Six years ago, on a July Tuesday in Los Angeles, members of MS-13’s downtown cell got into a fight with a rival gang. “Porky,” its leader, was none too pleased.
As the “shot-caller” for the Centrales cell, Porky had a lot of responsibilities. He managed its drug trafficking, oversaw the collection of extortion payments, and represented the group at the regular leadership meetings with his counterparts from MS-13’s 20 other L.A. cells.
But on that night in 2011, court documents suggest, Porky wanted revenge for the altercation. He brought together other members of the Centrales cell and handed one of them a gun.
The following day, in a residential area near downtown, the group found the rival gang member and shot him in the chest. He died at a nearby hospital. But Porky’s work wasn’t done. He later returned to the home where the rival was shot and told the woman living there never to talk to the police. Otherwise, he said, “MS-13 would harm her children.”
This dramatic anecdote is part of a blockbuster 127-page federal racketeering indictment unsealed in May. That month, federal and local authorities conducted one of the country’s largest-ever sweeps against MS-13, a Latino gang that started in Los Angeles more than 30 years ago and today operates up and down both coasts and in Texas. In pre-dawn raids, police arrested 21 suspected gang leaders and members. Another 20 MS-13 leaders were already in jail facing federal charges.
There are hundreds of gangs in the United States, but MS-13 stands out for its extreme violence. Members have been blamed for killing two high school girls on Long Island with machetes and baseball bats, stabbing a Baltimore teen 153 times, and beheading a victim in Northern Virginia. President Trump has repeatedly pledged to “destroy” MS-13 and take down the “animals” that constitute the gang, most recently in a high-profile speech to law enforcement in late July.
The L.A. indictment is an inside glimpse of the gang’s operations. Pieced together from years of investigative police work and the testimony of at least eight informants, the document spells out precisely how MS-13 is structured in Southern California and just what it does. Some of the incidents are the stuff of action movies, with kill orders issued and drive-by shootings planned. But many show the more mundane side of thug life, as gang leaders grapple with challenges of how to manage supply chains of crystal meth, administer finances, and rein in hotheaded colleagues.
MS-13 is no simple group of violent street toughs, but neither is it a highly organized, top-down cartel. Rather, it is a loose confederation of small and connected groups with similar operational structures and some common practices. Members have nicknames and follow initiation rituals. The MS-13 leadership grants cells exclusive rights in clearly defined territory, much as you would find in a franchise agreement.
“It is neither completely disorganized nor highly structured,” says Jorja Leap, an anthropologist at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs who studies gangs. “When we go beyond the main story and look at processes and the dynamics and the hierarchy, MS-13 is very reminiscent of a fraternity or a start-up business.”
Obviously, there are major differences. MS-13 works in the roughest neighborhoods of the county’s biggest cities, not in an office. Its products—narcotics and weapons—are illegal. Its methods—intimidation, beatings, and murder—are ruthless.
The gang’s high-profile attacks have bolstered the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration. Building a wall, stepping up deportations, and stripping funding from sanctuary cities are a far easier political sell if there are illegal immigrants on the loose who are cutting off heads and carving up victims with machetes. In Los Angeles, about half of the MS-13 gang leaders charged in May were determined to be here illegally.
When the charges and arrests were announced, local officials went out of their way to avoid offering any credit to the Trump administration. The crackdown had been in the works for months and was the result of years of effort by local and federal law enforcement, they noted. The Los Angeles police chief said the cooperation of victims, many of whom are here illegally, was essential.
At the center of MS-13’s activities in Los Angeles in recent years is Porky, identified in court documents as Jose Balmore Romero, age 44. It’s unclear how he got his nickname, but jail records may offer a clue: He is listed as 5′6′′, 300 pounds.
He was the shot-caller of the Centrales cell, or “clique,” but assumed leadership responsibility for the entire region in 2013 and 2014, law enforcement officials say. Porky and the other shot-callers held regular meetings and functioned as a leadership council that managed the wider gang business. They had occasional contact with MS-13 colleagues on the East Coast but ran their own operation.
There was a lot to do. The key relationship for MS-13’s L.A. leaders is with an umbrella organization known as the Mexican Mafia, a sort of league of Latino gangs operating in Southern California. Like other Latino gangs, MS-13 collects dues from its members—known as “rent” or “taxes”—and remits them on a regular basis to the Mexican Mafia. This guarantees the safety of MS-13 members in prisons and keeps other gangs from moving in on assigned territory. “Failure of MS-13 to pay its tax to the Mexican Mafia will result in a ‘green light’ on MS-13, that is, a general order from the Mexican Mafia to assault or kill any incarcerated MS-13 member in any facility controlled by the Mexican Mafia,” the indictment says.
And so MS-13 leaders find themselves facing an age-old business question: debt collection. The indictment depicts a lot of handwringing about who should collect the rents, just when they are due, and how members might best be prodded to pay. At one point, the leader of MS-13’s Pasadena cell complains that a planned April 2015 meeting had to be canceled because the only gang member with the details on who was paid up could not be present. Shot-callers debate whether to collect the $600 due annually from members or to offer a payment plan of $50 a month.
The consequences of not paying can be severe. In a March 2015 conversation detailed in the indictment, two cell leaders discuss what to do about “Triste,” an MS-13 member who was behind on his rents. If Triste didn’t pay, they agree, then he would be “courted,” or subject to disciplinary action. In MS-13, courting typically consists of beatings by three or four gang members that last 13, 26, or 39 seconds—all multiples of 13.
Such discipline is frequent. One Pasadena member receives a 26-second beating in April 2015 for being disrespectful to another member’s girlfriend. One Coronado member, nicknamed “Bestia,” receives a 39-second beating in October 2014 after getting into a fight with a fellow MS-13 member in L.A.’s Koreatown.
Some infractions are more serious. If MS-13 leaders see evidence that a member is cooperating with law enforcement, they issue a “green light” for that person to be killed on sight.
MS-13 members are beaten for 13 seconds when they join the gang, an initiation ritual known as “jumping in.” If someone is voted out of an MS-13 cell, he is “jumped out,” or given another 13-second beating. In some cases, a gang member “jumps out” of one clique and then “jumps in” to another one, receiving a beating each time.
The bulk of MS-13’s profits, according to court documents, come from the sale of narcotics, and the indictment refers repeatedly to drug deals: who has drugs, who wants them, and how much they will pay. In one conversation in December 2014, a gang member asks Porky about acquiring methamphetamine. But there’s a hitch: The supplier is on vacation. Porky tells the gang member a larger order would get filled more quickly. The two agree to place an order for a half-kilo.
At another point, gang leaders gripe about a new medical marijuana dispensary that opened up near the University of Southern California and how they wish it would move somewhere else. Sometimes, gang members dabble in their own horticulture. In a March 2015 conversation, the shot-caller of the Pasadena clique, “Droopy,” tells a colleague he had received marijuana clones from his cousin and asked advice on whether “to grow his marijuana plants with direct sunlight or in a room under a light bulb.” The next month, the indictment says, Droopy received a call from somebody who had seen on Facebook that Droopy had marijuana for sale. Droopy said he’d give the customer “a good price.” The FBI notes that many gangs have moved aggressively into social media in the last few years.
Another big source of income for MS-13 is from the management of “casitas,” which resemble modern-day speakeasies. They typically operate 24/7 and offer gambling, prostitution, drugs, and alcohol. The indictment details plenty of drug deals going down at the casitas. MS-13 collects a portion of all the proceeds from the illicit activity at a casita. In a November 2016 raid of an MS-13 casita two miles west of the Staples Center, police found 20 grams of meth, a half-gram of cocaine, digital scales, several pistols, a rifle, a shotgun, and 100 rounds of ammunition.
There’s plenty of violence described in the indictment, too—a drive-by shooting, a plot to kill two prison inmates accused of sex crimes, an attack on three people at a Salvadoran nightclub, the killing of a rival gang member outside an Internet café in the San Fernando Valley. Then there are incidents like the one in which a gang member nicknamed “Criminal” robs a victim in 2010, yells “We are MS, motherf—er!” He then “removed a firearm from his waistband and shot one round into the air.”
Most of the action takes place in rough neighborhoods. Leap, the UCLA gang expert, says MS-13 mostly menaces other gangs, not innocent people. She also says its numbers are declining. Years of turf wars and police crackdowns on gang leadership have taken their toll, and inner-city gang-prevention programs are dissuading a new generation of teens from joining.
In announcing the federal charges in May, the acting U.S. attorney for Los Angeles said, “The gang’s power is widespread—power which it maintains with severe acts of violence. Today’s charges and arrests, however, will deal a critical blow to the top leadership of this criminal organization and will significantly improve the safety in neighborhoods across the region.”
Today, Porky remains in Los Angeles County’s Men’s Central Jail. He’s due in court on the murder charge next month.
Tony Mecia is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
