Gangland Fun

A couple of weeks back we were talking about which sort of crime syndicate might make a good successor to this thing of ours in American popular culture. One candidate was the Salvadoran gang MS-13. I was skeptical of this proposal, since even living 'lo these past few years right around DC's main concentration of Salvadoran people, MS-13 has never seemed to do anything especially interesting (I suppose a machete attack would be fun to watch).

More recently, though, I discovered the MS-13 blog (a blog about the gang, not by it) and it turns out to be more interesting than I'd thought -- much wider in scope, in particular.

Comments

Matt, why are you blogging about gangs no one has heard of - shouldn't you be busy retracting your Lugar smear?

Posted by minderbender | June 26, 2007 5:29 PM

I got two words for you: Russian Mob

Posted by UofAZGrad | June 26, 2007 5:30 PM

p.s. - I just like the way that sounds - Lugar smear... Lugar smear...

Posted by minderbender | June 26, 2007 5:31 PM

Maybe I should retract my Lugar smear smear. Lugar smear smear - that still cracks me up.

Anyway, there's less to the Times story than I initially thought, so we still seem to be in "tough talk" territory. Still, I have the feeling he'll stick to his guns, and Matt will have needlessly smeared Lugar.

Posted by minderbender | June 26, 2007 5:42 PM

No other type of organized crime will replace american cosa nostra in popular culture. Its really just a very popular subgenre of the ever-popular bandit/gangster genre. I won't get into why its more popular than other categories of the American Criminal (that would take pages, but I think perhaps some combination of humor, violence, shared immigrant experience and the American Dream narrative play a role), but I think that while you will always have interesting movies about other gangs ("Blood in, Blood Out, Bound by Honor" comes to mind), none will match cosa nostra in popularity.

As far as taking over street crime in CN's absence, forget the Russians, they never branched out of their own neighborhoods. The Albanians are far more resourceful and they are getting their hands into the old and the new rackets.

Posted by laborlibert | June 26, 2007 6:11 PM

TV's best cop show, 'The Shield,' had a running storyline on Salvadoran gangs this past season. They didn't delve too deeply, though.

Posted by Woody Bombay | June 26, 2007 6:38 PM

read a bit more about MS-13 and it won't seem so fun. For flat-out brutality, violence to women, and terror Italians don't have anything on them. (It's fine to not know about everything, of course, and maybe it's meant to be more of a joke then it seems to me, but sometimes you really do come across as implying that if you haven't heard of something it must not be that interesting. It's a bad pundit habit to fall in to so early.)

Posted by Matt (not the famous one) | June 26, 2007 6:50 PM

I nominate the Mexican Mafia, which despite the name is not an organized crime syndicate in Mexico. Rather, it started out as a prison gang composed of Mexican Americans who, as their prison terms expired, returned to the streets to prey ruthlessly on immigrants, and who now control most of the cocaine trade in Los Angeles. The story demonstrates that these days prisons are not merely schools for crime but incubators.

Posted by Robert Fiore | June 26, 2007 7:24 PM

um, "fun to watch"? have you gone out of your mind? please stick to writing about things you know something about rather than glorifying gangland violence.

Posted by Arijit | June 26, 2007 11:15 PM

(I suppose a machete attack would be fun to watch).

You do?

Posted by RW Rogers | June 26, 2007 11:31 PM

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/youth/jan-june06/gang_4-24.html

JEFFREY KAYE: MS-13 members have been linked to particularly gruesome crimes.

REP. J. RANDY FORBES: They're cutting off people's heads; they're cutting off their fingers; they're cutting off their arms.

JEFFREY KAYE: Another example of the gang's brutality, the 2003 murder of 17-year-old Brenda Paz, prompted Forbes' bill. Paz had become an informant against MS-13. Gang members stabbed the pregnant teenager 16 times and left her body on the banks of the Shenandoah River in Virginia.

I'd totally love to watch that. It sounds fun. I wonder how I can get someone to be an innocent victim and just sit back and enjoy the show.

Posted by John | June 26, 2007 11:33 PM

The next big thing in gangland fiction is going to be a fucking blockbuster: A cabal of sociopathic-yet-idiotic rich dudes pull together a coalition of differently-aggrieved white folks that takes over America (by stealing an election), and thus takes over the world. Then they ruin everything for everybody.

Posted by dj moonbat | June 27, 2007 12:10 AM

MS-13 actually accounts for a smallish percentage of the total street gang population, & of gang-related crime. Its current prominence in the public imagination owes a lot to sensationalistic press coverage (not least the Washington Post's), & to the fact that, unlike most gang members, it's comprised of brown immigrants.

Posted by K | June 27, 2007 3:59 PM

As a point of reference Michelle Malkin is real big on the MS-13 scare. Not that changes things one way or another but just throwing it out there. Fine, I'm useless.

Posted by Jake | June 30, 2007 4:34 PM