“You Don’t Want to Know What We Do After Dark”

On the streets of southwest Houston, violent gangs are out of control, dealing drugs, robbing businesses, and protecting their turf at all costs. For one longtime member, each day comes down to two simple questions: Will I have to kill? Will I be killed?

by Skip Hollandsworth

December 2006

(Page 4 of 5)

At that very moment, I’m sitting with Alex in one of those apartments he shares with two other homeboys. There is no furniture in the living room and dining room except for a couple of mattresses. In the bedroom, there is a bed and a cheap radio, which is playing MEGA 101 FM, “Latino and Proud.” The apartment doesn’t look as if it’s been renovated since the eighties. The carpets are tattered, the walls need paint, and the kitchen refrigerator doesn’t get cold. For this, the rent is $650 a month.

“This place—this apartment complex—is that important to you?” I ask, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.

“El Bolillo,” Alex says, “this is my life. This is the only life I have. I’m not going let someone f— with my life.”

A MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT for a Fortune 500 company would be utterly vexed trying to figure out how gangs are organized and how territories are split up. There is, for instance, no single leader or command structure within the Southwest Cholos, despite the fact that the gang operates mostly out of southwest Houston. To further complicate matters, each gang is made up of cliques that basically operate as independent gangs and are usually divided up by streets, parts of streets, entire apartment complexes, or parts of apartment complexes.

If, for instance, you ask a gangbanger what gang he’s “claiming”—a gangbanger never says he “belongs” to a gang; he always says he “claims” a gang—he might say, “I’m a Cholo from Glenmont.” That means he’s a member of a clique of Southwest Cholos who hangs out on a particular block of Glenmont Drive, where a few members of the clique (though not necessarily all of them) have apartments. Likewise, when he talks about defending his hood, he’s often talking about the area around Glenmont, not the actual neighborhood itself.

Rarely, if ever, do all the Southwest Cholos—or the entire membership of any other gang, for that matter—get together for a mass meeting. Each clique does its own thing. If one of the cliques wants to run drugs and prostitutes on its street, it has that right. If it simply wants to charge rent to existing drug dealers and prostitutes and sell protection to the nearby businesses, it can do that too.

The decisions about the clique’s activities are loosely made by the clique’s OGs. But unlike a Mafia family, a clique has priorities other than making money. It’s a lot like a college fraternity. If you’re in one, you hang out with your fellow homeboys, you party with your homeboys, you trade girls with your homeboys, you loan your homeboys money when they need it, and you go out and get into trouble with your homeboys.

What’s more, in the same way that the fraternities on fraternity row stay out of one another’s way, the gangs of the southwest apartment complexes usually maintain an uneasy truce, abiding by certain codes of conduct. It is acceptable, for instance, for one gang member to go into another gang member’s territory as long as he does not show his colors or flash his sign. “And any good gangster knows he doesn’t go after another gangster if one of the mothers is around,” says Alex. “That’s bullshit. You know you’re supposed to show your mothers respect.”

But when disputes arise, gangs don’t go to some sort of council the way fraternities do. A gang that thinks it has been dishonored by another gang will do whatever is necessary to win back its respect—such as a drive-by. That in turn forces the other gang to respond with its own drive-by.

These wars can last for months or even years. In the mid-nineties the Southwest Cholos and the Mara Salvatruchans actually had an alliance. But according to local legend, about six years ago a well-known MS-13 homeboy was shot to death by a Cholo, and the war has been going on ever since. The rivalry is so established that when I recently asked Caroline Dozier, a prosecutor for the Harris County district attorney’s office who specializes in gang crime, why an MS-13 gang member was about to be tried for murder, she shrugged and said, “Oh, the usual reason. He shot a Cholo in a drive-by.”

Many large cities have an MS-13 gang. Each one operates independently, and just like the Southwest Cholos, there are various cliques within each city’s gang. It is true that in recent years MS-13 gang members from Central America have illegally crossed the border and gotten involved with one of the gangs already here. Many of them are more violent than the homegrown Mara Salvatruchans. Still, they haven’t significantly changed the balance of gang warfare. One day, Alex took me to lunch with a young MS-13 member named Fernando who had just arrived from Guatemala. He had tattoos on his body but not on his face (when newspapers run stories about MS-13, they tend to run photos of the Central American members who are in prison and have facial tattoos), he dressed nicely, and though he couldn’t speak any English, he said, as best as he could when lunch was over, “Thank you, sir,” and he shook my hand.

“Is Fernando some sort of trained killer?” I later ask Alex, thinking about some of the alarmist articles I had read about MS-13.

“El Bolillo, you are such a f—ing goofy-ass gabacho,” Alex says. “Fernando’s working at a shirt embroidery shop in the neighborhood, making $6.50 an hour.”

After dropping out of high school, Alex had also worked at that shop, and he’s also worked for his uncle’s roofing company, making $10 an hour. As far as I can tell, that’s his main source of income, which allows him to pay for his rent, cell phone, and food. Alex is obviously not in the gang for the money. He has no car, he doesn’t have the money for his own apartment, and he doesn’t buy many clothes. When I ask him what he does for money when he’s in a tight spot, he gives me one of his smiles and says, “Oh, don’t worry. I know what to do.”

ALEX’S ADULT CRIMINAL RECORD is relatively skimpy: just three convictions for drug possession and one conviction for assault. A law enforcement official told me that Alex’s juvenile record, which by law he could not reveal, is “far more impressive,” involving a variety of thefts.

Alex regaled me with numerous stories of crimes he has committed for which he was not arrested. At the age of thirteen, he says, he stole several cars from the parking lot of the Bellaire Square apartments (a Cholos hangout) and sold them. He and other gang members, he says, broke into a Wal-Mart in a failed attempt to get into the cash registers to get money to pay for a fellow homeboy’s bail.

Most of his stories, however, are about battles with rival Cholos who, in some way, have shown “disrespect” (one of Alex’s favorite words). He says he started a fight with a Cholo at one of the neighborhood nightclubs by “stacking” him: using both of his hands to flash gang signs, one right after the other—similar to what a third-base coach does in baseball. (Among the signs he displays is one that shows the Cholos being shot down and rubbed out, which is almost guaranteed to provoke a brawl.) He says he was part of a team of MS-13 members who shot at a Cholo coming out of a party. (He refuses to tell me whether the Cholo was wounded or killed.) He also says he is sometimes used as the driver in the gang’s drive-bys “because I know all the shortcuts and how to disappear down the back alleys.”

In fact, directly below the MS-13 tattoo on his back is another tattoo that reads “El Rata”—the Rat. It’s his gang nickname, which he says has little to do with his slight stature. “Once I do my business, I get away,” he says. “I scurry away just like a rat from the cops, from other gangs, from anyone else who’s after me. If I didn’t get away, you wouldn’t be talking to me. I’d have been dead a long time ago. Think about it, El Bolillo. I’m about to turn twenty-one, and I’m still on the streets. Not too many other f—ing gangbangers in the barrio can say they’ve been doing it as long as I have.”

BUT THE QUESTION IS, How long can Alex keep doing it? During one of my trips in September to the neighborhood, I began hearing rumors that some of the Cholos had put out a hit on Alex. “There’s a tag on my head, yeah, but there’s always been a tag on my head,” he says when I see him.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5  next »