Diversity Is Strength! It`s Also…The Mexican Mafia
[Previously by Lincoln Kahn:
Those Enterprising Immigrants: One Story
]
For
most of its 300-plus page-length,
Tony Rafael`s new book The Mexican Mafia
is
better entertainment than
The Sopranos and more
frightening a portrait of armies of the night than
Dawn of the Dead. Almost certainly it stands as
the most revealing work about
American organized crime since Nick Pileggi`s Wiseguy,
the book that was the source for the movie Goodfellas.
What
does Rafael have to say that groups from The Los
Angeles Times to La Raza have sought to keep quiet?
Simply this: the
Italian Mafia now has a large, well-organized and
far more bloody rival.
- The group that calls itself the
Mexican Mafia—La
Eme,
literally the Spanish for the letter M—is
responsible for more than 100 murders per year in
Los Angeles County alone.
- In the last decade it has perpetrated more killings
than the Italian mafia has in the United States in
its whole history.
- Through its contacts with
gangsters in Mexico, it now controls most of the
movement of
drugs to the West Coast and is actively involved
with many other crimes, including car-jacking,
auto theft, theft of phone cards and large-scale
extortion of bars,
shops and
prostitutes.
- With more than 300 "made" members, so-called
carnals, thousands of "soldiers" or
associates, and control over all but a handful of
the tens of thousands of
Hispanic street gang members in Los Angeles, it
has manpower at its disposal which the Italian Mafia
can only fantasize about.
- It also now dominates the prisons of many parts of
the West and, as a series of trials have shown, it
has successfully penetrated civil service agencies
and even many parts of the
California law enforcement establishment.
Rafael`s book is based on a decade of research and
interviews with police, prosecutors, defense lawyers and
former and current members of the Eme, and it is
intended as a warning. Rafael`s message is plain: unless
action is taken now, the Eme will become the persistent
problem that
the Italian Mafia became—and will, like the old
Mafia, spread across the entire country.
But,
Rafael notes, given its structure and history, the Eme
may prove far more deadly—as it is far more violent
today than the old Mafia ever was.
Rich
in detail, the book fascinates purely on that level: its
revelations about the methods and terminology of this
giant criminal underground are as sensational as
anything in
past masterpieces of muckraking like Upton
Sinclair`s
The Jungle.
This
includes information, for example, on the prescribed
method for killing an Eme turncoat. Three assassins are
to lure the traitor to a discreet place and then shoot
him repeatedly in the skull and face. The first shots
are to be made by the killer with the smallest and
easiest to conceal pistol while the killer with the
biggest gun serves as the lookout.
Rafael alternates between providing a history of the
Mexican Mafia with accounts of major trials of some
of its leaders.
Founded in 1957 by a Los Angeles street gang member
named Luis Flores, the Mexican Mafia consciously took
its name in imitation of its older model. Just as La
Cosa Nostra, the Eme has a process for "making"
new members. Mexican Mafia members are "jumped in"
through a bloody ritual in which they are sometimes shot
with a BB so that they will know what a gunshot feels
like. Once in the organization as a brother (carnal),
the rule is "blood
in, blood out". No member can speak publicly
about the group or leave without sentence of death.
Those who try to leave the group or testify against it
are "greenlighted", marked for death on "listas",
which are smuggled each day out of the California prison
system by members, their families and their (sometimes
unwitting) defense attorneys.
It is
there, in the prisons, Rafael shows, that the Mexican
Mafia first emerged as a power. Because
Mexican-Americans are the largest group in the
California penal system, they soon came to dominate
it, and even
white supremacist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood
have become de facto junior partners. Flores,
like nearly all the Eme leaders, spent much of his life
in the jails. Before long, he had a large network of
brothers committed to his idea of organizing a group of
"super-criminals" capable of intimidating any
possible rivals. Indeed,
within just a few years, through unrelenting
campaigns of murders and beatings, eMe had even come to
be the top dog group in
San Quentin.
By
the late 1960s the organization`s principles and
practices had become broadly established, and the name
"Eme"—literally the Spanish for the
letter M in mafia—had become accepted.
[VDARE.COM NOTE: Mexican
gangsters sometimes spell it "eMe" as if they
were some kind of iGang.
Spelling is
There
are some dramatic contrasts between the Eme and the
traditional Mafia, however—and not just degree of
bloodthirstiness. Eme members are theoretically equal.
In contrast with the purely top-down hierarchical
structure of the
Cosa Nostra,
major decisions in the group are made through some
process of consensus among the "carnals".
Achieving this consensus may, of course, involve
conflict and violence. But in theory no carnal is
permitted to "greenlight" another carnal unless
it can be show that the "brother" has turned
state`s evidence—providing what is known within the
group as "paperwork."
One
of the most disturbing of the Eme`s practices is
ethnic cleansing. As one might expect of a group
whose symbols include Aztec gods and which has been
known to use the Aztec language
Nahuatl as a means of coding notes sent among its
leaders, the group is
fiercely nationalistic. Rafael shows that its policy
has been to push its associates to
murder any and all blacks (called "mayates")
who try to move into
Mexican-American neighborhoods or date
Hispanic women. He documents a great number of these
killings along with a few of the trials that followed.
In
addition, Rafael shows:
- The Eme also has been known routinely to engage in
thrill killings and beatings of "Chinos", a
designation it applies most often, curiously, to
Cambodians and
Filipinos.
- It is also an Eme policy and a sworn belief that
threats or derogatory comments made in the presence
of Eme associates and soldiers towards any
Hispanic person by non-Hispanics must be repaid with
violence.
Ironically, as Rafael also shows, the Emes are also
contemptuous of those they call their Border Brothers,
or "BBs": illegal aliens who do not speak
English. The group`s Associates regularly rob and beat
illegals as a way of supplementing their income.
The
eMes` exploitation of aliens is clearly one of the most
powerful arguments against present
U.S. open borders policies. Illegal aliens are both
the most common victims of the Eme and those with least
ability to appeal to the police for protection from it.
Even
so, these "Border Brothers" are also used to get
the
drugs from Mexico which the Eme and their associates
sell throughout the Southwest and which is their major
source of income.
Among
Rafael`s other important revelations:
- Like La Cosa Nostra, the Mexican Mafia includes many
members from the same nuclear families, often
passing on from generation to generation.
"Some families have as
many members in prison as on the street. And
rather than feeling shame, some of these families
take perverse pride in having relatives locked up
for decades or for life. Families that are deep in
the Eme or a street gang have status in the barrio."
- Working with La Cosa Nostra, the Eme has used
corrupt
Los Angeles City Council members to get funds
for supposed drug treatment programs which were
instead run as drug-dealing operations. Those
who criticized the clinics they ran were threatened
and
often killed.
- The eMe not only brings in large amounts of
cocaine from Mexico but high-quality
amphetamine as well.
- The Eme sometimes
hides in Mexico, and there are more than 3,000
U.S.
fugitives now south of the border.
The
last fifty pages of Rafael`s book at times become
repetitive, and the galley version of the book I
received could have been better edited. One also wishes
that the book had an index. However, this is only
because the book is such a remarkable resource.
Because his message is so politically incorrect, the
author speaks repeatedly of his struggles to get The
Los Angeles Times and other leading outlets in
California—to say nothing of
the rest of the country—to recognize the seriousness
of the problem. Most gang killings, he shows, are
ignored. The Eme is treated in the mainstream media
as
J. Edgar Hoover once
regarded the Italian Mafia: an urban legend or at
least a gross exaggeration.
Indirectly, Rafael provides decisive evidence of how
present immigration policies are feeding the Eme`s
growth—and how the
current double standards about race prevent
discussion of the phenomenon.
Lincoln
Kahn (email
him) is a New York-based writer


