excellent. if you work at ms-13, st come it is a must read. when i read it i asked tom if he would come out and do this and give some insight from a non-law enforcement perspective and tom has written several books on terrorism, or a book on terrorism, and other books. he is also an attorney and is home based out of washington, d.c.. we've known each other a good few years. we have talked about gangs for a long time. tom? [applause] ..

>> it was about 12 years ago when i was working with an independent television producer. she was working on a documentary about gangs in the military. i meant wes then. i also met atf supervisor agents now. nothing has been changed. i think the documentary showed that it was different. the full title of my book, if you are interested, is "no boundaires: transnational latino gangs and american law enforcement." when i talk about the book i

just call it "no boundaries". yesterday somebody asked me what the title was. i could not remember any of it. i don't know. i came to this conference three years ago. i was hoping to get an interview with wes. i did not realize how busy he was. he told me graciously told me come on out. i got about two minutes. he said come back when i'm not so busy. i did. i had a very long and interesting conversation with them. another person i did meet in 2006 when i came out hear was bruce riordan. he is now the director of the anti-gay operations for the city attorney of los angeles. in 2006 when i cannot hear he was an assistant district attorney in los angeles and he was and present time won a landmark federal racketeering

case. they were doing extortion under the command of frank pablo martinez. it has been said before, last wes and bruce all represent this team effort of what is necessary to get at this problem. they don't agree on everything, and sometimes they disagree. i don't know of anything you can think of that wes mcbride agrees with entirely every single item of. he is an independent man. i talk about bruce riordan. when i walked into his office something struck me. he had one of these sitting on a table in his office. i may not be the smartest lawyer in washington, and i may not be the best journalists in america, but i figured there was a story behind it. this is the kind of helmet that

was worn by soldiers in the british empire in the late 19th century when the british empire was in its glory, and they used to say the sun never sets on the union jack meaning that the british flag was flying somewhere in the world. there is the story about this helmet and about bruce, and it relates to you. i'm going to put this away for now and tell the story a title bit later. i'm not a gang expert. you're the gang experts. i am a writer. "no boundaries" is not an academic work. not a textbook concept sociology. it not is an encyclopedia of latino gangs. it is not a handbook for investigators. there are very good books like that that i have read that are available. some of them on the web site of the cgia written by gang detectives in orange county. but what my book, "no boundaries," and it is a work of

journalism, narrative nonfiction. it tells real stories about real people in real cases. i aim to describe through the story the story of the traumatic birth, the turbulent growth, and the violent criminal activity of the major transnational latino criminal gangs and the response of you all, american law enforcement, to those things. now whatever else "no boundaries" may be or how it may be described it is a sort of travelogue. it's a journey into an exceedingly violent gang -- excuse me, an extremely violent land within a land. and that land is one which most americans and unfortunately some in law enforcement know it's out there. but they probably frightened by it, but they don't know the details of it and don't understand it. i hope to communicate through "no boundaries" some of the texture of the latino gang

world. i want to take you on the tour of that land from my perspective today, and i want to talk about five subjects: change, carnage, culture, character, and challenge. the five c's. i was thinking about having four c's and a v, the v being violence. now the four c's and a v. wes suggested that i became the talk a little bit about how i came to write this. looking for something else to

write. why don't you look at ms-13? at that time they ranked gang. and ms-13 was on the top of the list. it is no coincidence right about that time the fbi started their ms-13 national gang task force. i was fortunate enough to get an extremely good public affairs representative who helped me through that part of it. however, when i started looking into the subject of gangs i was really hooked on it. i thought it was important and interesting. there were really two obstacles. the first is, there are a lot of different kinds of latina gangs and subsets, sometimes called clicks. they range from the organizations that belong to a single block or to those of you from suburban or rural areas, a little area to the regional gangs that operate across large states to the big transnational

gangs like ms-13 and the 18th streeet gang. but it is worth noting that at every level when you're talking about the street gang. the western hemisphere all these things confronts a society with one fundamental society. there is no way i could write about all of these. i decided to the focus on the ms-13 and the 18th street gang. they both embody what people call the california gang style or the california gang culture, especially as it exists today because they were both born here, developed in ways out talk about later. the other characteristic of this gang is that they both operate transnationally. some debate about how well organized they are, but they are at least loosely organized across international borders. and they conduct crime across those borders. that is where the book's title

came from, "no boundaries." i also wanted to show the variety of latina gangs and how they differ among themselves. so i wrote a research about the original latin kings and chicago. they call chicago their motherland. the natural reaction, miami. they must have a lot of latino gang problems. i got some very interesting and different perspectives down there. i write about them in the book. there are other the for gangs or of other latino gangs that play cameo roles throughout "no boundaries". my second big obstacle is you all. law enforcement people are notoriously or -- perhaps notorious is not the best way, but closed mouth, especially about talking to writers. some of that completely understandable. you don't want to jeopardize the investigation or the prosecution. some of you have been burned. some of you just don't feel

comfortable talking to civilians or outsiders. either it that an introduction from one police officer to another is essential often to get door's open. sometimes the doors are opened. sometimes they are open and shut. most often the stories behind the stories. over and not the time i was able to develop a network of several score of people in law enforcement, and i was able to attend an international anti-gang conference in el salvador. to my knowledge they still do it every year. i learned some very interesting things from the international perspective. research is the biggest part of writing a book. people often ask me how long it took. the research is the biggest part. i spent three years researching the gang.

the sources, people like law-enforcement. second, this is mostly over looked. the actual records of criminal cases. i examined in detail a number of criminal cases, and then i read books, magazine articles. no one has written down the knowledge, and i don't think they could write down all the knowledge that resides in the minds of gang investigators, prosecutors, other people like you all, wes mcbride, bruce riordan. so the best you can help to do is to mine out of there perspective. well, out of all these sources i arrived at the five themes that i've wanted to talk about today. when i was in the military they used to say tell them what you want to tell them and then tell them what you told them. change, carnage, culture, and

character, and challenge. i will start with change. the biggest concept is change. the gangs are a product of change around them. they're changing themselves. law enforcement has changed. we heard some of that earlier. the most important question from my point of view that you might as during this week of training is not only what is, it's what is going to be. what does the future hold? and the same way that southern california; houston, texas; washington d.c.; miami, florida; chicago are not the same today as they were in 1940 or 1950 the latina gangs are not the same today as they were when they started. some started in the '20s. really took off in the '40's. different from when they were in the '50's, '60's and '70's and

'80's. even in the '90's there are some differences that you can see. of course law enforcement has changed, too. now the big transnational institutionalized latino gangs did not just fall out of the sky. they are not just a random collection of bad boys who would become angelic and productive citizens of respect and around enough or hard enough. they are the product and market of really vast changes that have swept over our society, the united states and the world over the last several decades. for example, war in central america, which i don't think anybody in the 1980's -- i was in central america in 1985. had the foresight to think through, well, what is that going to mean domestically. if you look at the history of

mara salvatrucha, about 1 million salvadorans immigrants ended up in different places. big concentrations in the los angeles area. big concentrations in the washington d.c. area, the two areas where complex groups named mara salvatrucha grew up. another factor, the big chicano pride movement. a bunch of latinos that could not show that they were necessarily of pure mexican heritage founded another gang. they called it the 18th street gang. in the inimitable words of los angeles police department's gang detective frank flores, a little bit. they were getting their butt kicked. we will open the flood gates.

the gang grew. it all happened within the last 20 years. those forces are unpredictable. wars, other forces that we can talk about that are really at the guts of our political life today, and we have heard reference to them. the changes that i write about and talk about, economic restructuring in the united states and the world, something we call globalization. immigration patterns that define national borders and ignore immigration laws, transnational crime, and the federalization and growing internationalization of law enforcement. these changes today force us as the people to face issues that are sometimes very divisive, but they are at the core of why these latina gangs exist in the form they do today. one of the biggest of these changes was a fundamental change in the american economy. in less than a single lifetime, the lifetime of maybe your parents or grandparents, certainly my parents, the face

of the american worker changed from basically the factory worker to what we call an associate in the service and information industries. the factories in just close in pittsburgh and cleveland and chicago. there were factories in southern california that made cars. those all disappeared, and then we became you have to be a computer scientist or you push members across the counter. those things all changed. you add to this the change that cheif bratton referred to, the preparation of semiautomatic high-capacity firearms and the rise of the lucrative drug industry, the most profitable business in the world. you add all that together and you have got in the case of latina gangs are really harsh crucible. they were transformed, and they were hardened during this. they went from what they were in the '40's to some extent even

into the 50's, called fighting gangs. some people even called them tomato gangs. they were called tomato gangs because they stole tomatos from the carts and throw them at its other when get into fights. that changed. they became violent, and it became overtime members of gangs that went to prison primarily for drug purposes. they became as the juices of as education. they became rooted in the community. all kinds of changes. these changes economically have the following impact. particularly for immigrants. it used to be it did not matter whether you spoken hungarian,

german, french, italian, spanish. if you could get a job in a factory you could do that. that was a rung on a ladder that you pull yourself and your family up on. with the manufacturing jobs disappeared it became much harder. announcing these are the only reason is that things exist because they existed before this. a major impact on how gangs hardened. the alternative for the gang members. the cabin between the office suite and hot food counter at mcdonald's or you name your fast food place became just too far if you could not get a handle on the industrial ladder. that is true for all young people. we are still dealing with the problem today. and then there is something that we call globalization. jobs went offshore. sweatshops came on shore. that affected not just gangsters, but all youth. gangsters are drawn to the youth who are affected most directly by these economic trends. global transportation, communication network. the transnational criminal

organizations. especially, but not exclusively the drug trade exploit these changes. very adaptive. a move very quickly and have the funds to get to them. they seized upon the gangs as natural connectors. wherever you are from if you have gangs they are natural places for these bigger transnational organized crime groups deployed in and sometimes they provide useful muscle. migration changed all of this also. today almost any migration dream is siezable. whether you are talking about china or america, central america or the middle east. migration is seasonal. so that is all changed. that has all presented an obvious problem. the gangs continue to change. they are not static. they are not mechanical devices that wind up. if you could just smash that one gear they would stop.

i discuss in "no boundaries" -- people often say southern california is the epicenter of gangs. epicenter is a term we use when we talk about earthquakes. it is a mechanical time. the epicenter is the point right about where the earthquake boom and pieces fall down. but it implies a kind of mechanical relationship. i say gangs are not like that. gangs are made up of human beings. they are organic. they learn. they adapt. they exploit the world around them as it changes. they watch what you do, and they learn from what you do. so the gang of yesterday is not the gang of today. and the gang of tomorrow is not going to be a gang of today. as a professor at the u.s. army war college who has written about this evolution of gangs. he talks about generations of gangs. the first generation were the

bario gangs. unfortunately a lot of people today romanticize these gangs as if that were a period of sweetness and love and ethnic community. but in the contrast. that was the third-generation. the third-generation gangs are the ones we're talking about today, ms-13 and 18th street gangs. connections to major criminal groups are heavily armed and are really only about criminal profit. i talked about sweat shops earlier. sweat shops coming on board. in my opinion the world's biggest was shot today is the trade in illegal drugs. gang life sells itself to its young recruits as a refuge. it is portrayed as a brotherhood that provides family to respect, and glamor. reality it is bloody, sorted, dangerous, and a tool of

explotation. many gangs today, especially the bigger gangs are really nothing more than a violent criminal enterprises. they wear the clothes of the bario and speak the language, but in reality they practice the life of traditional organized crimes. clever and ruthless few, the shot callers, the big homies who sieze leadership of these gangs injury wealth and enormous profits. they found a cardboard box with a half a million dollars in cash in frank "puppet" martinez's mother-in-law's closet. that was just something that was there when they executed the major search warrants. but the loyal poorly-compensated foot soldiers of these enterprises, the rank and file gang members are really in effect slaves. here is what they are enslaved by. inslaved by deeply breading concepts in the latino community of manhood, pride, and loyalty to one's bario and the gang.

then gang number ms-13, 18th street and the colors are in affect invisible chains. and it is these meager surfs provide them pilot muscles through which the criminal enterprise asserts its control and disciplines those to dissipate. maybe the gangsters aren't toiling in sweat shops, but they are toiling in the drug industry. if you'll get some of these gangs most of the latino gangs have adopted the familiar model of traditional organized crime. that means extortion, smuggling, opportunistic crime of any sort, and the development, the development of skills and assets, networks that can be plugged in and used as needed. the gang extortion that i write about and see most takes the

form of so-called taxation. sometimes they call renta. taxation of drug dealers. but they also tax, extort people who sell tacos from vending stands or whatever opportunity there is. drugs just happens to be the most lucrative. there is an impressive indictment that was handed up last month in los angeles of ms-13, and that indictment lays out in detail in the case of ms-13 and the mexican mafia has all the taxing scheme worked. the click taxes the drug dealer. they have all hierarchy. and then some of that goes to the mexican mafia. now, you all know better than i do generally and in response to gangs. i will talk about two things.

first general path of reform of law enforcement agency over the next century. if you look at the history of police agencies, in particular 100 years ago they were widely recognized as the corrupt tools of basically political bosses. if you had not gone on line and read the los angeles police department official history i would suggest you do it. they are very candid about what things were like 100 years ago. that has all changed. now we have the professional highly-trained organization that you all represent. part of that development and training has been learning about gangs and reacting to gangs in different ways. los angeles police department use to deal with the latino gang problem in the 1940's. they had a few, what they called mexican officers. they sent them down into the barios. there were some cataclysmic events that happened in los angeles. police had to change the way they dealt with it. went through a whole history of

different ways of dealing with gangs. the los angeles police department is credited with the first model of the gang unit. the other remarkable changes, the involvement of federal law enforcement. in the early 1990's people in washington dismissed gang crime they called it street crime. and many agencies said we are not going to get our highly-trained professional agents involved in street crime. that is something that is the only appropriate for basically street cops. well, events in the early 1990's change that. i write about them in some detail. a huge riot in los angeles. happens to be during the president's election year. some people call that the rodney king riots. one of the fallout was that it was seen that gang members were intimately involved in a lot of the violence, a lot of the pillage, a lot of the death and

fire. surprisingly enough it is often thought of as an african american riot. really later it was determined that the bulk of the organized violence was done by a latina gangs. now, that that the federal government's attention in a preliminary way. there were other things going on. the so-called crack epidemic. but the point is that over the last 15 years the federal government has become much more intimately involved and the fact that atf, fbi, dea, they all have some kind of program and are all part of the team concept and racketeering concept that the federal government brings to the table. well, i talk about these historical, social, economic forces that shape latina gangs. in one way, however, it is interesting as all those forces

are they don't matter. they don't matter because u.s. law enforcement officers have to do with the gang as it yesterday. you have dead deal with the gangster as he or in some cases she is today. it doesn't matter with the forces are. you have to deal with the gangsters as they are today. so let's talk a little bit about what they are. if i could send one postcard from the gangland that i looked at in the course of researching the book i have two words. that would be, harmless violence. the plain truth emerges. this is where street gangs ultimately do. they are religiously and consistently violent. violence is simply what they do in real life. there are many reasons that they do violence. discipline, territorial control, revenge, rivalries, something called respect. gang life may and does include

hours of ethnic and brotherly bonding. there are nights and days of chemically-assisted partying where nothing much goes on. you just hang out. there are weeks of just listless being around that creep by. but sooner or later in the land of the gangs that i write about violence erupts. the bloody assault, the brutal murder, and the casual death of innocent bystanders. one of the two people i dedicated my book to was such an innocent bystander in chicago. her name was anna mateo. her family was a model of mexican immigrants immigration to the united states, good, hard-working, building a new and productive life in chicago.

the largest latino community of los angeles. seven years old when she was struck in the back of the head by an .9 mm bullet. it was fired two blocks away by a 16-year-old gangster named juan garcia. he was a member of a gang called the latin council. garcia was chasing a guy down the street who he thought mistakenly was a member of another gang. pop, pop, pop, pop. mateo died in the arms of her mother. there is no gang squad whose members can tell similar stories. innocent bystanders killed. the point is every gangster is at least capable of that violence. because a gangster culture has

normalized and rationalized violence, so that being an instant killer is no longer in that culture a bad thing. it is a good thing. .. >> or when respect demands revenge.

or when a rivalry, some beef that nobody can remember how it started demands that you go out and take somebody else's life. a gang prosecutor in chicago, put it this way, somebody says hey, that is the day when pick your name got killed. let's go out and kill somebody from the other gang. why? it's just what they do. to me the testimony from the 8th street gang. a guy was convicted. they were asking him, what is the gang? they call us to do things. sometimed it's graffiti and sometimes it's a drive by. they call it work. they make it sound like the same

thing. sometimes i spray paint, sometimes i kill somebody. the gangsters who refused faces expulsion and will probably suffer violence themselves. which brings us to gangster culture. gangster values are completely different from and hostile to everybody that we've learned about culture in the last few years. in 2006, i interviewed with police officer who is an fbi analyst and expert on gang culture. when i interviewed him, i asked him, i read an article that he wrote, i asked him, and he turned the table and started asking me questions. this is how the conversation went paraphrased.

do you have any children? me, yeah. him, do you teach them values? now i'm thinking where is this going? he said, well, turn those values upside down and you will understand the gang culture. everybody you think is good, they think is bad. and vice versa. at the time, i thought he was exaggerating. after three years of research, i don't think so. i write in detail about a number of gang assaults and murders, three of them have strings that start and involve one way or another one particular female gangster. you may have heard of brenda. it starts with the murder of a kid named fabiera. he was just a kid who worked. he had a very nice call that he

liked. and it had some of these big, shiny wheels on it. he had the misfortune to cross paths with ms13 members in dallas texas. they wanted his wheels. they took him off somewhere in the boggy area, and they killed him. the kicker is it was raining. they couldn't figure out how to get the lug nuts off. they so just left without the bike. there she got involved with a gang number who killed another young man who name was joaquin diaz. one the gang leaders thought that joaquin was a member of a rival gang. turns out he wasn't. but it didn't make any

difference. the gangster said we're going into the district, we're going to get some weed, come with us. they took him to a little island south of the washington national airport. this is several days after 9/11. it did not get any attention. and they slit his throat. they didn't get cut it, they cut out his la -- laranx. i wrote about brenda. she had a habit, she kept diets and notes, she kept the diary and business cards of law enforcement people that was involved in a traffic stop.

for some reasoned she died i'm ready to talk. she unrolled a lot of information. i believe it's probably still unrolling. her habit of keeping a diary and business cards, some of her homies, first started they found one of her business cards. and it was one of the women who had borrowed her purse. what's this? you have a detective's card. she was able to explain that away. the fact as i recall, they couldn't believe that she turned against the gang. she was a lovely person. later on, it's a long story. she kept basically bailing out of the witness security program that she had been put in. they got papers on brenda. they took her out to this little community on the other side of the blue ridge mountains on the valley of virginia. and she was pregnant by one of

the gangsters. and they hacked her to death. how bizarre, odd, and interesting, thread that ties all of these three dayses together. the bodies were found by fisherman. think of that, your ordinary john q citizen going for a day of fishing, and he finds a dead body in texas, another one in or near washington, d.c., and the third a father and his son find brenda. what struck me was the enthusiasm which with the gangsters talking about their killing about hacking out a already nix. about killing someone just for the bike that they ultimately couldn't get. i write about another in the transnational aspect. a horrible killing. some of you may have seen the

video. i've seen grown men wiping away the tiers. i tears from their eyes. i went to a place called hon duh rays where a gangster who was the tapeworm master minded this video to the government. you push us, we'll push back. christmas eve and the day before you go shopping, you get gifts, you have a big party. two cars full of ms gangsterred stopped the bus, they had an ak-47 and an m-16 or something and just start killing people. children, mothers, old men, the bus driver, the conductor, they were all killed. 26 people killed, 26 injured.

the interesting afterstory to that case. nobody really knows where he is today. his name is annabell rivero presidents. -- potts. he escaped and came to the united states. he was arrested in texas. and he was a long-time gang member. he had a list of offenses. he was re-entering the united states after deportation. there were a lot of news stories about how this guy is going to get the -- the titanic is going to come down on him. the president of hon duh rats said we will get this guy.

the deputy director said, we got him. the newspapers said he's going to be minimum of 10 years. then we'll send him back and let honduras deal with him. interesting happened. when his case came to trial at the sentencing hearing, he said the most improbable thing. please send me back to honduras where i can face justice. than doesn't compute. what makes you think of the administration in the justice, we actually do. there are still squads that go around popping people. a guy in miami told me an interesting story about the reputation of the honduras police. they had arrested some gangster? miami, and they were really just taking him down to an interview room. but it happened there were two police officers that were visiting in a liaison capacity.

and they were wearing the uniform. and this tough guy was walking with the american cops. as soon as he saw them, he said whatever you want to know, i'll tell you. it didn't make sense to send me back to honduras. he was sentenced to 6 months for his reentry violation. which again, it was about, you might get some clue from the fact that every record from sentencing report to the sentence has now been sealed. here's the interesting story. maybe a year and a half two years later, a newspaper in texas, i think it was a four-way start telegram. he said this guy was put on a flight to go see honduras, and he disappeared.

you don't disappear from airplanes in flight. if you look at the standard operating procedure when u.s. authorities deport a criminal, they always have to get a travel document from the country, from this case, honduras, something to put them on the plane. this guy supposedly disappeared. i don't know maybe somebody here knows what happened. i have an idea what possibly happened, and the possibilities are quite simple. you know? maybe he walked off the plane and maybe people weren't paying attention and he speared. maybe he walked off the plane and his homies decided he was hot and whacked him. or maybe he's a cooperator.

i was interested why is it that sometimes the kids from the same family when i first came out here. i heard a story and i believe that this was heard an san diego or orange county family where one of the brothers were an investigator who died on the street. what causes that? and there's a professor who studied that and he's developed a theory which explains why some families and some individuals in families can't stand to take the stress of particularly second generation kids the children of immigrants. one of the most striking stories that i heard, and i wrote about in no boundaries was a story of los angeles police department,

detective frank flores. he grew up with all the burdens that some people say cause gang membership. he grew up in a gang infested neighbor in east los angeles. he was the child of a single parent. his uncle belong to one of the oldest gangs in los angeles, and one that some authorities credit with starting armed violence, from zip guns to manufactured guns. and yet in the face of all these positive factor, all frank flores ever wanted to be was a police officer. that's what he is today. even though when he was a child, he felt the well-known muscle of the lapd. frank made another point that i think is worth making any time we talk about or work with

latino communities and talk about latino gangs. he said look when i first met him i get tired about hearing the gangsters. east los angeles produces doctors and lawyers and scientists and artists. even from the east los angeles and political leaders and just lots of plain hard workers. only a small majority of latino youth are drawn into the gang. so it's worth the memory then. so observers make it seem like every latino has to go into a gang. i tell some of them in my book. not just frank flores but former sheriff's department deputy and a police officer in chicago like one of the first things in chicago. while history teaches that nothing is e static, everything

changes. even in law enforcement, the question is what will these gangs look like in the future? well, there are three indicators and one wild card that i think might give us a clue to that. one indicator is the proportion of the second generation. that is u.s. born from immigrant parents of latino kids 18 and under has grown from about 30% of latino population to about 50% since the last several years. that bulge is not going to go down for another decade. those are precisely the kids that are most ann recruited. that ball is going to be there as a recruiting tool. second, the reports say that street gangs are moving from retail to wholesale. that means it often will come

with violence. that means the drug trafficking organizations are moving stronger operations. that's the queen of ms and 18th street. there are a lot of scenarios from that, and none of them will good. nobody yet has hammered any of these into anything lively. i was in the terms of cohesion and organization. but one gangster named nelson gomadrari tried to do that. many people think he's a ms13 figure. some law enforcement officers thought he could have done that if he wasn't arrested. i think i know where he is, but his record is also sealed. all right. all this brings us back to

whatever happened ten years from now, 20 years from now, as we said earlier, the job of dealing with latino street gangs is going to be yours. the reason that explore in some detail in no boundaries. but the fact is that the american people and most politicians define the latino gang problem as a law enforcement problem. their solution is gang subpresentation. they want gangs to be stamped out specially by force, arrest, imprisonment, deportation, and the creation of seemless international borders. we heard people, and i'm a believer, that you can't arrest your way out of this problem. we talking about intervention and prevention. until somebody that bring in new

that the economy, drug, immigration problem has been solved. in my future that i can foresee, these gangs are not going to go away, they are going to get stronger. they are rarely funded at levels that would make them possible to work against the cosmic forces i described of the economy, globalization, international organize crime. i agree it's great from law enforcement can get involved. but it's like the afghanistan and iran problem. every foot soldier you take off and put them into a prevention program costs money, who's going to pay for that? that's one of the problems. well, what about this helmet? it's called a mcgulf fin in drama. bruce was an agent of change. when he started talking about

using the federal racketeer and influence and corrupt organizations. conventional wisdom was you can't do that. bruce is the one the first button in this case. well, bruce and his wisdom showed a movie called zulu. if any of you have seen that movie, 1964 michael cane made an appearance. in the that year, between 4,000 and 5,000 warriors of the zulu nation dissends on a drift or a

river crossing. in this case, the buffalo river. they wanted to wipe out about 100 british soldiers. they just defeated in a field the british army in which they found the soldiers. it's one of the best examples of small infantry attacking against a superior force. they held off 4 or 5,000 war warriors and basically defeated him. he showed that movie once to his team of investigators. we can do this, guys. what does it mean to you? you know what? here's what i think. the call -- call veer reis not coming up over the hill. you my friends are on that

line. thank you. for more information on tom diaz, the author visit vpc.org where tom is a senior analyst. here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals over the next few months. this weekend the decatur book festival welcomes harold evans. 50 authors will gather in north carolina for the carolina mountains literary festival. this year's theme is mountain mu -- mu sayic. the main children's theme.

attendees can participate. they will have the story telling festival in kentucky. they will offer that at night. please tell us know about book fairs and festivals in your area. e-mail at booktv@cspan.org >> this summer, book tv is asking what are you reading? >> early on this year i was given a copy of this book by kristen downing," the women behind the new deal." she was nominated by fdr. i find a lot of similarities with respect to the kinds of challenges that we are facing,

unemployment, dislocation of workers and need for investment in our work force, protection, safety for children. just making sure we uphold our labor laws and provide adequate help. it's a really interesting book. she was somehow who had great courage and someone who broke barriers for women. i see it in my travels. we continue to see poverty and the financial crisis affecting so many people. just how she helped to resolve and give strength to provide good leadership and reforms. basic wages and hours to be met. there are many people that were, for example, killed in a sweat shot. she saw that first hand and as a result created laws and procedures to make there were safety outlets for people in the workplace, which is really important.

a second book that i want to look at is one that i read and a good friend of mine wrote this. it's the "profiles in courage for our time." she continued the legacy for the kennedy family. her father of the original author of the first book. she has since taken up the torch there and has really looked at profiling different people, people that would make decisions that would cost their political careers. she gives different examples of people that she showcases in the book. one that i think was a great interest to me was henry gonzales who was a congressman, who was one of the first hispanic members of that background. really exciting reading. that's kind of interesting. this last book here, the "grapes

of wrath." i remember reading it when i was in the 9th grade. i felt so drawn to the story and the humility of people back in the era were faced with depression and trying to find a job and saw a lot of mistreatments and abuses. more importantly just the fighting wanting to be successful and many of them came from the midwest and came to california. and it's a great story just to reflect back on the plight of americans and how they laid the frontier for many of the changes that we saw now that we were actually benefiting from because a lot of changes that occurred in society, laws, protection from workers, for me the scene is here. women of courage, people of courage, people that have been

able to go through great challenges in their life and were able to supersede and go beyond. i think these are good things to think about and look at because of where we are right now. >> to see more lists visit or web site at booktv.org. in the next founders, the former object, they profiled people. both men and women, the subjects, come from iraq, iran, and kuwait. he spoke about this in washington dr.(^ ) dc. -- washington, d.c. this is an hour and a half.

>> hello. i'm the director for the national endowment for the democratic studies and coed tour. it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the publication of the new good "the next founders" voices of the democracy in the middle east. it's a mentally readable volume, and tells the stories of seven leading activists from the middle east, some of whom are women, and one iranian. it should conference that where there may not where democracies, there certainly are democrats. the book will be for sale in the back of the room, although we can only take cash or check. i hope