This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (15 page)

And it did. The Dallas County prosecutor finally agreed to give Brenda immunity in exchange for a signed statement. With his case nearly completed, Detective Oseguera traveled with Sergeant Patton to Virginia only days after her first meeting with Walutes.

Greg invited Alexander to the Massey Building, where they arranged to meet with Oseguera and Sergeant Patton. The two listened as Oseguera asked Brenda questions. Patton took notes. Brenda provided a detailed account of the night Javier Calzada was murdered and identified from a group of photos Little Zico, Veto, and the other three men who were all at the top of Oseguera’s suspect list. Unlike the other two times she had met with Oseguera, Brenda was forthcoming with the information and was willing to sign a four-page statement.

After four hours of question and answer, she corroborated nearly everything Oseguera had learned prior to the interview. He now had enough information to take to the Dallas County prosecutor. With Brenda as a witness for the prosecution, Oseguera was confident his case was all but closed. At the end of the interview, Brenda confirmed that one of the men present when Veto shot Javier had taken Javier’s shoes. She also said it was possible Veto had worn Javier’s white Adidas shoes. That statement stuck in Oseguera’s mind like a sliver of splintered wood. He had to get back to the Dallas County Jail to look for those shoes.

Patton walked out of the meeting slowly shaking his head, thinking
Brenda knew too much for her own good. He knew what her gang had done in Grand Prairie, and from what he’d learned, MS-13 had a much stronger presence in Virginia. Brenda could be killed if she wasn’t careful, but Patton kept his thoughts to himself. They had gotten what they’d come for. With the taste of success in their mouths, Oseguera and Patton finished the meeting, then spent the evening at a baseball game in Baltimore—Baltimore Orioles versus the Texas Rangers. They might as well make use of the one night they had on the East Coast before boarding a plane for Texas at BWI Airport in the morning.

Back in Texas, Oseguera wasted no time driving to the Dallas County Jail, where he requested to see the personal effects of Veto and the four men arrested with him. He carefully searched through the belongings until he found the shoes he was looking for. It was a moment of clarity when Oseguera held in his hands the evidence he thought would finally close his case. It had been nine months since he took on the Calzada murder investigation, and in this moment he could see the end.

Oseguera immediately wrote up a request to take a DNA sample from Veto and the other four men. Within hours his request was approved and a lab technician took mouth swabs that were submitted to the Dallas County DNA lab along with the shoes. The results showed that three separate strands of DNA removed from dried sweat in the shoes matched the DNA of Javier Calzada, Veto, and the inmate who had been wearing Javier’s shoes when he was arrested.

As he suspected, the DNA match was Oseguera’s strongest evidence against Veto and at least one of his accomplices. There were also soil samples, fingerprints, and Brenda’s affidavit. Within weeks of having interviewed Brenda a third time, Oseguera was prepared to make his case, largely due to her tip-off about the shoes.

The day after Brenda spoke with Oseguera, she agreed to speak off the record with another detective from the Dallas area. The two-day meeting stretched across Saturday and Sunday. It was held in the same conference room in the Massey Building. During the marathon interview, one with little more than an overnight break to sleep, Brenda met the detective’s long list of questions head-on. There were some questions she couldn’t answer, but the information she did have was detailed, as usual. Brenda talked about how a group of MS set out to rob a bank a couple of states over from Texas. They had left Dallas in a borrowed car and parked it in Arkansas. Then they stole a car, drove to
another state, and robbed a bank. They stole another car before driving back to Arkansas, where they ditched it and got in the borrowed car before heading back to Dallas.

Brenda also described how her homies in Texas had stolen baby formula to sell it to undocumented immigrants. The baby formula was parceled out into smaller portions, affordable for their black market customers.

On Sunday afternoon, after three long days of interviews, Brenda finally described a murder that had haunted her for months. One night in Dallas, shortly before Calzada’s murder, Brenda was with Veto and other MS members when there was a shoot-out between the MS and a rival gang. One of the rival gang members was shot but not killed. Not wanting to waste bullets, the MS members had decided to use a car to finish him off. Brenda and the others sat in the car as they repeatedly ran over the wounded
chavala
until he quit screaming.

The detective told Brenda the kid was still alive. Her eyes widened. She didn’t believe it. The detective then produced a photo of the kid. Brenda took in a deep breath when she looked at the photo, and then sharply turned her head away. The sight affected her deeply. What was she thinking at the time? How crazy had she been? Greg was shocked that anyone would do such a thing. For him, it was another moment when he looked directly at the evil things some members of the MS-13 did. The kid’s face was a mess. He was barely recognizable. It was a disturbing conclusion to an exhausting three-day ordeal with the detectives from Texas. On the way back to the detention center, Greg detected that Brenda was emotionally spent, but he listed the weekend as a major victory for her. Brenda probably wasn’t thinking about it at that moment, but she was clean and free from the Texas murder that had been haunting her for so many months. That night, Brenda didn’t sleep well. The sight of that boy’s face had triggered a long list of memories she thought she had successfully forgotten.

T
he most remarkable interview Brenda gave occurred days later in one of the same conference rooms where she and Greg had had so many of her previous interviews. The room was long and narrow with a blackboard on one of the end walls. On it she had once drawn a diagram of the MS organizational structure in Virginia, Texas, and across the nation. There was a conference table in the middle surrounded by surprisingly comfortable chairs, complete with padded armrests, wheels, and adjustable hydraulics. The walls were covered with a tightly woven upholstery that looked like processed straw. The room could have been in an elementary school, except for the Spartan décor.

Brenda sat cross-legged at the front of the room, in a chair between an open door and a white dry-erase marker board. She fiddled with one of the black markers in her hand. A brown hair-band was on her right arm, comfortably resting just below where she had the name
VETO
tattooed on her wrist. Her curly brown hair was tucked behind her ears and flowed halfway down her chest. Brenda was dressed in a loose-fitting red shirt and blue sweatpants. She looked like a teenage kid ready for an afternoon at the park or a stroll in the mall, not a taped interview where she would talk about one of the nation’s most dangerous gangs.

Brenda was a little nervous seated in front of the top street gang
detectives for miles around, including two federal agents. Just after Porter pressed the record button on the video camera, Brenda giggled. It was a way for her to break the tension in the room with all these serious adults.

“What do you want me to say?” she asked, flashing her trademark smile at Porter and twirling the marker between two fingers.

“Tell them…tell them what gang you’re with,” he began with a deadpan voice, all business but calm, not pushy.

Nervous, Brenda looked at the red blinking light of the video camera, then directly at the lens.

“MS-13,” Brenda replied, matter-of-factly. Her Spanish accent contrasted sharply with Porter’s deep southern drawl.

“What clique?” Porter asked, moving forward with the most basic questions. These were the answers she was most comfortable giving.

“Normandie Locos Salvatrucha—NLS. The first clique in MS started way back in the day in El Salvador,” Brenda said with some pride. She bounced in her seat when she said it, projecting her smile across the room.

“How long have you been with MS?” Porter asked. It was a controversial question.

Brenda looked up at the ceiling and sighed before answering. “I’ve been affiliated since I was eleven and in the gang since I was thirteen.” She had told that lie so many times, she was beginning to believe it was true. It was one of the lies she most repeated. Brenda was never affiliated with the MS before she met Veto in Texas. It was a truth she kept close—something she even kept from Greg. On film, in front of her lawyer and the entourage of detectives, it was the last place Brenda would tell them she had only been a member for less than a year before she was arrested that summer.

“And how did you get into the gang?” Porter asked, staying on familiar ground with Brenda.

“I got jumped in to the gang, and then I got jumped in to another clique, and then got jumped out and got re-jumped in to MS Normandie clique,” Brenda said. It was a second lie, backing up the first. Though Brenda’s lies were believable in the don’t-ask-questions world of the MS, her fabrications were harder to pull off in front of experienced investigators. She could keep the false information straight but had a poor delivery in front of the cops. Fortunately her smile often came to the rescue. Yet there was some truth to her second answer.
Any MS member who wanted to leave one clique to join another had to be jumped out of a clique with a thirteen-second beating before being jumped in to the next clique with another thirteen-second beating.

“Can you…ah…do the MS hand signs? Can you spell out, can you show us the MS hand signs?” Porter jumbled out the sentence, referring to stacking, a practice among street gang members that was something akin to sign language, using both hands to spell out words in a rapid succession of finger twists, curves, and seemingly difficult feats of pinky and ring finger dexterity. Brenda had stacked for the Grand Prairie detective, Rick Oseguera, when he had first interviewed her. She had also viewed some police surveillance tapes with Greg and Porter when MS members in the video stacked in front of the camera. Brenda could read their hand signs like a book. It was a complicated and fascinating method of communication that Brenda had perfected.

She knew the hand signs, and after placing the dry-erase marker in her lap, she readily showed the camera and the men present how to spell out the name of her gang, moving forward letter by letter beginning with the Spanish word
La
and moving on to
Mara
, then
Salvatrucha
. She made the hand symbol of each letter just as fast as she was talking.

“The
L
is for
loco
. The
A
is for arsonist. The
M
is for
maldito
. The
A
for arsonist. The
R
for
robo,
which in English is translated to robbery. The
A
for arsonist. The
S
for Salvatrucha. The
A
for arsonist. The
L
for
loco
. The
V
for
violar
. That means rape. The
A
for arsonist, again. The
T
for…God, I forgot.”

“
Trece
,” Porter suggested, thinking the
T
in Salvatrucha could mean
trece
, the Spanish word for the number 13.

“
Trece
,” Brenda agreed, smiling at Porter for the help.

She continued. “The
R
for
robo
. The
U
for united. The
C
for
controlador
—controlling. The
H
for Home Beat, Homeboys. And the
A
for arsonist. And the 13. That’s
sureños
. We’re from the south side. That’s why we carry the 13; we just adopted the 13. There’s also sayings in MS that it comes from the Bible. I really don’t know what passage or anything, but in MS, they affiliate themselves with the Bible a lot.” Brenda was starting to open up. Her extroverted nature was beginning to shake loose the grip her nerves had on her tongue. Soon, Porter thought, Brenda might tell the men in the room information they had never heard about the Mara Salvatrucha.

“There’s a lot of different stacking and when you’re taught how to
stack people do it differently. People stack their cliques, the gang. Like I’m spelling out my whole clique,” Brenda said, using her hands in fast motion to spell out Normandie Locos Salvatrucha. Each letter required a specific hand pose. She shifted her weight in her chair to accommodate inverting her arms to place her elbows above her shoulders or quickly alternate the position of her wrists. Brenda stacked equally well with both hands.

“Everyone’s taught how to do it differently, but the more significant ones are always with the
M
and the
S
and the 13,” Brenda explained, making an intricate sign for
M
before positioning her pointer finger under her middle finger and curving her thumb to make an
S
. She crossed her ring finger and thumb and spread her other three fingers apart to make an
X
and a 3 for the number 13. She stuck out her tongue a little to help concentrate. Her fingers were chubby and short, not ideal for stacking. But she never used her left hand to put errant right-hand fingers in the correct position. Her fingering was smooth and precise.

“Who teaches you to stack?” Porter asked.

“When you get jumped in your clique leader teaches you the basics and you learn from how you’re always with your homeboys. They also do the
M
, this is
M
,” Brenda said, slightly leaning forward and positioning both elbows above her shoulders to make the effect of an
M
. “And that’s the
S
,” she said, curving her arms and placing the fist of her right arm just below the elbow of the top arm, which extended over her head to make a crude
S
. “That’s the 13—X, 1, 1, 1,” Brenda said. She made a ninety-degree angle with one fist against the inside of her other elbow, alternating fist and elbow, left and right, each time she said “one.”

Her pride in the Mara Salvatrucha, even after she had been away from the gang for over three months, was clear-cut. Brenda broke into a broad smile. Her confidence swelled. After showing the men some stacking, Brenda composed herself a little. She straightened her hair and picked up the dry-erase pen for more fiddling.

Porter noticed Brenda was now considerably relaxed. It would soon be time for more interesting questions. The men in the room were all seasoned gang detectives. They had known about stacking for a long time, but were also patient. They all had managed informants in the past and were content to let Porter run the show. But then Greg stepped in.

“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 recruit
ment. 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.”