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MS-13

THE MAKING OF AMERICA'S MOST NOTORIOUS GANG

A cleareyed account of a criminal enterprise that is undeniably a threat to civil society wherever it turns up.

Trenchant history of the gang that Donald Trump has called as dangerous as al-Qaida.

MS-13, which takes its name from the enigmatic Spanish phrase “Mara Salvatrucha,” is now 40 years old, and it has members throughout the U.S. as well as El Salvador. Owing to a vicious civil war between a government backed by the Reagan administration and communist guerrillas, tens of thousands of Salvadorans fled to the United States, with a particularly strong presence in Los Angeles. Two refugee brothers founded MS-13 to protect their community from other gangs—and then, over time, discovered that they could gain power and wealth by controlling segments of the drug trade and other criminal enterprises. Now, journalist Dudley writes, MS-13 is a loosely organized gang that “had grown by coming at their enemies in waves, like a marabunta, or army of ants, as the street gangs were baptized so many years ago in El Salvador.” The gang is marked by several signatures, including heavy tattooing and a tendency to kill their victims with machetes, chopping them to bits. Like any gang, Dudley observes, MS-13 is both a product of its environment and a shaper of it, strengthening social bonds “via violence and predatory criminal acts.” Gang life is also far from romantic, as he reveals, marked by excessive drug and alcohol use, that constant violence, and, often, homelessness—landlords are reluctant to rent to gang members who treat their properties as “a crash-pad, a party-place, a meeting spot, a stash house, a torture chamber, a brothel or all of the above.” The gang is also dominant in places such as LA, New York, and even Washington while its members travel freely back and forth to El Salvador, bribing the authorities to look the other way.

A cleareyed account of a criminal enterprise that is undeniably a threat to civil society wherever it turns up.

Pub Date: May 12, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-335-00554-0

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Hanover Square Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


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Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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