other people to do it. More professionalized people and then I guess more people that know how to kill.”

  Another silent pause descended on the room. The weight of what Brenda just said hung in the air. The men in the room were digesting one of the most serious revelations of the Mara Salvatrucha they had ever heard. Sure, they thought, MS members exto
rt immigrants for money, even pimp undocumented women and sell drugs from time to time. They have a violent streak, and could be hard to track down because they moved from state to state. But a street gang that was willing to kill anyone for money and one that would plan an assassination, even on a cop? That was new and very disturbing information. It was the most memorable thing Brenda said that day and spurred many in the room to consider how far down the evolutionary path the Mara Salvatrucha had gone from street gang toward true organized crime, the kind only the FBI had the resources and experience to handle.

  CHAPTER 28

  The interview lasted for nearly two hours. Brenda was open and honest about almost everything and left all the men present with a long list of new information and some disturbing insight into the Mara Salvatrucha. Greg and Porter were very pleased with Brenda. The taped interview would go a long way toward proving her knowledge of the gang and willingness to provide information. Porter thought any cop who wanted to know more about the MS should watch the tape. It was the perfect primer for any new gang detective. He thought it should be made into a training video.

  After dropping off Brenda at the juvenile detention facility, just across the parking garage from the Massey Building, Greg returned to his thoughts on a strategy to ensure Brenda’s long-term safety. She had again demonstrated how much she knew about the gang, and he was convinced there were MS members on the street who were eager to get hold of her.

  Brenda’s immunity from prosecution in Dallas County was the last of Greg’s list of legal hurdles that he’d had to jump in order to keep Brenda out of prison and away from prosecution. He now faced down her emancipation.

  Brenda’s emancipation required Greg to argue that she was capable of taking care of herself, but more importantly Greg had to argue that Brenda required a high level of safety, one that could only be provided by witness protection. She was a proven informant and could only be an asset to federal investigations into the Mara Salvatrucha. The bottom line, he had to argue, was that witness protection was now Brenda’s only option for guaranteed safety.