Publishers Weekly
03/30/2020
Journalist Dudley, who spent the last two decades covering crime in Latin America, brings his expertise to his chilling debut about the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Started more than 40 years ago in Los Angeles, the gang consisted of mostly teenage Salvadoran boys who wanted to forget the violence of their home country and its civil war by drinking and playing loud music. But it grew into a vicious group known for brutal murders. After gang members were rounded up, sent to U.S. prisons, and then deported, they recreated the gang in El Salvador and spread to other Central American nations. Dudley personalizes the history of MS-13 in a boy he calls Norman, a typical gang member, who as a child in El Salvador turned to the gang to protect him from the army, the war, and domestic violence. Eventually, Norman fled to the U.S. to get out of MS-13, but he has lived in fear ever since. For anyone who has ever wondered why and how gang members are made, Dudley has the answers. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary. (May)
From the Publisher
"Steven Dudley’s MS-13 is a remarkable feat of reporting; the ways in which the United States is complicit in the creation and preservation of MS-13 might well keep you awake deep into the night, as it did me. I can’t shake this book, or the feeling that we have doomed so many young men to a life of violence. We have to do better for them, for our children, and for our collective future.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
"Steven Dudley's great contribution in this landmark account of MS-13 is to take a subject that has been sensationalized and mythologized and politicized beyond recognition and, through painstaking reporting and clear-eyed analysis, capture a truth that is less exotic—but more fascinating—than the headlines. Rather than default to easy alarmism or xenophobic caricatures, Dudley captures the origins of the gang as a human story of migration and migrant communities, and a policy story, about the unintended consequences of U.S. policy. By detailing the experiences of gang members and victims alike, he anatomizes the complex, fluid dynamics of this elusive transnational network. A startling book."—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
"Steve Dudley’s clear prose helps untangle the murky world of the MS-13 gang and its little-known history and origins. Dudley’s time spent with gang members offers keen observations on the complex nature of the gang's social, criminal and economic structures that few have had access to. As Dudley shows, the gangs formed, grew and evolved for many reasons, and its members are not cartoon gangsters but real people dealing with harsh realities that often result in great harm and loss in repeated cycles. Dudley provides vital details and context for the U.S. policies that make the problems worse rather than better our fundamental inability to deal with this rapidly evolving reality."—Douglas Farah, author of Blood from Stones
"Ripped straight from the headlines, MS-13, is one of the year’s most important books, a gripping meticulously reported account of the rise of one of the world’s most notorious street gangs. Author Steven Dudley spent years studying MS-13. With his remarkable access, Dudley skillfully weaves in the story of gang members to show how MS-13 grew from a social network to a criminal enterprise that President Trump has blamed for the rise of violent attacks in communities across the United States. After relatively humble beginnings in Los Angeles in the 1980s, it has spread to more than a half-dozen countries and become the focus of law enforcement in the United States and Central America. In spite of these efforts, MS-13 remains a threat. But Dudley does more than chronicle the history of the gang. He uses MS-13 to tell a larger story of flawed U.S. policy that has helped the gang flourish."—Mitch Weiss, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Broken Faith and Tiger Force
“Steven Dudley’s latest book is a historical treatise moved forward by a series of captivating narratives that present a wholistic, unifying perspective on the Mara Salvatrucha. Where other authors have stopped short in their own work on this mysterious gang, Dudley’s research presses deeper into the past, and walks father into the countryside of El Salvador and neighborhoods of Los Angeles to bring to the conversation a thoroughly researched and reported body of work. In one read, MS-13 counterbalances many of the wrong assumptions made about the gang among politicians and law enforcement while highlighting some of the most often obfuscated truths about the realities of what it means to be a Mara Salvatrucha, from wannabe to homie, and then desperate to escape a gang that never lets you go.”—Samuel Logan, author of This is for the Mara Salvatrucha
"Steven Dudley skillfully cuts through the hype and clichés to tell the dirty true story of the gang—from its painful birth in Los Angeles to its bloody adolescence in El Salvador to the showdown in the Trump era. People need to read this thorough investigation to find a better way."—Ioan Grillo, author of El Narco and Gangster Warlord
“The definitive account of MS-13… An outstanding book for true crime readers.”—Library Journal STARRED review
“Chilling.…For anyone who has ever wondered why and how gang members are made, Dudley has the answers.”—Publishers Weekly
“Trenchant….A cleareyed account of a criminal enterprise that is undeniably a threat to civil society wherever it turns up.”—Kirkus Reviews
"A deep dive written in plain prose backed by years of research, MS-13 is a remarkable resource for thorough understanding."—Shelf Awareness
Library Journal
03/27/2020
Dudley (codirector & cofounder, InSight Crime; Walking Ghosts) has written the definitive account of MS-13, the violent international crime organization. This panoramic narrative ties together the gang's formation in Los Angeles, by immigrants from El Salvador seeking protection from other gangs; Dudley also examines MS-13's links with the Mexican Mafia and relevance to American immigration and foreign policy. The book benefits greatly from the perspectives of a gang leader, a recruit, the Salvadoran military, and U.S. federal and state agents. Like a deadly virus, MS-13 has mutated, and Dudley provides a chilling, even-handed account of its origins. Norman, the gang leader seeking asylum in the United States, is at the center of Dudley's work. He grew up amid violence in El Salvador, embraced MS-13 as a new family, and ultimately tried to leave it. This volume is more complete than its predecessors—such as Samuel Logan's This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha and Juan José Martínez d' Aubuisson's A Year Inside MS-13—and reflects the author's deep knowledge of the subject, derived from his local reporting and codirection of a government funded three-year study of MS-13 in the United States. VERDICT An outstanding book for true crime readers.—Harry Charles, St. Louis
Kirkus Reviews
2020-03-01
Trenchant history of the gang that Donald Trump has called as dangerous as al-Qaida.
MS-13, which takes its name from the enigmatic Spanish phrase “Mara Salvatrucha,” is now 40 years old, and it has members throughout the U.S. as well as El Salvador. Owing to a vicious civil war between a government backed by the Reagan administration and communist guerrillas, tens of thousands of Salvadorans fled to the United States, with a particularly strong presence in Los Angeles. Two refugee brothers founded MS-13 to protect their community from other gangs—and then, over time, discovered that they could gain power and wealth by controlling segments of the drug trade and other criminal enterprises. Now, journalist Dudley writes, MS-13 is a loosely organized gang that “had grown by coming at their enemies in waves, like a marabunta, or army of ants, as the street gangs were baptized so many years ago in El Salvador.” The gang is marked by several signatures, including heavy tattooing and a tendency to kill their victims with machetes, chopping them to bits. Like any gang, Dudley observes, MS-13 is both a product of its environment and a shaper of it, strengthening social bonds “via violence and predatory criminal acts.” Gang life is also far from romantic, as he reveals, marked by excessive drug and alcohol use, that constant violence, and, often, homelessness—landlords are reluctant to rent to gang members who treat their properties as “a crash-pad, a party-place, a meeting spot, a stash house, a torture chamber, a brothel or all of the above.” The gang is also dominant in places such as LA, New York, and even Washington while its members travel freely back and forth to El Salvador, bribing the authorities to look the other way.
A cleareyed account of a criminal enterprise that is undeniably a threat to civil society wherever it turns up.
