A Guard In Gangland
When Luis Sandoval went to work for the Texas prison system, he did the wrong favors for the wrong people. But, he insisted, that didn’t make him a murderer.
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Today the numbers still favor the inmates: There are 47,751 of them and only 3,500 security personnel—none of whom carries a gun—per eight-hour shift. At the close of the eighth hour, the shift changes, but the inmates remain. “In your house you can walk around in the dark and not bang your shins because you know every square inch,” said a former Ellis I officer. “Well, so does the inmate. After you sit there for twenty-four hours a day with nothing else to do, you discover all sorts of good hiding places.” Added a current officer, “The only time that we can find drugs is if an inmate snitches and tells us.”
Inmates know their surroundings, and they know that the surroundings are theirs. And as in any society, some lead while others are led. We in the free world classify inmates according to motivation: those who do not wish to live a life of crime and those who know no other life; those who wish only to do their time and get out and those who function best in a kill-or-be-killed environment. As the free world would have it, there are good inmates and bad inmates. But such sentiments are meaningless down on the farm. There are only weak inmates and strong inmates.
Prisoners join gangs, thereby becoming strong, and prey upon the weak. The first major TDCJ gang, a Hispanic group known as the Texans, consisted of former residents who were doing time in California penal institutions in the mid-seventies. To defend themselves against harassment and assault by California prison gangs, they formed their own protection group. Push inevitably came to shove: In two separate gang confrontations, the Texans murdered one California inmate and seriously wounded another. Word spread that the Texans were a force to contend with. Upon their release from prison, gang members returned to Texas, renamed themselves the Texas Syndicate (TS), committed crimes, and wound up in TDCJ, where they developed an extensive network of drug trafficking, extortion, prostitution, and contract murder behind Texas prison walls.
Other inmates reacted to the TS as the TS members had first responded to California gang harassment. Hispanics who were not TS members formed their own gang, the Mexican Mafia, which today outnumbers the TS two to one but is not considered as well organized by prison officials. (Officials also say the Texas Syndicate is far more selective and does not, for example, recruit homosexuals.) Meanwhile, white inmates, tired of being robbed and sexually assaulted by the larger population of black inmates, began the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. The blacks, in turn, formed the Mandingo Warriors. Other gangs also sprang up: the Hermanos de Pistoleros, the Self-Defense Family, the Texas Mafia, the Nuestra Carnales. Each gang had its own hierarchy and its own rules; each member was not permitted to leave his gang, even outside of prison, except by his own death. And each gang, after accomplishing the first objective of protection from other gangs, preyed on inmates who would buy drugs or sex or who could be intimidated into giving sex or buying protection.
Throughout the Sandoval trial, guards on the witness stand were asked if they had ever stopped a gang member from murdering an inmate. The answer was always no said former Ellis I officer Nolan McCool, “If the opportunity exists, they’re gonna make the hit. If you tell him, ‘Put that knife down,’ he’ll look up at you and say, ‘I ain’t through yet.’ These people are serious. If they don’t make this hit, they’ll become the person to get hit. So it may be a week or a month or a year…but that hit is on.”
Today supervisors advise guards: “We cannot stop a hit. So don’t try.” Guards have been instructed to monitor gang activity but have shown an embarrassing inability to do so. At the Ferguson Unit, for example, guards wore special caps sporting a patch designed by an inmate. It took months before someone looked closely at the gas mask featured on the patch and realized that every correctional officer at the unit had been wearing the letters TS across his forehead.
Gangs didn’t worry about guards; they worried about each other. The field for their activities, though fertile, was finite, thus making turf wars inevitable. During August and September of 1985, a long-standing rivalry between the Mexican Mafia and the TS exploded into a free-for-all throughout the prison system, leaving eleven inmates dead. For about three months thereafter, while state officials sought a long-term solution, every prison unit experienced a total lockdown. Every inmate was confined to his cell, stripped of recreation and visitation privileges, and fed sandwiches that guards tossed through the bars of the cell. By the spring of 1986, prison officials had examined every inmate for telltale tattoos, weeded out identifiable gang members, and ordered that they spend the rest of their sentences in administrative segregation, away from the general population.
After the lockdown, the murder rate plunged. Peaceable inmates who had lost faith in TDCJ’s ability to protect them now felt less inclined to carry shanks everywhere they went. A certain order prevailed, which stilled the critics and deflected the interest of the media. Prison officials could boast that their residents stood less chance of being killed than did the average Texas city dweller. By the end of the eighties, the public fretting over prison gangs had dissipated.
But the sudden absence of gang wars did not mean that the gangs had gone away. On the fourth day of the Sandoval trial, as if to punctuate the implicit warning in the testimony that gangs till thrived within the system, a member of the Mexican Mafia stabbed a Hermano de Pistolero to death at the Eastham Unit. Around the same time, prison officials expressed concern about the fifty or sixty members of the two Los Angeles-based black street gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, that had recently entered the system. The youth gangs haven’t caused trouble yet, but the realities of prison life suggest that this will surely change.
The Bloods and the Crips will likely adapt to their new environment just as other inmates do. To make identification difficult for prison officials, most gang members no longer wear tattoos. Uneasy truces between gangs have developed. The 1,577 gang members currently housed in administrative segregation represent only a fraction of those inmates who actually do the gangs’ bidding. Many of the gang leaders who had been doing time are now in the free world, spreading the gang network across the state, beyond prison walls. TDCJ intelligence files indicate that by the close of the eighties, the TS, the Mexican Mafia, and other prison gangs had developed active memberships in every major Texas city, as well as in several small towns. Our prisons, far from turning out reformed citizens, have instead become incubators of a statewide crime wave.
The gang murders that once took place inside prisons now take place on the streets. Prison officials believe that the rivalry between the TS and the Mexican Mafia has produced homicides in Austin, Dallas, Houston, El Paso, and especially San Antonio, where nearly one hundred suspected prison-gang-related murders were committed last year. This past May, the bullet-riddled body of Mexican Mafia member Andres Sampyro was found in a San Antonio barrio.
What sustains the gangs is money, which inmates use to bribe prison employees. The money chiefly comes from drugs. Drugs come from the free world. Prisons, crammed with thrill-seekers and outright junkies, provide the ultimate captive consumers. Each society sustains the other, but the economic cycle depends on a vital link, for the supply will not meet the demand unless the product reaches the consumer. To get drugs out of the free world and into prison cells, there must be a courier. And the courier must possess a particular power: He must be able to walk through walls.
A Call From El Carpintero
“Hey, boss, you got a light?” Luis Sandoval pulled out his lighter and, as he had before, lit the cigarette held by Armando Garcia. (This inmate’s name has been changed as a condition of his interview.) Garcia, a four-time loser serving a life sentence for repeated theft and heroin offenses, was one of the friendlier inmates: 33 years old but actually grandfatherly in demeanor—a gentleman, you could almost say—quiet and unthreatening. And Sandoval welcomed his company.
Sandoval felt more at home with fellow Hispanics than with the black inmates, who terrified him. The five-foot-six, soft-voiced young man had spent most of his life in the South Texas town of Alice, where blacks were scarcely seen. His mother and stepfather lived in a middle-class neighborhood, but most of Sandoval’s friends lived in the barrios or in the projects of Kingsville, where Sandoval attended college for three years. In the tenements across the street from the Texas A&I University stadium lived a fifteen-year-old girl named Veronica, whom he married on June 22, 1985, after learning that TDCJ had accepted his application for employment as a correctional officer, or CO. The next day, a Sunday, the newlyweds threw their possessions into a suitcase and a grocery bag, and drove Sandoval’s Datsun to Conroe. On Monday, at eight in the morning, Sandoval reported for duty at the Ellis I training academy in Huntsville.
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