Gangs 3

What’s really amazed me through the years is how our government has done little or nothing to combat the gang problem that’s plagued America. I mean there has always been gangs as far back as I can remember. I am fifty-seven and I always remember hearing about gangs. Of course, gangs from the past, way in the past, like when I was a kid growing up usually consisted of a bunch of young kids from different neighborhoods fighting each other over who had the toughest gang but in today’s times things are way different. Every prison and every major city across the United States have been affected in some way because of gangs. They are no longer a bunch of young kids fighting to see who the toughest gang is, the gangs today are well organized criminals who have literally flooded the streets and prisons with every drug imaginable and left thousands of murdered people along the way.

To give readers an example of these men and how ruthless they can be, at one prison there were four Aryan Brotherhood members living in a five man cell together, all from LA, a new white guy was put in the cell with them and right away they tell him who they are. The new guy likes to get high, so they sell him some heroin. After a few weeks of living with him they noticed he received visits almost every week from his wife. One night they asked him if he wanted to get high but he said “I can’t, I don’t have any money.” One gang member told him don’t worry, we are fixing to all do a shot ourselves, this one is on the house. So, after they get high, one of them says “Look, we see you’re getting visits and we were thinking we might be able to help each other. Your wife is out there working, taking care of the house, your kids and sending you money, we believe we that we can help you.” He asked how? “We have some friends who live close to your wife, we can have someone go by your place and drop some balloons of heroin off to her, we will also drop off some money, that way she can come each week to visit you for free. All you have to do is swallow them, come back to the cell and shit them out. We will also give you some balloons, now you’ll never have to worry about having to pay for your fix ever again.” The guy called his wife and they both said it sounded like a good idea. So, she comes to visit the very next week, during the visit he swallows the balloons and everything went well. He goes back to his cell and tries to use the rest room, but can’t. One of the guys gives him some medicine to help him go. The next day he goes, but no balloons. Two days later he still hasn’t shit any balloons. The gang members are getting mad now, one of them asked “Did you swallow the balloon?” “yes.” he said. So, he takes more medicine to help him go. By the fourth day, these dudes are infuriated, one of them accused him of lying and while they were arguing one guy hit him over the head with a steal pipe, knocking him unconscious. Then he stabbed him in the heart, cuts the guy open and pulls out his intestines. He started running his intestines through his fingers until he found what he believed to be the balloons, cut the intestines open and pulled out all the balloons. One of the guys makes a joke, “I’ll be damned, he wasn’t lying.” The man who cut him open, washed the balloons off, fixed a shot for everyone and afterward left this man on the floor for the guards to find. Forget this man did what they asked him to do, forget that he had a wife and children, none of that matters with these types of men. As long as they get what they want, at the end of the day, they got their drugs, were able to get high and make some money. Plus, they also knew murdering someone like this instilled fear in the rest of the men throughout the prison.

I remember another time when the Aryan Brotherhood killed a black guy, cut his head off, then they walked around with his head so everyone could see it. Whether it was the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, or Texas Syndicate, they all wanted to be known for how brutal they were. Everyone around them was sacrificial. Even though gangs had been around for decades, these three gangs were the start of a new breed of gangs.

Like I talked about in my last chapter, whether it was others around them in prison or the homeless women they were using in the street to transport money and guns into Mexico, everyone around them was used to accomplish their goal. Nothing else matters with these men. As the years passed by these three gangs grew in numbers both in and out of prison. The men who were running the show from inside prison started expanding their numbers on the street by having the men they trained start sending men to other states and setting them up in the drug business. Naturally these men would meet people and start prospecting them to join their gang. When these men would get busted and go to prison, they would start recruiting men inside the prison. Now these three gangs had spread from California to most of the west coast. Oddly, the Texas Syndicate had actually started in California, but they went back to Texas and it had quickly spread throughout the state, especially in the prison system.

The Aryan Brotherhood also came to Texas and took off and is still going strong to this day. When the Mexican Mafia showed up in Texas, it started one of the longest, deadliest wars inside of the Texas Prison system that they had ever seen. It left countless people dead and hundreds of others stabbed or beat so bad that they could hardly function on their own. Prisons across California and other states went from having to break up a few fights from time to time, to full scale wars between hundreds of prisoners with pipes, shanks and anything else they could use. Needless to say the prison systems weren’t ready for this. Even the bigger states like California and Texas were at a loss on what to do at first. The prison guards and administration were not ready for what was taking place, especially in Texas. Texas went from a few dozen prisons to way over one hundred prisons in the 1990’s. A lot of these prisons were out in the middle of nowhere, so a lot of the guards and staff that were hired, were country people that had no idea how to deal with a full-scale riot.

On three different occasions during my fifteen years in Texas, riots between gangs has gotten so out of control that the prisons had to call the National Guard. It wasn’t just the different gangs having trouble. Let’s say a new guard or even a guard that had been there a while, wouldn’t accept a bribe from them and became a problem to these gangs, the heads of these gangs would take this opportunity to sacrifice some of their crash dummies. I mean after all that is the only reason, they brought the crash dummies in their organization.

They knew these men would never be made members; they just lead them along like they are a part of their gang. Now they would call some of them to the side and say “We are having some trouble from this guard, when he or she comes inside the cell block we want you two to beat them so bad that they have to be carried out of here to the hospital. Don’t stop beating them after you knock them out, after they are laid out on the ground, we want you to kick ‘em in the face over and over until they come in and pull you off. Then we want you to start yelling, this is what happens to any guard who does something wrong to the Aryan Brotherhood or Mexican Mafia or whatever gang they belong to.” These different groups wanted it to be known who did this so that it would instill fear in all the others who worked there.

This type of brutal attacks and intimidation worked well on the rest of the staff. Especially in Texas, because of the big prison boom, they started hiring people who had no business working in a prison. There are people so fat that it is hard for them to just walk through the cell block for count because they are so out of shape. There are too many elderly guards and prisons that are mostly women. I’m not trying to cut these people down or say they shouldn’t have jobs, but because of the huge prison boom in the 1990’s, Texas was forced to hire anybody and everybody they could, and because of that there is literally thousands of people not qualified working in the prison system. Which gave these different gangs the perfect opportunity to grow and pretty much take over. After a gang had some of their crash dummies savagely beat by a guard, they would laugh and tell the other guards, “See what happens when you fuck one of us over?” After brutal attacks, or in some cases murders, the guards realized that they had lost total control of their prison system and these gangs also realized they were in control. So, prisons across our country were being taken over by these gangs and still to this day our government has done very little combat this problem. It’s so far out of control now that it’s not just affecting the prison system, but almost every major city in the United States.

In my next chapter I’ll explain the destruction these gangs have caused, and how other gangs broke off from these gangs.