This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (11 page)

“One day,” Brenda often said, “the Mara Salvatrucha will take over the United States.”

F
ull of confidence, Brenda was happy about being the center of such attention. It was a position that thoroughly satisfied her extroverted nature. And her vast knowledge of the gang never ceased to amaze Greg or anyone listening to her. She had told Ignacio he was the target of an MS plot to kill two policemen in Virginia. The other targeted cop had a physical description that matched Rick Rodriguez. That cop was in the most danger. And Brenda saved his life.

When Rodriguez had helped his colleagues figure out what Denis was saying to Brenda soon after their arrest, he already knew MS members planned on killing two cops, but he didn’t know which ones. If Rodriguez had seen Denis that day when he listened to the tapes, Denis might have recognized him. Denis knew the MS wanted Ignacio dead, but he didn’t know the other cop’s name, only a physical description. Word had spread out among the MS that Ignacio and another cop, a bald guy who looked like a gringo but spoke Spanish, needed to die. That physical description could only fit one man: Detective Rick Rodriguez.

Like Detective Ignacio, Rodriguez had worked gang-related crimes for years. He was the first detective in Arlington County to focus on gangs, and for many years he was the only detective in the county’s gang unit. Rodriguez made gangs and gang members, especially the Mara Salvatrucha, a priority.

Rodriguez was a gang expert. In the summer of 2002, his fellow officers considered Rodriguez a walking dictionary of gang information. But there was a time when he didn’t know so much.

In the early 1990s, Rodriguez was a young police officer working a normal beat in northern Virginia. Because he was a native Spanish speaker, he gravitated toward the Latinos who lived in the immigrant communities in Arlington County near Columbia Heights West. He sometimes worked in Latino communities in neighboring Fairfax County—the heart of the Salvadoran population in northern Virginia.

Rodriguez dealt with the crimes that festered in these communities. There was little gang activity when he first started, not nearly enough to warrant any special attention to street gangs over any other type of crime, such as spousal abuse, robbery, or traffic violations. But by the early 1990s, reunified Salvadoran families became common in Culmore. The ostracized children reached out to anyone who accepted them, showed them love, and allowed them to love in return.

Rodriguez knew that in El Salvador, the word
mara
didn’t always have a gang connotation. It meant a bunch of friends. In the United States, the Salvadoran kids looked for other young people in their same situation. Misery loved company. Cliques were formed. These groups were not violent street gangs. They were a crew of friends. They were
maras
in the original sense of the word. The informal cliques were a source of love and a place to be accepted, not judged. Invariably, however, some of these groups grew violent.

Street gangs in immigrant populations were, of course, nothing new in the United States. Dating back to the Irish street gangs in New York’s Five Points area, gangs have formed where there has been a need for acceptance and a large enough group of like-minded people. The Culmore area of Fairfax County was no exception. And with such a large Latino immigrant community, it was a place where groups of friends could easily evolve into street gangs where the combination of teenage recklessness and rebellious desires clashed with the laws of the land.

Rodriguez remembered the old days, when it started with simple tagging. The
maras
in Culmore evolved into two memorable groups, the Mara Queens and the Mara Locos Intocables, or “untouchable crazies.” Members of these groups spray-painted clumsy symbols of their gang, usually just the first letters of their gang’s name, in random
public spaces. They vandalized public walls, lampposts, and the large green Dumpsters near where they lived, went to school, or worked. Tagging was normal activity for these kids, nothing more sinister than meeting up at the park to drink beer or hang out on a street corner just to stay out of the house and away from their parents, the primary source of frustration in their new lives in the United States.

At times there were fights. Rodriguez could understand the motives of the early
maras
. No one liked to constantly look over his shoulder or worry about safety when hanging out near home or school. There was a sense of turf and protecting that turf, but this sense of needing protection had little to do with controlling an area used for criminal enterprise, as it did in Los Angeles. The formation of Virginia’s street gangs was more about making sure everyone was safe in a part of town known to be dangerous.

Culmore was a focal point for crime. Poverty and unemployment fed armed robberies and sometimes murder. It was necessary for clique members to look out for one another. Knives added a level of enforcement, but they were rarely used. To combat rising crime levels, the police departments from Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria initiated community-policing programs and placed patrol officers on walking beats in direct contact with the communities that needed the most attention. Members of the immigrant communities slowly grew to trust the cops they always saw walking around, talking with shop owners, garage mechanics, people at the bus stop, just about anyone. It was an added level of protection that, for a short time, prevented any serious street gang activity from taking root in Fairfax County.

Then Snoopy arrived. Rodriguez had chuckled when he’d heard the street name. He quickly learned it was no laughing matter.

Snoopy was an old-school MS-13 member from Los Angeles. He was the first of a wave of MS members who targeted the second-largest Salvadoran community in the United States.

The Salvadorans and other Latinos who immigrated to northern Virginia were a gold mine of opportunity for MS-13 members who dealt with a level of law enforcement in California they wanted to avoid. Virginia police in the early 1990s had little idea what the MS-13 was all about. When Snoopy arrived, he was very open about being a Mara Salvatrucha. He was proud and handed out business cards printed with his phone number and street name, and some of the most com
mon symbols used by the MS in Los Angeles, like MSX3, another way to spell out MS-13, replacing the one with a Roman numeral. A gangster who handed out business cards had mystified Rodriguez and his colleagues. This simply was not normal.

The pioneering gangster quickly set out recruiting new MS members. He offered the backing of a much larger, national-level gang. Compared to the Mara Queens or the Mara Locos Intocables, the Mara Salvatrucha was a serious and organized street gang. Snoopy’s arrival in 1993 signified the beginning of a higher level of gangbanging in the Culmore area. The established
maras
in the area, however, were not about to let the MS just come in and disrespect them.

Snoopy had his work cut out for him. For many months, his fledgling MS group was a punching bag for the other, better-established gangs in the area. But their numbers quickly grew. Dozens of MS members were let out of California prisons in 1995 and 1996. Many members who were not deported decided to leave Los Angeles, where they were marked and well known by the cops. Many left for Texas and Nashville, but a significant number decided to travel to Virginia. Some MS cliques from LA took root in Virginia. The Normandie Locos, Brenda’s clique, was among them. The Centrales Locos was another prominent MS clique that had originated in Los Angeles.

The native
maras
learned quickly that Snoopy brought from Los Angeles a new level of competition. Rodriguez realized that this was a street gang culture that thrived on violence, the strict enforcement of turf, and the use of fear to control victims and earn money from a number of illegal business practices. Snoopy recruited Virginia’s new MS members into an organization that was willing to kill with knives and machetes to make a point. Discipline within the gang was strict. New recruits quickly learned that the MS was the real deal from LA. If you broke the rules as an MS member, they didn’t kick you out. You were severely beaten, maimed, stabbed, or killed.

Not surprisingly, Virginia’s street gangs became a serious problem by 1996, only three years after Snoopy first arrived in Fairfax County. It was a banner year. President Clinton pointed to Fairfax County as a model for how other counties in the country should work to absorb divergent cultures. But a deeper look revealed colorful gang graffiti spray-painted on walls, buildings, lampposts, trash cans, and just about anyplace gang members could get their message out loud and clear.

What started in the early 1990s as tagging became spray-painted
warnings from one gang to another. The message was simple: This is our turf. Stay out or face the consequences. The MS had established enemies from LA, and it knew how to deal with
chavalas.

Virginia’s other
maras
didn’t adopt this type of proactive aggression and violence until the MS arrived. But once the violence started, it didn’t stop. One act of disrespect had to be answered by a show of strength. That show of strength was another act of disrespect. This cycle of violence continued until one gang became dominant. Supremacy was always the goal of the MS in Virginia. They were against everyone. And it didn’t take them long to establish control. As the cops in the region struggled to react, the MS cut through the local gangs, forcing them to bend to their will and be absorbed or disband.

The Mara Salvatrucha’s growing presence in northern Virginia caused a spike in violence during the summer months of 1996. The worst case occurred when a sixteen-year-old was stabbed in front of a middle school in Alexandria, just down the road from Culmore. Months later, in the Columbia Heights West section of Arlington, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into one family’s living room.

Assigned as one of the community cops at the time, Rick Rodriguez responded to the call. He was sure it was gang-related, but the parents, who had a mattress propped against their living room window to prevent further damage to their apartment, denied their child was involved in a gang.

Rodriguez left the apartment and drove to a nearby corner popular with young MS members and found the kid he was looking for. Their child, while at home, acted appropriately and wore clothes that suggested good study habits and a well-mannered lifestyle. Once he was out on the street, gangland clothes came out of the backpack and the attitude changed. Mom and Dad never knew.

Rodriguez grabbed the kid, took him back to his parents’ apartment dressed in his street gang clothes. Around cops the bad attitude was hard to mask. With the clothes and bad attitude still in place, Rodriguez revealed the boy’s other life to his bewildered parents. Lifting up the kid’s shirtsleeves, Rodriguez showed the parents their child’s gang tattoos.

To Rodriguez, these tattoos were a brand and a constant reminder of the permanency of the MS influence on any kid’s life. When Rodriguez explained all this to the unsuspecting parents, they were speechless. Rodriguez thought the kid was on the fringe of the MS. He wasn’t
yet a hard-core member. “The parents are the last ones to know,” the kid’s mom lamented before Rodriguez left the apartment.

For many immigrant families, the gap between their lower-class existence and the middle class always seemed to grow wider, making it impossible for them to pull themselves up and out of the hole they had tried to escape back home in Central America. They were constantly chasing an American dream that could be seen everywhere but was never obtainable at home. The only way to keep the family afloat was to work constantly. Keeping up with the Perezes—the Latino version of the Joneses—was never supposed to be this hard.

Three years after Rodriguez and others inaugurated their community policing program, the Mara Salvatrucha firmly established itself in the Culmore neighborhood of Fairfax County. Columbia Heights West and the Arlandria section of Alexandria were also MS-13 hot spots. It was a growing problem, one the local police had still not been able to completely control. Prevention programs, desperately needed to keep kids from joining gangs, were meager in the face of such need.

Rodriguez remembered that MS-style violence finally splashed across local media in the summer of 2000, when a fourteen-year-old was arrested for the stabbing death of a twenty-two-year-old man in the Falls Church section of Fairfax County. José Rodriguez, along with two other minors, pushed, kicked, and stabbed their victim outside the Culmore Shopping Center on Leesburg Pike. José had been jumped in when he was thirteen, having fallen under the influence of his older sister’s boyfriend, an MS member who, like Veto in Texas, had
MS
tattooed across his forehead and numerous other tattoos across his neck, arms, and upper chest. José received fourteen staples in his head after his jumping-in ceremony. He had been beaten with a crowbar.

Before killing his victim, José met fifty other MS members in the woods behind a restaurant where he requested judgment and punishment for excessive drug use. It was rare for an MS member to request to be judged by his fellow gang members. Normally, MS members tried to avoid it. But José was adamant and he was found guilty. After the beating, he set out to find a victim to prove his loyalty to the gang and bolster his position within the group. José was still in elementary school when he was arrested.

At the time of José’s arrest, Rodriguez had become familiar with twenty to thirty gangs in the northern Virginia area through police training. All except the Mara Salvatrucha had fewer than a hundred
members. The Mara Salvatrucha boasted at least six hundred members in Fairfax County alone.

José Rodriguez was found guilty of second-degree murder. He was the youngest person in Fairfax County to be tried as an adult, and even after receiving twenty-two years for secondary murder, the young gangster didn’t recant his loyalty to the MS. His sister started hanging around the MS when she was ten. His parents were never home. The MS had become his family, and even in prison, he was not about to let it go.