>> about what it means when u leave an ancient culture like the hills of kurdish dance and move to israel and into the united states. this is in the way, i think it's highest aspiration is this is an americ story about immigration and identity and what it means to leave the past behind, what you can take with you, what do you he to leave behind. >> the book is "my ther's paradise." the author is ariel sabar. >> thank you very much. >> now my move back coincide with the change in my own life. d as you might suspect given the title of my book, i met someone who would later become my husband. and when i move back so that we could start our life together and go forward, i began to experience and sort of firsthand witness all of the things that iranian young people were dealing with when it came to marriage. and moving on in life eon simply being single and young.

this a started for me in the course of planning our wedding and there's a chapter in my book devoted to this and it is called the persian bride handbook. it looks at the world of weddingsn iraq. and of course i was the woman the one planning the wedding. anwas quite astonished by the world that i encountered in iran, the world of weddings, and what a middle-class dream it had become to have an extravagant comic butiful, over the top, expensive wedding. bank of california, i was very familiar with of course this culture of extravagant when it comes to weddings. i hadn't suspected i would also find it in iran, especially among the middle class who could surely not afford these kinds of lavish spectacles. >> this was a portion of a book tv program. you can view the entire program and many other book tv programs online go to booktv.org.

type the name of the author or book into the searchrea in the upper left hd corner of the page. select the watch link. now you can view the entire program. you might also explore the recently on book tv box, or the featured video box, to find reason and featured programs. >> and now tom diaz talks about the rise of latin kings in the u.s. like ms-13, and how law-enforcement is reactg. he spoke in anaheim california. >> our next paper, our keynote speaker for the conrence is tom diaz. and imagine the book earlier, "no boundaries," and i have read it and i think it is excellent. if you work at ms-13 to 18th

street, any hispanic game, latino gang, i think it is a must read. so when i read it, i asked him if he would come out and do this and give us some insight from the non-law-enforcement perspective. looking at law-enforcement and how we work with them. tom has written several books on terrorism, or a book on terrorism. and other books. he is also an attorney. his home base is out of washington, d.c.. we've known each other for a few years. we talk about games for a long time. tom? [applause] >> thank you. i am deeply honored and i'm deeply a part that wes mcbride

in california gang investigators association invited me to speak here today. wementioned that i've talked to a lot of people across the country in researching my book. and just about everything investor i met, either new or had heard of or had learned something from wes mcbride. i had the pleasure of meeting and. we were talking about 12 years ago when i was working with independent television produc, and she was working on a document about gangs in the military. and i met west bend and i also met htf supervisor agent, rich. nothing has changed at the military said it did have a problem with gangs then at a dozen other problem that. i think barbara's documentary show 12 years ago showed it was different. the full title of my book if you're interested is "no boundaries: transnational latino gas and american law enforcement." when i talk about the book i just call it "no boundaries" except yesterday when i was

checking in summary as it was the title of youbook and i could 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 and i didn't realize how busy he was. he told me graciously come on out there so i got about two minutes. is a very pleasant two minutes and he sd come back when i'm not so busy. i did. i had a very long and interesting conversation with him. i knowhe person i actually did meet an interview in 2006 when i came up here was bruce riordan. bruce is now the director of antigang operations for the city attkrney for the city of los angeles. when i came out here he was an assistant united states attorney in los angeles, and he just within reason time one of landmark federal racketeering case against the 18th street gang, the columbia little cycles. they were doing extortion in the environment of macarthur park under the command of frank

poppet martinez was a member of the mexican mafia prison gang. it's been said before and i will say briefly, but wes andrews and all represent his team effort that is necessary from the point of view of an outsider looking at games at law-enforcement to get this problem and they don't agree on everything, and sometimes they disree. i don't know of anything you can think of a west that bride agrees with entirely every single item of it. he is an independent man. i talked about bruce written. when it walked int his office something struck me. he had one of these sitting on a table in his office. i may not be the smartest lawyer inashington and i may not be the best journalist in america but i figure there is a story behind. this is a pith helmet. it was worn by solers 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. as i said, there is a story about his helmet and about bruce and it relates to you. i'm going to put this away for now, and tell the story a little bit later. i'm not a gang expert that you are the gang experts. i'm a writer. no boundaries is n an academic work. it is not a textbook on sociology, psychology, or criminology. it is not an encyclopedia of latin gangs. and it i not a handbook for investigative. there are very good books like that that i've read and are available, some of them on the website of the ctia, written by a couple of getting detected in orange county. there's a fine book about the history of the gangs in los angeles. but what my book, "no boundaries" is it is a specific type of narrative nonfiction. it tells the real stories about

real people in real cases. i aimed to describe through the stories the story of the traumatic birth, turbulent growth, and the violent criminal activity of the major transnational latino criminal gangs. and the response of you all the american law-enforcement to those gangs. whatever else "no boundaries" may be or how it may be described, it is sort of a travel log. it is a journey into an exceedingly violent gang -- land within a land. at violent land is one which most americans and unfortunately, some in law-enforcement, are only vaguely aware. they know it's out there. they don't like it. they are probably frightened by it but they don know the details of it and they don't understand it. and i hope to get it through "no boundaries" some of the texture of the latino gang world. i want to take you on a tour of that land, from my perspective

today. i want to talk about my subject. change, carnage, culture, character, and challenge. the five c's. i was thinking about having foresees and iv, the db violence instead of carnage. it sounded like a doo-wop group which probably ages me. and now, ladies and german, the foresees andy the. west just i talk a lot about how i came to write "no boundaries" and then get into the substance. four years ago i finished the book that he reference which i also wrote, co-authored with barbara newman about a lebanese terrorist group called hezbollah and its operations in the united states. that book was called lightning out of lebanon. i was looking around for mething else to write aut, and a senior official of the fbi told him why did you look at these latino gangs and particularly m13 because at that time they h ranked it does not they rank gang violence as number one on their words

about violent crime in america. and ms-13 was on the top of the list. it was no quinces that write about that time fbi started their ms-13 national gang task force. i was fortunate to get an extremely good represented by the name of angela bell who helped me through that part. however, when i started looking into the subject of gangs i was really hooked. i thought it was important. and interesting, but there were two obstacles like they've. there e a lot of different kinds of latino gangs and their subset, sometimes called clicks. they range from little organism that belong in a single block, or for those of you who are from suburban or rural areas, maybe a little area. through the regional gangs that operate across large estates were several states to the big transnational gangs like ms-13 and the 18th street gang, which were both born in here in los angeles. but it is worth noting that at

every level, whether you are talking about a street gang or the gang that operate across the western hemisphere, all of thes gangs confront society with one fundamental question. and that question is who is in charge your? who controls this turf? is it a legitimate government or is it the gangster's? there is no way i could write about all these gangs so i decided to focus on ms-13 and 18th street gang for two reasons. first i think they both embody what people call the california gang starr, or the california gang culture, especially as it exists today because they were both born here, they both develop in ways i'll tk about later. the other characteristic of these gangs is that both operate transnational he. there is some debate about how well organized are but they are at least loosely organized across international borders and the conduct crime across those borders. that's where the book's title came from, "no boundaries." i also wanted to show the

variety of latino gangs and how they differ among themselves so i wrote, i research and i wrote about the original latin kings in chicago. they call chicago their motherland. i went to miami, florida, several times because a natural reaction i had any people have is miami, big latino city, they must have a lot of latino gang problems. i got some very interesting and different perspectives dn there, which i write about in the book. there are other little games or other latino gangs play cameo roles throughout "no boundaries." my second big obstacle, as you all, because law-enforcement people notoriously poor perhaps notorious is not the best word, t closemouthed. especiallyot talking to writers. some of that completely understandable if you're working on a case you don't want to jeopardize the investigation or the prosecution. some of you have bee burned. some of you just don't feel comfortable talkine to civilians or outsiders.

but i learned that an introduction from one police officer to another, or one agent to another is essential, often to get doors on. sometimes the doors are open. but more importantly the stories behind those doors. over a period of time i was able to develop a network of i think several people involved for such an idea to gain enough confidence that i was able to attend an international antigang conference in el salvador in 2007. this is the conference that is held to my knowledge base to do it every year. the salvadoran civilian police and the fbi are major sponsors of the conference. where i learned very ieresting thing from the international perspective. research is the biggest part of writing a book. people asking how long did it take y to write aook. the research is the biggest part and i snt about three years researchinghe gangs. the sources i use first and most important, people in law-enforcement, people like you. second and i think this is

largely overlooked by journalists and other researchers, the actual records of criminal cases. i examined and detailed a number of criminal cases. 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 nds of gang investigators, prosecutors, other people like you all, wes mcbride, bruce written. so theest you can hope to do is o mine out of there a perspective. out of all of the sources i arrived at the five things that i want to talk about today. when i was in the military to you to say tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and didn't tell them what you told them. i will start with change. the biggest concert of latino change is change.

there is change around and. they are changing themselves and law enforcement has change. we heard some of that. so the most important question from my point of view that you might ask during this week of training is not only what is, it is what is going to be. what is the future hold? in the same way that sthern california, houston, texas, washington, d.c., miami, florida, chicago are not the same today as they were i 1940, or 1950. the latino gangs are not the same as they were in the california interest example. some of them started in a minor way in the '20s, really took off in the '40s. th are different from where they were in the '50s. the '60s, 70s, the '80s. even in the 90s there is different that you can see. of course, longhorn has change also. now the big transnational

institutionalized latino gangs didn't just fall out of the sky. and they are not jus a random collection of bad boys w have become angelic and productive citizens if we just smack them around enough or have them enough. they are the products and them aren't really vast changes that swept over our society, the united states and the world, over the last several decades. for example, wars in central america, which i don't think anybody in the 1980s, i was in central america in 1985, h the resight to think well, what's that going to be domestically in the united states a site and the many demonstrations that were going on in here well, if you look at the history of ms-13, about 1 million salvadoran immigrants ended up in different places. big concentrations in the los angeles area. big concentrations in the washington, d.c., area.

the two areas for complex of reasons which i describe in "no boundaries," a king named ms-13 grew up, was born. another factor, the big chicano pride movement prompted at least some authority sank again to sa if you can't prove that your blood is coming up your mexican blood we don't want you in our gang. so a bunch of latinos who could show that they were necessary a pure mexican heritage formed another gang. they called it the 18th street gang. in the inevitable words of a los angeles police department gang detective, frank florez, cleaned up a little bit there they were getting their butt kicked. so they said we will open the book. anybody can join our gang. and the gang grew and became huge hits as all happened within the last 20 years.

those forces are unpredictable. wars, the forces we can tal about that are really advocates of our political life today. we have heard reference to them. the changes that i write about and talk about, economic restructuring in the united states in the wor. something we called globalization. immigratinn patterns that have defined national borders and ignore immigration laws. transnational crime, and a the federalization and growing international of law-enforcement. thes changes today force us as a people to face issues that are sometimes very divisive buthey are at the core of why the latino gangs exist in the form that they do today. one of the biggest of these changes was a fundamental change in themerican 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. it wasn't just in the rust belt. the factors didn't close in pittsburgh and cleveland and chicago. there were factors in southern california that make cars and she clasped it does all this appeared in the wood again, have to be a computer scientist at these all change. and to add to the change that chief bratton referred to the proliferation of semi-automatic high-capacity firearms, and the rise of the lucrative drug industry, the most profitable business in the world. you at all a together and you've got in the case of latino gang, a really harsh crucible. they were transformed and they were heartened during this period. they went from at they were in the '40s to some extent even into the '50s, they were called in fighting gangs.

some people even call them tomato gangs. they were called tomato gangs because they would get into fights and they would steal tomatoes from the vegetable garden throw them at each other and get into these food fights in effect. that all change. they became violent and it became over time members of gangs went to prison, primarily for drug purposes. prisons became institutions of education, and the gangs hardened. they became rooted in the community. there were allinds of changes in the '40s. but these changes, economically, had the following impact. particarly for immigrants to get used to be it didn't matter whether you spoke hungarian, english,erman, french, italian, spanish. if you could get a job in a factory and the foreman could show you what to do, you could do that. that was a run on a ladder that you pulled yourself and your family up in. when the manufacturing jobs disappeared it became harder. i'm not saying these are the only reasons that gangs exist

because they existed before this but i am saying how a major impact on how gangs hardened, and the alternatives for the gang members. the chasm between the offe suite and the hot food counter mcdonald's or using a fast food place, became just too far to leave if you couldn't get a handle on the industrial ladder. that was true for all young people. we aretill dealing with that problem today. then there is something we called globalization. as the jobs wt offshore and sweatshops came on tour, that affected not just gangsters, but all youth. but gangsters are drawn from the pool of youth who are affected those under most directly by the economic and. global transportation, communications network and technology. the transnational criminal organizations, especially but not exclusively, the drug trade exploit these changes. they are very adaive. they move quickly and they have the fus to get to them.

they seized upon the gangs as natural connectors. wherever you're from, if you have gangs, they are natural places for these bigger transnational organized crime group to plug-in. and sometimes they provide useful muscle. migration changed all this also. today, almost a migration dream is usable. whether you are talking about china, wther you are talking about central america, whether you are talking about the middle east. migration is feasible and it is as close as the nearest snake had or coyote or human smuggler. thap is all change and that is all presented in obvious problem. the gangs continue to change. they are not static. but they are not mechanicalevices who you wind up and smash that went here and they would stop. you could freeze them up. i discuss in "no boundaries"

people oft say southern california is at the epicenter of gangs. epicenters is a term we use when we talk about earthquakes to it is a mechanical tribute the epicenter is at that point right above where the earthquake, pieces fall down. that it applies a kind of mechanical relationship, big piece of rock falls, buildings fall down. i say that gangs are not like that gangs are made up of human begs. they are organic. they learn. they adapt. they exploit the world around them as it changes, and they watch what you do and they learn from what you do. so the gang of yesterday is not a gang of today andhe gang at the bar will not be theang of today. there is a professor named max at the u.s. army war college who has written about his evolution of gangs. he talks about generations of gangs. the first generation, unfortunate a lot of people today romanticizes these gangs as if that was a period with all

sweetness and lov and ethnic community. but then theontrast that with the development o what he calls the third generation gangs and those are the games we are talking about today, ms-13, 18th street gangs who have connection who are heavily armed and really only are about criminal profit. i talked about sweatshops or there. sweatshops coming on portrait in my opinion, the world's biggest sweatshop today, is the trade in illega dru. gangster life sells itself and you use out on the streets, to his young recruits as a refuge. in reality the gang life is a bloody, sordid, dangerous and poisonous and a tool of exploitation. many games today, especially the bigger gangs are reallyothing more than violt criminal enterprises inrag. they were the clothes, they

speak theanguage, but in reality they practice the life of traditional organized crime. the clever and ruthless view, the shot callers, the big home is who sees the leadership of these gangs enjoy well and enormous prots. in the case of bruce riordan, they found a cardboard box with a half a million dollars of cash and fra martinez mother-in-law's closet. that was just something that was there when executed the major search warrants. but the loyal poorly compensated for soldiers of these enterprises, the rank-and-file gang members are really in effect slaves pictures what ver it's late like they a enslaved by deeply rooted concepts in the latino community of manhood, pride, and loyalty to one's gang and to one's homies.

the gay number, ms-13, 18th street, and the colors are in effect invisible chains. and it is indeed eager serves to provide a violent muscle assert its control over whatever the market is, drugs, human trafficking, and discipline to ose who participate in. so when you think about it, maybe to gangsters are not toiling in t garment industry sweatshops but they are pointing in the biggest sweatshop of all, the drug industry sweatshops or if you look at some of these gangs in the case is as i have and will talk more about them, most of the lato gangs have adopted the familiar model of traditional organized crime. that means extortion, smuggling, opportunistic crime of any sort, d the development, the development of skills and assets, networks that can be plugged in and use as needed. gang extortion that i write about and i see most takes the form ofo-called taxation, sometimes they call it others.

taxation of drug dealers. but they also tags, extort, people who sell tacos from bending stance, or whatever opportunity there is. drugs just happens to be the most lucrative in. there was an impressive indictment that was handed up last month in los angeles of ms-13. that indtment if you get a chance to read it, lays out in detail ithe case of ms-13, the mexican mafia, how the taxing scheme works. the local gang taxes the drug dealers. they have a whole hierarchy, and in some of that goes to the mexican mafia. at you all know better than i do how law enforcement has changed genelly and in response to gang specifically so i will not othat topic. but i will talk about two things that i write about in the book. first is the genal path of reform of the law-enfcement agencies really over the last

century. if you look at the history of police agencies, in particular 100 years ago, they were widely recognized as the corrupt pulls a basically political bosses. if you haven't gone online and read the los angeles police department officia entry, i would suggest you do because they are very candid about what things were like 100 years ago. that has all changed and now we have the professional highly trained organizations that you all represent, and part of that development and training has been learning about gangs and reacting to gangs in different ways. the los angeles police department used to deal with the latino gang problem in the 1940s as they had to do what they called mexican offers. they would sit down to the burled whenever things got out of order. there were some clear cataclysmic events that happened in los angeles and the police had to change the way they dealt with a. they would do a whole history of different ways of dealing with

gangs. the los angeles police department credited with the first model of the gang unit. the other remarkable changes on the federal law-enforcement, in the early 1990s people in washington dismissed the gang crime. they call it street crime. and many agency said we're not going to get our highly trained professional agents involved in street time. crime. well, events in the early 1990s change that and i write about that in some detail. to a couple of them. there was a huge riot in los angeles, happen to be during a presidential election year. some people call it the rodney king riot. but one of the fallout of that riot was that it would seem that gang members were intimately involved in a lot of the violence, a lot of the pillage, along of the theft. and surprisingly enough, it is often thought of as an

african-american riot. really, later and after election it was determined that the bk of the organized violencwas done by latino gangs. that sort of got t federal government attention and a preliminary way. there werether thinggoing on at the same time, the so-call epidemic. the point is that over the last 15 years, the federal government has become much more intimately involved and theact that it was discussed today, atf, fbi, dea, ice, they all have something to program and they're all part of the team concept and the racketeering concept that the federal government brings to the table. i talk about these historical, social, econic forces that shaped the latino gangs. in one way, however, as interesting as all of those forces are, they don't matter. they d't matter because you, as law-enforcement officer

have to do with the gang as it is today. we have to do with the gangster as he or in some cases she is today. doesn't matter what the forces are. that's interesting to know and understand in more depth. you have to deal with 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 look at in the course of researching that bok,t would have to work on a. those two words would be heartless violence. because the plain truth emerges from the records of the case that i looked at. that this is what street gangs in particular, these transnational latino gangs, ultimately deal. they are relentless and consistently violent. violence is simply what they do in real life. there are many reasonthat they do violence. internal discipline, territorial control, revenge, something called respect. gang life may and does include hours of ethnic and brotherly

bonding. therare nights and days of chemically assisted partying where nothing much goes on, just hang out. and there are weeks of just listlesseating around that creep by. but sooner or later in the game, the land of the games that i write about, violenc erupts. the bloody assault, the brutal murder, the casual death of innocent bystanders. one of the two people i dedicated my book to why such an innocent bystander in chicago. her name was anna mark hale. her family was a model of mexican immigration to the united states. legal, hard-working, building a new and productive life in chicago's pilsen neighborhood. some of you may not know is that the largest latino community, east of los angeles. she was seven years old when she was struck in the back of the head a 9-millimeter bullet.

it was fired two blocks away by a 16 year old gangster named juan garcia. he was a member of a gang in chicago called latin counts. garcia was teaching a guy down the street who he thought mistaking was a member of another gang. hop, pop, pop. he empti his 9-millimeter handgun. moments later, little ana mateo died in the arms of her mother. tell her story in a chapter of my book titled thirst after justic a medical examiner case number 338 because that was the number of her ase. there is no gang squad in any city of any size whose members can't tell similar stories. i saw stores like that in, everywhere the innocent bystanders too often chiren killed and oftentimes by stray shots. at the point is that every gangster is at least capablef that violence. because gangster culture has noalized and rationalize

violence so that being a stone killer is no longer in that culture a bad thing. it is a good thing. when you look at the history of gangs, particularly in los angeles, there used to be a thing, it was called a fair fight. when you wanted to have, you have a beef with another gang member even fm another gang, which did you call that person out. this is not into the '40s, maybe early '50s. that you fought it out. women, children, other members of the family were off limits. it was called the fair fight. that no longer exist obviously. probably everybody in this room knows that anybody is a fair target in anoccasion could be added by the tribe by shooting. in fact, every gangster is expected, expecteto step up and commit violence when the shot callers or the big homies whatever you want to call them decides it is nded. or when respect the man's revenge. or when a rivalry, some beef

that nobody can even remember how it started demanding that you go out and take mebody else's life. a gang prosecutor in chicago put it this way. every now and then somebody says this is the day when, pick a name, got killed. let's go out and kill somebody from that of the gang. >> why? that's just what we do. i quote se testimony of the 18th street gang that to me was really chilly winds at guy who was ultimately convicted and was sort of a hitman for the 18th street click. talked about, they asked him how his defense. he says they call us to do things. sometimes it is graffiti. sometimes it is to do a drive-by. bu just as of those two things. they called a doing work for the gang. sometimes it's graffiti, sometimes it is killing somebody. kind of sounded like it's the same thing. sometimes i break my garden

sometimes i go back and shoot my neighbor. if you heard that a new community, it doesn't make sense. i gangster who refuses these invitations at best faces expulsion from the gang and probably at worst will suffer violence himself. which brings us to the question of gangster culture. gangster values are completely different from and fundamentally hostile to everything that we have learned abo western culture over the last several thousand years. in june 2006 i interviewed a man named don. is a former district of columbia metropolitan police officer. is become an fbi gang analyst and expert on gang culture. when i can give him a little bit disconcerting to me because i asked him, i had read an article he had written about gang culture. i asked him about it and he turned the tables on me, started asking me questions. this is how the conversation went. paraphse. do youave any children? me.

yes. ledet. do you teach them how you? right now i think where is this going. yes, i do. he says well, just turn ose gu upside down and you'll begin to understand the gang culture. everything you think is good they thinks bad at everything they think is bad you think is good. that wasn eye-opener. at the time i thoughtaybe he was exaggerating. butfter three years of research i don't think so. i write in detl in "no boundaries" about a number of gang assaults and murders. one of them has a particular string. three of them have particular string. they all involve one way or another one particular female gangster you may have heard of brenda hobbs. it starts with the murder of a kid named javier and grand prairie texas. hobby art was just a kid who rked to get a very nice little card that he liked and i had

some of these big shiny wheels it. hobby or had the misfortune to cross paths with some ms-13 neighbors. in dallas, texas. they wanted his whee. they took him off somewhere in a body area and they killed him. the kicker of the story as it was raining and they couldn't fire out how to get the lug nuts off so they didn't get the car. renda w present at that murder. she then moved to washington to the fairfax county area. there she got involved with a gang member wh killed another young man whose name was walking. joaquin diaz was another kid. kids hang out with other kids. one of the gang.m one of the ms gang leaders that he was a member of a rival gang. it turned out he wasn't but it didn't make any difference. the gangster said we're going to

go in the district. we're going to get some weed. , along with his. they took him to an island that was south of washington national airport. this is actually several days after 911 so it did t get very much attention at all. they slit his throat. i didn't just cut his toat. they cut out his larynx. and the gangster who did it said later, just like cutting up chicken. the third story that i write about that involves this remorseless,icious, hacking out of human life was brenda paz hersel brenda is a very interesting case and has a new book ounow all about transcending and i write about her. brenda had an unfortunate habit. she kept diary, she kept notes, business cards of law enforcement peopleá of brenda was iolved in a traffic stop in for whatever

reason, she decided, she told her lawyer i am rdy to talk. brinda unrold a lot of information. i believe it is probably still ongoing. but her habit of keeping a diary, business card, several of her homies, first letter th found one of her business cards and there was another one of h her, what is this, you have some detectives guard. she was able to kind of explain that away. in fact, i think as i recall, they couldn't believe that brenda was, you know, turned against the gang. first of all, lovely person. later on, it's a long story, she kept evading, basically bailing out of the witness program that she had been put in. and they got, you know, papers on brenda. theyook her out to this idyllic little community on the other side of the blue ridge mountains in the shenandoah valley of virginia. and she was pregnant by one of

the gangsters, and they hacked her to death. call it bizarre, interesting thread that ties all of these three cases together. the bodies were found by fishermen. just think that. your ordinary john q. citizen walking around going out for a day of fishing and he finds this dead body in texas, anoer one finds a dead body on dangerfield island in the baton at the washington, d.c.. and then a third i think was a father and his son, find brenda paz. what struck me about these cases though was the enthusiasm with which the gangsters talk about their telling, about hacking out a larynx, about killing half a year just for his wheels that they alternately couldn't get. i write about another transnational aspect, a horrible killing. some of you may have seen the video this. have seen grown men wiping the tears away from their eye

it is the video of christmas season massacre and a place in honduras where a gangster whose nickname was the tapeworm. masterminded this message to the governnt. you pushed us and we will push back. this bus full of working people here condorcet kind of a traditional, you go shopko you could guess, you have a big party. two cars full of ms gangsters stopped the bus. they had an ak-47 and either an m-16 or a r. 15. walk on the bus and start killing people. children, mothers, old men, the bus driver, the conductor. they are all killed. 26 people killed. 26 injured.

there is an interesting after story dictates. nobody really knows where the tapeworm is today. is name is rivera. he escaped froprison in honduras, crossed the border of the united states three weeks later he made pretty good time. probably through the network of ms. and was arrested in texas. and he was a longtime gang member. he had a list of offenses and he was closely reentered the united states after deportation. so there were a lot of news stories about how this guy is going to get, you know, the titanic is going to come down on him. he is the president of honduras. at a press conference. we got the theme, the mastermind of this case, the leader of ms in honduras. i think the director or deputy director of ice just happened

because i can't help it he said we have this horrible guide. and the newspapers all said he is going to do whatever it was, minimum 10 years, and rsi. d will send him back and let the hondurans deal with him. well, interesting thing happened. when el culiche's case came to trial at the sending hearing he said the most improbable thing. he said please send me back to honduras where i can face justice. well, that doesn't compute. whatever else you think of the administration of justice in the united states, we actually do administer justice. there are still squaws going around talking people in various countries, and the guy in miami told an interesting story if i can digress a little bit about the reputationf the honduran police among gangsters. they had arrested some gangster in miami, and they were really just taking him down to an interview room. but it happened that there were two honduran police officers who are visiting in a liaison capacity.

i guess they were wearing the uniform. and this tough guy was walking with the american cops. as sn as he saw the hondurans he started crying and said okay whatever you want to know i will tell you. please don't send me back to the. the point is they did make sense that el culiche would say send me back to honduras. he was sent to i think six months for his polonius reentry violation of federal immigration law. which again to scratch her head, what is that all about. you might get some clue from the fact that every record has now been sealed. sometimes that means cooperation. sometimes it doesn't. here is the interesting story about el culiche. maybe a year and a half, two years later in this paper in texas. i think was fort worth. published a story into this guy was supposedly put on a flit and he disappeared. you don't disappear inirplanes

in flight. even if a snake is on the flight. if you lookt standard operating procedure when u.s. authorities to port a criminal, they always have to get a travel document from t country, in this case it would be honduras, something, a passport, id card. but this guy supposey disappeared. i don't know. maybe somebody here knows what happened. i have aidea 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 disappeared. maybe he walked off the plane, same story in his homies thought he was hot and they want to. maybe he is a cooperator now sitting back in protection program. i don't know but it is an interesting story. i know the tm that developed in "no boundaries" is the contrast between the character and the values of people like yourself and law enforcement and the gangsters. i was particularly interested in

the question of why is it that some kid from the same street, sometimes even the same family. when i first came out here and metes, ieard a story i believe that ts was either san diego or orange county family were one of the brothers was a gang detective or investigator and the other was a gang banger, gangster, who was ultimately died on the street. so what causes that? there is a professor named james diego that study that paradox in detail and yet developed a theory he calls multiple marginality which explains why some families, some individuals and families just can't take the stress of particularly second generation kids, the children of immigrants. so they sank beneath the weight. but one of the most striking stores that i heard and wrote about in "no boundaries" is a story of los angeles police department detective frank for his. some of you may know him. i don't think frank is here

today. frank grew up with all the burdens that some people say can't gang membership. he grew up in the east los angeles. he was the child of a single parent. his uncles, his ankles belong to white fans, one of the oldest gangs losngeles and some authorities credit was actually starting our violence that went from zip guns to manufacture guns. and yet in the face of all tse positive factors, all frank florez wanted to be was a los angeles police department police officer. and that is what he is tod. evenhough when he was a child he on occasion saw the well-known muscle on the lapd. he capitalized and underscoring, anytime we talk about or worked with latino communities and talk

about latino gangs, frank said, look, when i first met him, i got tired of hearing only about the gangsters from east los angeles. east los angeles produces doctors and lawyers and scientists, artists, edward james is from east los angeles. the mayor of los angeles. political leaders, and just lots of playing hard workers. only a small minority of latino yoh, maybe 10 or 12 percent by some estimates, are drawn into the gangs. so it is worth remembering that. when se observers make it seem like every latino kid has too into again, there are just too many stories. and i tell some of them in my book. not just frank florez, but former los angeles sheriff department deputy richard valdemar and police officer in chicago, ramirez was like one of the first mexican kid on his block in chicago. history teaches us as i said earlier that nothing is static. everything changes.

20 years ago a lot of people never heard of the 18th street gain. even in law enforcement. so the question is what will these games look like in the future? there are three indicators and one wild card that think might give us a clue to that. one indicator is that 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 percent of latino youth population to about 50 percent in the last several years. that is not going to go down for another decade. those are pretty precisely the kids who are most often recruited into ethnic gangs. it is a recruiting pool. there are government reports that say that latino street gangs, some less keno reet gangs are moving from retail to wholesale. that is restructuring markets, ich often means violence. finally there are some reports

that the and drug trafficking organizations are moving stronger operations into central america. th is the quaen's nest of ms and 18th street. so there are a lot of sinners that developed. none of them are good. the wild card. i will take a minute about one ambitious gangster. nobody yet has hammered either any of these latino gangs anything rivalry. one gangsr named nelson tried to do that. many law enforcement offics think that he is a ms-13. very interesting and a mysterious figure. some officer felt he could have done that had he not been arrested and incarcerated on a federal drug trafficking charge and basically fallen off the map. i think i know where he is. but s record is also sealed. all right. all of this brings us back to

bruce riordan is pith helmet. whatever happens 10 years from now, 20 years from now, as we saidarlier the job of dealing with latino street gangs as they exist in is going to be yours. there are reasons that i 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. the solution is gang suppression. they want games to be stamped out, essentially by force. arrest, irisonment, deportation, and the creation of seamless international borders. i am a great believer in the affirmation that you can't arrest your way out of this problem. we talk about intervention and prevention. but at least in any lifetime that i can see, unless somebody can bring in his big economic problem has been solved, the drug problem has been solved,

the immigration pblem has been stalled. in any future that i can foresee, gangs are not going to go away. th will get stronger. and most important, for all the talk we do aut intervention and prevention, they are rarely funded at levels that would make them possible to work against the cosmic forces that i describein the economy, globalization,nternational organized crime. i agree that it is great if law enforcement can get involved, but it is like the afghanistan iranroblem. every footsoldier you take off the at and put them into a prevention program, cost money. who is going to pay for that? that's one of the problems in talkg about intervention and prevention. well, what about is helmet? is coley mcguffin and drama. i can tell you what it meant for bruce britain because he was an agent of change. when he startetalking about using the federal racketeer and

corrupt, ricoh. racketeering influenced and corrupt program. when he talked about bringing the case against the 18th street day. conventional wdom was you can't do that. they are not organized in america. you c't bring that case. it was ongoing at the time, a case against the mexican mafia. bruce was the first one who brought that case. bruce and his wisdom showed a movie called zulu. if any of you have seen that movie, 1964, michael caine made his first appearance as a serious actor in a movie. you knowthe story. in the late afternoon of genuine 22nd, 1879, between 4,005,000 warriors of the zulu nation descended on a little place called works drift. a trip is a river crossing and in this case it was a buffalo river.

their mission was to wipe out a force of about 100 british soldiers. had just defeated in the field a brish army and wish they had killed somewhere around 13 british and navy soldiers. a fascinating story as it is a great story. those soldiers held off for 5000 warriors, and basically defeated them. s bruce riordan had this helmet in his office and he showed that movie wants to his team of investigator we can do this, guys. so what does it mean for you? well, you know what? here is what i think. the calvary is not coming over the hill. the drift is out there from wherever you came to pick your going to have to face that every day. and you, my friend, you are our thin red line. thank you. [applause]

>> mic and if you an overview kind of where i have come from, how i have gotten to this point, how i've gotten to the casinos. because it is kind of a particular place i think. black satire that it's not really burning off the shelves, you know. it is the publishing people can take that. so i feel like this is kinof new ground, but i've always kind of thought this way in terms of comment. back when i did stand up back in the day as we like to say. we'll like to say how old we actually are. even from the beginning, my stand that kind of h political subject matter, kind of racial

subject matter. it was always off the wall. always a little different. i remember one of the first bit i do. i think it was the firstit i wrote. it was about politicians lying. and i said every politician lies. the only one that didn't was george washington. i actually did a richard nixon impression. that's how long ago it was. i have you who you are talking about. but it was funny. richard, come your. did you chop down my tree? well, you know, daddy, i -- looking in retrospect, i can firmly say although i did all the right the initial break-in of the toolshed, i must say that that no significant way links me to the actual chopping your. [laughter] >> so, you know, that kind of

thing. i think i even did carter. reagan, i can't remember. in fact, i think that was the joke probably that, well, what was the question again? it was something like that. but the ones i really like, the one that kind of close the whole bit was jesse jackson because you have driven at a time when jesse ran for president in 1984, that was a whole new thing. white people, you are happy for obama. jesse, black people were so happy in 1984. i can't even tell you the feeling that it was, you know. and so the energy that kind of response that got promised that, there was so much energy. i thought there's something in that. there is something different that is different from the other last. it was like jesse, come here, boy. did you chop down my tree? well, boo the question is not whether or not i chop down your tree, as

much as do i believe in the trees right to exist. [laughter] >> on that point, i do. >> this was a portion of a book tv program. you can view the entire program and many other book tv programs online. go to booktv.org. . .