This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (16 page)

Brenda talked about the girls who were sexed in. They become a sort of member, looked upon with little respect. As one of the few female members who decided to take a beating, Brenda occasionally talked back to the male members, something few female members got away with. In most cases it would mean instant retaliation for disrespect.

“They let them think that they’re MS, but they’re not,” Brenda continued. “So they go out there and prostitute themselves and prostitute their friends for nothing. MS kind of pimps them.”

“Does MS move these girls from state to state?” Porter asked. He wanted to establish the MS national level activities as much as possible. It wasn’t just a northern Virginia problem.

“Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. If it starts getting hot, if the cops are noticing that something’s going on or if they’ve killed at that time or if they’re wanted for any reason, they’ll move. And they take the girls with them.”

“Where do you personally know of that MS has moved the girls from Texas to?” one detective asked.

Brenda finished his sentence. “Colorado, from Idaho to Virginia, and then Virginia back to Idaho. LA to Nevada, ’cause there was a lot of LA girls that were getting prostituted in Las Vegas. Oklahoma. I know of a couple of girls that moved to Oklahoma. North Carolina, they moved from Texas to North Carolina, but they were in Virginia first,” Brenda said, looking away still. She squinted when recalling the states. She never said the girls’ names but knew exactly where they had been. Brenda was uncomfortable talking about other women in the gang. Maybe there was a bad memory in there Brenda didn’t want to access. Porter shifted the questioning.

“So once you become a member, what are your requirements? What do you have to do?” Porter asked. It was important for him to establish these facts for those listening. Brenda had their attention now. Alexander was taking notes.

“Well, they tell you the thirteen rules when you get jumped in to MS. Your first requirement is to follow them. You follow the rules like a book. Just like anything else, okay, commandments, I guess. And then you have to put in work for the neighborhood. You always have to do that,” Brenda said. She shifted her weight again in the chair.

“When you say ‘put in work,’ can you be more specific?” Porter asked, prying a little.

“By ‘put in work’ I mean you have to go out and recruit,” Brenda
replied. She started fidgeting again. “You have to go out and kill. You have to go out and shoot. Bring money in for the gang. You have to let everyone know you’re in the gang. That’s how you put in your work.” Brenda didn’t like talking about putting in work. Although she could play the role and keep up the mask of a hardened gangster, she didn’t have what it took to be a killer, or even someone who would harm people. Her history as an MS member was peppered with instances when Brenda had revealed her sensitive side despite herself.

Remembering her interview with Detective Oseguera in Texas, it had hurt her to see him lower the pictures of his family members when she walked into his office. She didn’t want him to think she was someone who would hurt children. Once she had arrived in Virginia, Denis had taken her out to do work, telling her she had to shoot the father of a
chavala
. That was the time when, moments before the hit, Brenda told him she couldn’t do it. Then, when they were out shopping for Hondas, Brenda wouldn’t steal a car with a baby seat in the back. This sensitivity was a weakness in the MS. Deep down, she was a caring, sensitive girl. She liked being part of all the MS parties, but like most members of the Mara Salvatrucha, she resisted doing the real work that made rank in the gang. Brenda had only made rank by dating the leaders and earning respect with her intelligence.

Porter broke the silence with a new set of questions. He was curious to know about what he heard was a growing trend for MS members to keep a low profile, especially the leaders.

“You mentioned that some MS members work. Do members tend to maintain a regular occupation?” Porter asked.

“The smart ones, the ones that are actually out there committing crimes and the ones that are out there actually wanting to look more like a citizen than anything else, those are actually the ones who probably are the hit men for MS or are actually the killers for MS, the clique leaders. They all maintain a job so they can keep a low profile,” Brenda finished. Pens in the room scratched out notes.

With that comment still hanging in the air, Porter thought it was a good time to take a new direction and talk about the gang’s inner workings.

“The meetings with MS,” he began.

“There’s different meetings,” Brenda said, cutting him off. “There’s clique meetings, there’s leader meetings, and there’s
generales
.” Brenda had never been to the meetings. Girls were not allowed. After dating
both Veto and Denis, she was very familiar with what happened at the meetings, down to things that had been said at a number of them. Veto and Denis had often asked her to remember information.

The clique meetings were called
misas
; the men in the room knew that. A few had heard of the
generales,
or mass meetings with any number of cliques gathering together, usually after dark in a large park. None had heard that clique leaders had meetings. They were secretive affairs, and Brenda had only heard of them happening. She never knew when or where.

Brenda continued. “You go to your clique meeting regularly every Saturday or Sunday, every week. And you take your tax money. Taxes can wind up from $10 to $200, depending on what your clique leader wants. A clique leader holds those meetings, and if he doesn’t go, it’s canceled or it’s not. He might have someone below him do it. And in every clique there’s a treasurer. And every clique has a head man, a spokesperson that talks for the clique.”

“Does the treasurer keep a book, an accounting book or something that shows who’s paying and who’s not?” Greg asked.

“If you don’t pay, you’re not at the meeting. So if you’re not at the meeting, you get into trouble. So either way no written files are kept because cops, I guess, they don’t want no one to know how MS runs. But it’s mostly a mental thing. So you know how much money you have, and you know how much money you get every meeting, so you know how much money you should wind up with.”

“So who runs the meetings?” Greg continued.

“The clique leader,” Brenda said matter-of-factly.

“And what about the general meeting?” Greg asked. He knew the men in the room were most interested in the
generales
.

“
Generales
are when all the cliques come. But let’s say someone from LA comes, he can run the meeting. If he wants to intrude, he can run the meeting ’cause he has respect. But Bam-Bam gets to run the Virginia meetings. He’s respected, he’s been in MS a long time and he’s from El Salvador, so that kind of makes him a little bit more of a leader. He takes leadership and runs it. The meetings are set up like this: Everybody waits for each other. Everyone has to be there. No one can be late, no matter what. So you go to the meetings, you give your thirteen seconds. That’s you bow your heads and you give thanks for being alive and all that, good stuff, you know, ‘Forgive me God, I have
sinned’—whatever. You usually always throw the MS sign while you’re doing it for the thirteen seconds. After that everybody collects the money. Then you say, you watch out to see who’s not there. And then everybody who’s not there is noticed at that time. After that you talk about what’s going on. You talk about if anyone’s got arrested, if they need money to get anybody out. Whatever’s going on at that situation of that week, you talk about it. If there’s anyone you’ve got to kill, if there’s anyone you have to hit, you talk about it.”

“And what are you told about dealing with your enemies?” Porter asked, taking over for Greg. There was a specific point he was driving toward, something Brenda hinted at during a previous interview.

“You kill them,” Brenda replied with a serious look. It was a simple answer, but Porter wanted more. He kept silent, and as he had hoped, Brenda filled the silence with revealing information.

“Well, I mean if you’re dealing with an Eighteenth—if you go to school with some guy who, let me just say for example, right? You go to school with some guy who is an Eighteenth Street leader, he’s not going to be waiting for you to just kick his ass. You’ve got to come up with a way to kill him,” Brenda said. Porter kept silent. She continued. “He’s an Eighteenth Street leader, he’s in your territory, he’s in
your
common place. But if it’s just another
chavala
, you just kick them. You fight them, you do anything to put them down and belittle them.” Brenda made a clear distinction about how a leader is treated. The Mara Salvatrucha planned that kill. Porter wanted to drive home the point of discipline and organization.

“If MS-13 wants to kill somebody do they plan the attack?” Porter asked.

“Not all the time because a lot of MS people just act on reaction. But when it’s a big crime that they want to do…they, they plan. They think about it, in meetings they bring it up. They think of how they’re going to kill them. They don’t just do it. But if it’s just in the random street, if he just walks down the street and you walk next to him and he throws another gang sign and you have a gun on you, you just shoot and kill.” The words fell out of Brenda’s mouth in a nonchalant manner. Most of the officers in the room tensed, bristling at the information coming out of this sixteen-year-old girl, the most unlikely of informants. She was relaxed, having a conversation with Detective Porter, someone she grew to like over the weeks. He pushed ahead.

“How about murder for hire? If I know an MS member, even though I’m not MS, maybe we were friends from work or something, can I hire somebody from MS to kill somebody?” Porter asked.

“Yeah. They always do. Money talks in a gang. Money talks,” Brenda said with a shrug. For her it was a matter of fact. For the officers in the room, the possibility that members of the Mara Salvatrucha would kill people simply for money was deeply disturbing.

One of the detectives in the room couldn’t contain himself. He had to ask. “If I wanted MS to kill somebody
tomorrow,
or if I wanted somebody killed, how long would it take MS to send somebody here if I paid them?”

“How long will it take you to give us the money?” Brenda asked, looking in his direction. She was serious.

“If I gave you the money today, how long would it take MS to come up here and…” the detective continued.

“A couple of hours,” Brenda said, still looking at him. “We’ll throw a meeting like that”—Brenda snapped—“just to get a person to do it. Someone’s always going to do it for the money.”

“Would it be somebody local or would they send somebody from out of state?” the detective asked, still not believing what this girl was saying.

“It depends who you want to kill. If it’s just a nobody just anybody local could do it. If you’re talking about killing someone who people are going to give a fuck about, a cop, anybody like that, then we’d probably get other people to do it. More professionalized people and then I guess more people that know how to kill.”

Another silent pause descended on the room. The weight of what Brenda just said hung in the air. The men in the room were digesting one of the most serious revelations of the Mara Salvatrucha they had ever heard. Sure, they thought, MS members extort immigrants for money, even pimp undocumented women and sell drugs from time to time. They have a violent streak, and could be hard to track down because they moved from state to state. But a street gang that was willing to kill anyone for money and one that would plan an assassination, even on a cop? That was new and very disturbing information. It was the most memorable thing Brenda said that day and spurred many in the room to consider how far down the evolutionary path the Mara Salvatrucha had gone from street gang toward true organized crime, the kind only the FBI had the resources and experience to handle.

T
he interview lasted for nearly two hours. Brenda was open and honest about almost everything and left all the men present with a long list of new information and some disturbing insight into the Mara Salvatrucha. Greg and Porter were very pleased with Brenda. The taped interview would go a long way toward proving her knowledge of the gang and willingness to provide information. Porter thought any cop who wanted to know more about the MS should watch the tape. It was the perfect primer for any new gang detective. He thought it should be made into a training video.

After dropping off Brenda at the juvenile detention facility, just across the parking garage from the Massey Building, Greg returned to his thoughts on a strategy to ensure Brenda’s long-term safety. She had again demonstrated how much she knew about the gang, and he was convinced there were MS members on the street who were eager to get hold of her.

Brenda’s immunity from prosecution in Dallas County was the last of Greg’s list of legal hurdles that he’d had to jump in order to keep Brenda out of prison and away from prosecution. He now faced down her emancipation.

Brenda’s emancipation required Greg to argue that she was capable of taking care of herself, but more importantly Greg had to argue that Brenda required a high level of safety, one that could only be provided
by witness protection. She was a proven informant and could only be an asset to federal investigations into the Mara Salvatrucha. The bottom line, he had to argue, was that witness protection was now Brenda’s only option for guaranteed safety.

The emancipation process required numerous court appearances and took much longer than Alexander, Greg, and especially Brenda, had anticipated. October was a tough month. The mid-Atlantic states lived with a three-week reign of terror as two killers, known as the Beltway Snipers, attacked people at gas stations, leaving ten innocent men and women dead and three others critically wounded. It was not business as usual for the area. The Washington FBI field office was working overtime to unravel this top-priority domestic terrorism case. Special Agent Alexander was pulled off Brenda’s case in an all-hand-son-deck effort to button down the Beltway Snipers. It was an inescapable delay in processing Brenda’s paperwork. Frustration mounted.

Meanwhile, the tension and fear surrounding Brenda climbed. On one outing with Greg in mid-October, Brenda lowered herself in the seat after he pulled up to a gas station. She thought he was going to get shot. On a separate incident, Greg and Porter left the Massey Building with a coat over Brenda’s head before placing her in a van for the short drive to the detention center. Throngs of press, gathered to get a glimpse of one of the Beltway Snipers, thought she was Lee Boyd Malvo. Flashbulbs popped like it was a red-carpet event.

The frustration came to a head in court at the end of October. Greg met with Brenda in one of the interview rooms the night before the court case that he thought would be her last. It was a simple space with a small window and venetian blinds. Once both were seated, Greg pulled the blinds shut and explained to Brenda that he thought she would be set free the next day. Brenda was ecstatic. With the exception of the one night she snuck out, Brenda had been incarcerated for nearly four months. She was eager to get out of detention. Before Greg left, he told her that he would see her in court the next day. He gave her a broad smile that barely masked his anticipation. It would be a big day for both of them. Brenda didn’t mask anything. Her smile in return held high hopes and a clear display of trust in her guardian.

The next day, Greg stood in the very same hall where he had once contemplated leaving Brenda to her fate in the Fairfax County juvenile justice system. Just before the hearing, while he was waiting his turn to enter the courtroom, Alexander walked up to him briskly. The special
agent had bad news. Because of the Beltway Sniper events that month, he was not prepared to receive Brenda. Alexander had initially agreed to place Brenda in an FBI safe house while she waited for an entrance date into witness protection, but it was still too soon. He needed more time. Alexander was shooting straight, no sugar coating on anything, and he had a point. The Beltway Sniper case had everyone in law enforcement behind on normal caseload work. Alexander was no exception. Greg frowned as the weight of this situation settled on his shoulders. He was in a tough spot. Even if he did manage to have her charges dropped and win her emancipation that afternoon, he would have nowhere to put her. Worse yet, he couldn’t tell Brenda in a controlled, private atmosphere the bad news before she heard it in court.

Once the hearing started, Greg immediately realized the county prosecutor that afternoon was also going to be a pain in his ass. This guy wasn’t going to let Brenda off that easily. He couldn’t believe it. Everyone in the room knew Greg and Detective Porter had crossed natural boundaries between defense and prosecution to keep an important witness safe. Greg bristled and prepared his defense, but before he could put the prosecutor in his place, the judge bowled him over. Not allowing the hearing to move forward into the procedural arguments to drop the charges, the judge didn’t see why Brenda should be emancipated and made that point with a certain finality at the beginning of the hearing. Greg was against a wall and had to punt. He chose to waive Brenda’s right to a speedy trial. It would give him at least another twenty-one days to prepare a better defense against what he realized would be a considerably more complicated process than what he and Porter had originally thought.

During the hearing, Brenda had sat calmly, but she was paying attention. As the hearing moved forward, with conversations bouncing from Greg to the judge to the prosecutor and back, Brenda quickly put two and two together. She realized she wouldn’t be set free that day. For her, it was a crushing realization. With quick whispers, Greg tried to help her keep herself together, but she stood up and with tears in her eyes asked if she could be escorted out of the courtroom. Sheriff’s deputies walked Brenda out into the hall, where she lost control and began bawling before the door was completely closed. Everyone in the courtroom heard her wracking sobs. It was an extremely hard moment for Greg, who wanted to comfort her but had to remain in court to finalize the hearing. His mind burned with the memory that just the
night before he had told her she would be set free, but the system was set against him that day. Damn the Fairfax juvenile court, he thought as he stood there listening to Brenda cry.

While Greg wrapped up the hearing, officers escorted Brenda back to detention, where she was placed in the general-population holding pen. Greg got over to the detention facility as soon as he could. Alexander was with him, and soon Detective Porter showed up. He had made a quick run to McDonald’s to get Brenda a McFlurry.

She refused to meet with them and threatened to give up. The heavy toll levied by the bureaucracy had gotten to her. Brenda was deeply frustrated with the system and wanted out. She wanted to give up. Fuck these guys, Brenda thought. All they want is my information and don’t care about what I need. Greg knew it would take a monumental effort to convince her that they were there helping her for her own safety, not just for the information she had. It was a precarious moment. Brenda was headstrong, and she was all but ready to stop cooperating.

After over an hour of coaxing and apologies, Brenda finally agreed to meet with Greg, Alexander, Porter, and a social worker to talk through what had happened. It was a tough meeting, and it took a while for her to stop crying. She finally did, but only because she ran out of tears. She had given them her all, and she felt used. She felt like she’d been punked. She’d opened herself up to them and had risked her life to tell them information that everyone knew could get her killed. Greg was in a tough position because the hearing had made him look like he was not on her side. He was desperate to convince her of just the opposite. On that frustrating day in late October, Brenda’s patience for courtroom wrangling and living under lock and key expired. If she had been anywhere but in a detention center, Brenda would have walked away.

Delays were commonplace in court. Greg, Porter, and the rest were accustomed to the bureaucracy. Brenda was not. It meant much more for her to get through the process and into witness protection than Greg or Porter had realized before her breakdown. They felt guilty and redoubled their efforts to support her. Once they were able to calm her down, they embarked on a careful process to bring her back into the fold where they could trust that she understood what was going on and how long it was going to take.

For days after the explosive court case, Greg made a point of meeting with her just to hang out, not to solicit more information. He con
tinued to bring her ice-cream shakes, and to talk to her about the books she was reading, especially
Crime and Punishment
. He also worked with her on practice GED tests. She responded well to the attention. After she passed two practice tests in just ten days of classes, she was ready to take the real one. The detention home, however, wouldn’t allow it. As her legal guardian, Greg was not able to sign off on the GED permission forms. Only her real parents could do that. It was another headache and a slight setback during this delicate time of regaining Brenda’s trust. Greg promised Brenda he would make sure she could take the test once she was in witness protection, but he couldn’t help but feel cynicism creep in as he wondered if she would ever get there.