MS-13

The Making of America's Most Notorious Gang

By: Steven Dudley

Narrated by: Christian Barillas

Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

“A remarkable feat of reporting.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises

*WINNER OF THE LUKAS PRIZE*

The definitive account of the most notorious street gang in America—the MS-13—as seen through the lives of gang members and their families caught in its malicious web

The MS-13 was born from war. In the 1980s, El Salvador was enmeshed in a bloody civil conflict. To escape the guerrilla assaults and death squads, many fled to the US and settled in Los Angeles. Among them were Alex and his brother.

There, as a survival instinct, Alex and a small number of Salvadoran immigrants formed a group called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a relatively harmless social network bound by heavy metal music and their Salvadoran identity. But later, as they brushed against established local gangs, the group took on a harder edge, selling drugs, stealing cars and killing rivals who threatened their territories. As authorities cracked down, gang members like Alex were incarcerated and deported. But in the prison system, the group only grew stronger, and in Central America, the gang multiplied, eventually spreading to a half-dozen nations in two continents.

Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth, with an estimated ten thousand members operating in dozens of states and linked to thousands of grisly murders each year in the US and abroad. But it is also misunderstood—less a drug cartel and more a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal economy is based mostly on small-time extortion schemes and petty drug dealing. Journalist and longtime organized crime investigator Steven Dudley brings listeners inside the nefarious group to tell a larger story of how a flawed US and Central American policy, and the exploitative and unequal economic systems, helped foster the gang and sustain it. Ultimately, MS-13 is the story of the modern immigrant and the perennial battle to escape a vortex of poverty and crime, as well as the repressive, unequal systems that feed these problems.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Steven Dudley (P)2020 Harlequin Enterprises, Limited

You want me to become a monster, I can only take so much before I become one

As a gang member mentioned in this book and who got involved in the beginning stages of the gang. We never intended to have our gang be a transnational threat. They still are not. But when governments exploit them and and have them do their bidding, they become a necessary pet of the state.
The failed policies of mass incarceration made us. They forced us to organize. Now they are calling them terrorist. The US wants to charged at least 16 members of MS13 with terrorism.
They will adapt based on the police’s used against them. This book peels the layers of these complex problem created by poverty, US foreign policy, capitalism, war on drugs and exploitation of immigrants.

MS-13 got their own PR

The writer is self serving by injecting his own personal political views and downplaying the villainous role the gang members played. It’s all about blaming the US for gangs killing their own countrymen.

Very boring.

Not what I was expecting. Didn't get past 3rd chapter Don't waste your money on this.

Simping for Serial Killers

This aged badly. With Trump gone and violence soaring, blaming him for career psychopaths only magnifies the absurdity. Another book about a gang that revels in the rituals of cutting people up into bite-sized pieces which doesn't approach any solutions. The author does, however, succeed in highlighting that he himself is part of the problem.

Wrong and Biased

Written by someone who was never in the trenches. And it shows. Blame Trump, blame America, blame everyone else but MS 13. The stats are wrong. Not a great listen. Went as far as I could with it.

Disappointed

This book does not approach the CSG MS-13 from the perspective of objective facts of it. But from a narrative, the criminal members of such CSG are victims of society, more precisely victims of the USA—no actual learning value