The Death of Black Sabbath
Los Angeles in the 1980s was a complicated space. It contained both the whitewashed exuberance of Beverly Hills and the desperation of the poor Latino and African American neighborhoods. A cocktail mix of a swanky Sunday brunch with a spritz of blood from an alleyway machete fight.
The Salvadorans kept coming. Hundreds of them every day, carrying the dust of a civil war on their thin-soled shoes. As of 1981, the military-political conflict had come of age. The brutal repression of the organized masses had turned into full-fledged guerrilla warfare. Various insurgent groups unified to form the FMLN. By 1983, the guerrilla rank and file were men and women with grit and tactical experience in staging ambushes and attacking military garrisons. The war, in short, had been professionalized. The fight against the counterinsurgency was being run by high military officials, with the National Guard focusing solely on urban repression. The killing fields migrated from the streets to the mountains.
The Salvadorans arriving in Los Angeles, the mecca of US gangs, had been hardened by this violence. What Richard found in Los Angeles in the 1980s was not only the gang that would become his family for the next thirty years, but an entirely new world: all-consuming and violent, but also intriguing. The world of the Sureños.
Where he came from, what you did when you saw an enemy was simple. You aimed your weapon and fired. But it was different in the Sureño neighborhoods of LA. Each block and ’hood was dominated by a particular Latino gang, typically named after their barrio: Hawaiian Gardens 13, White Fence 13, Florencia 13, La Puente 13, Varrio Nuevo Estrada, Artensia 13, Pacoimas 13. All Hispanic, all at war. They fought with other gangs like Crazy Riders 13—the locos with the machetes and the hatchets—or the menacing, old-school Playboy 13, elegantly outfitted gangsters that defended Normandie Street wearing sport coats, short-brimmed hats, button-down shirts, ties, and shiny shoes. Pachucos that recognized fellow members by folding in their thumbs, index, and middle fingers and making bunny ears with their ring fingers and pinkies. But all of them, no matter what gang they belonged to, were playing the same game.
The “13” came from a simple substitution. All the nascent gangs were affiliated with the all-powerful Mexican Mafia. “M” is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. That’s why the Hispanic gangs used the number 13 in their names, signaling that they were part of the same Sur system and working under the shadow of the same Mexican Mafia—that gang of gangs that controlled the prisons and managed the system of punishment for all gang members who failed to conform to the code.
Richard found it all fascinating, and when he talks about those early years he shifts around in his seat and switches between Spanish and English, dredging up his old passions. One day, the gangs were his ultimate enemies. The next day, inside a Californian prison, they were his allies in a yard brawl against the black gangs.
Salvadorans took a few LA neighborhoods by storm—places where no one was thinking of brunch. The majority of those being jumped into the gang structure joined Barrio 18, which dated back to the 1950s, and whose lineage was also tied to the powerful Mexican Mafia. Despite some resistance from Mexican and Chicano gang members, the Salvadorans filled out the ranks of hundreds of different Hispanic gangs in the Sur system. The MS, however, still received most of the recent Central American recruits. And it became a gang built by them, run by them, and in defense of them.
The rookies quickly learned the basics of the game, but not all its subtleties. They came from a brutal place and didn’t understand temperance. It was like trying to teach a Neanderthal the rules of boxing.
“The Crazy Riders 13, for example,” Richard says, “became really dangerous when the Salvadorans showed up. They knew how to ride in a pick-up with giant machetes, along with files to sharpen them up. They were crazy, because most of them were Indians from San Miguel”—an eastern Salvadoran department.
Juan, a Salvadoran from Ilobasco (one of the areas most affected by the war) who was affiliated with a small gang in Orange County, the Shalimar 13, tells a dramatic story. Fellow gang members told him they were going to kill some enemies from the Alley Boy 13 gang. They gave him a pistol. But when Juan pulled the trigger, he discovered that there were no bullets in the gun. It was just a test—something all aspiring members needed to pass. The other gang members were laughing at him back in the car, ready to peel out before their enemies came to hunt them down.
But Juan, furious at having made himself so vulnerable, grabbed a gun his uncle had given him and shot a couple of them in the face. And then he jammed the barrel into another terrified gangster’s mouth and told him never to pull shit like that with him again. They never did. In the ten years that Juan would lead the gang, they stopped using that initiation test. Juan was deported to El Salvador in 2010, and he told this story back in his native Ilobasco. The enormous tattoos he had all over his body, even on his face, wouldn’t let him live in peace in El Salvador. The police hounded him. The gangs, both MS and Barrio 18, which had been in the country for decades at this point, threatened him. He went back to the United States to live without papers—not in California this time, but a state that was “less violent.”
In the 1980s the Salvadorans put a lot on the line with the Sureños. Death in Los Angeles was a big deal, but where these guys were from, it was part of daily life.
To the Mara Salvatrucha Stoner gangsters, the squabbles with other party gangs and quasi-gangs seemed trivial. They were ready for a different league. In East LA, the La Raza Loca gang wanted to stand up to these long-haired goth kids flocking to their neighborhoods. But it wasn’t a good idea. Only those who ran survived the showdown. Meanwhile, in the San Fernando Valley, an entire gang was caught off-guard in an abandoned factory. MS members utilized a technique they’d learned from Reagan’s counterinsurgency battalions. The gangsters beat the rival gang members all night long, and then forced them to join their side. The Lafayette, Verendos, and Leeward cliques all took on some of these new members. And the Hollywood Boulevard clique wasn’t going to be left out of the pickings, either. They were all looking to fill out their ranks and raise their status among the other Sureños. To win more battles they needed more soldiers.
In their own neighborhoods they started extorting drug dealers and beating up car thieves. While most Salvadorans entering the Sureño system were trying to understand the lay of the land, the gangsters of the Mara Salvatrucha Stoner didn’t bother. They expected Southern California to adapt to them.
Barrio 18, enormous and well respected, was amused by the wildness of the inflowing gangsters. It was a natural association—at first. A lot of the new members of Barrio 18 were Salvadoran. Some of them were received with respect. They were invited to parties where they learned how to act like Sureños. They heard, in whispers, about the bosses of the M and how they ran Southern California from inside the prisons.
The MS grew up in the shadow of Barrio 18. It was a savage place to come of age.
El Burro, a Mara Salvatrucha 13 veteran, recalls his first confrontation, back in 1984, with the gangsters of Barrio 18, though he doesn’t resort to the drama with which most gang tales are told. They had a couple of shootouts with a Barrio 18 clique called Tiny Winos. It went down close to a drug sale point, and it was a fight for the corner. Nobody was injured that day, but the Mara Salvatrucha and the Barrio 18 started distancing themselves from each other. Like brothers after a fight. Both sides knew that one way or another this rift was for life. The definitive break, however, didn’t come for a few more years.
“We gained numbers, but lost quality,” a woman in her fifties recalls, three decades later, in a coffee shop in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of San Salvador. She was a protagonist in the early history of MS, one of the few women to hold power inside the gang structure. Now, though she maintains respect for the Mara and its trajectory, she keeps to the outer edges of gang life. Speaking to us for this book was about as close as she would go. And to ensure her safety, this is the only time we’ll mention our interview with her.
“When we became Sureños we gained respect, but we sacrificed a lot. I was against it, along with a bunch of others in my generation. But we somehow needed to keep in step with what the majority wanted.”
Little by little the new gangsters were being imprisoned in California. Once inside, they realized that no matter how tough they were on the street, all bets were off behind bars. They didn’t have firm alliances with any of the Sureño gangs (apart from the friendship with Barrio 18) and they hadn’t yet formally incorporated into the Sur system. Which means they weren’t protected by the Mexican Mafia. The other Sureño gangs continuously subjected them to humiliation, and they were on their own in any brawls with black gangs in the halls and yards of the California prisons. Though it’s still hard for them to admit this, they usually lost.
Without many other options, they began accepting the 13 at the end of their name, and, little by little, forgot their past as satanic hard rockers and dropped the “Stoner.” By 1983, the gang had fully integrated into the Sur system, under the now notorious name of Mara Salvatrucha 13.
“The guys coming out of prison weren’t like us anymore,” a gang veteran recalls. “They didn’t come out with long black hair. They came out as cholos, with shaved heads, baggy pants, big white t-shirts, earrings, and prison tattoos. They were different. They didn’t listen to black or death metal. They’d turned into something more like Chicanos, cholos, like Sureños.”
With the Mara Salvatrucha, pacts are signed with blood. The strange and romantic history of MSS, digging corpses out of cemeteries and robbing gravestones to the sound of heavy metal, needed its own burial. In late 1985, in an alleyway between 6th Street and Virgil Avenue, some homies, members of the Crazy Riders 13, beat an MS member to death. In honor of the recent stoner past that had spread like wildfire throughout Salvadoran culture, the kid had chosen a dark name for himself: Black Sabatt. He died in the hospital, under the tearful eyes of his homeboys. He was the first homie they’d had to mourn. This is how they paid their entrance fee, with blood. The stoners had died, and the Mara Salvatrucha 13 came bleeding into the Sureño system. Now they had a death to avenge, a token to play with.
These stories are told by the men and women who lived through them. Today, most of them are only tied to the gang through emotional links or old friendships. They recount these snapshots of bygone lives in busy cafés in downtown San Salvador, or dabbing their eyes over a beer at a bar in Dallas. They’re no longer members of the Mara Salvatrucha 13, but they once were, and when they speak of the MS they do so as if they were talking about family, with respect. Some are teachers in elementary schools, others are plumbers, others again preach the virtues of God in Pentecostal churches in the slums of San Salvador or Guatemala City. They only ask, in exchange for revealing their secrets, that we don’t use their names.
The Birth of the Fulton
In the San Fernando Valley, some forty minutes north of downtown Los Angeles, there’s a street. It’s not a very imposing street, nor very long. Lining it are apartment buildings, most of them low-cost, and framing these buildings are long alleyways that sometimes connect with other streets, or dead-end into a wall. In the mid 1980s, these alleys were the domain of the Salvadoran gangsters of the San Fernando Valley. What happened here to the Salvadoran youth was integral to the fate of Miguel Ángel Tobar many years later in his rural, coffee-dominated Atiquizaya.
In those years, the Valley was already an epicenter for Hispanic families. Attracted by the plummeting prices the further they got from the city center, hundreds of Salvadoran families started moving in. Some of the gang members who’d warred in the city were among them. Others, in that violent oblivion, decided to join the Mara only after they got to the Valley.
Living in San Fernando Valley meant climbing a couple steps up the social strata of undocumented migrants. Only Salvadorans who’d prospered in the city could migrate to the Valley and buy, at least the wealthiest among them, their own house with its own backyard. Some were able to set up stands in the bustling swap meets and flea markets. There they sold contraband, stolen goods, and t-shirts with small defects that were unfit to sell in the gift shops of Universal Studios.
The Salvadorans of the Valley were, for want of a better term, high-class. Of course, this should be seen in the relative context of the immigrant community. The kids had formed their own quasi-gangs. But unlike the wild stoners, these didn’t attempt to dig up the dead or worship the Beast. Instead, they formed a lowriders club.
They called themselves Mini Toy, for mini Toyota, and were all about status symbols. They saw their cars as mobile murals. The lower your car was to the ground, and the more outlandish it looked, the greater your reputation.
Members recall cruising in a carnival parade of customized and remodeled cars—all driven by brown people. It felt like falling out of the Kid Frost music video, La Raza.
Most were Mexican or Chicano, but the Salvadorans had also secured a place in that scene. Maybe their cars weren’t as eye-catching as the others, but they had other ways of winning the game. The Mini Toys and other Salvadoran car clubs started jockeying for position. With astounding speed, they went from wielding bats and chains to machetes and axes. Outfitted cars had nothing to do with violence, but those forgotten kids were always looking for trouble, trying to forge meaning in their lives. They found it in the hatred of the Other. In the conflict with the Other. It was the only way of life they knew.
The transition from car club to powerful MS-13 clique is not entirely clear. It’s known that some gang members had come over from the Hollywood clique, or had some blood relation with members of both the Hollywoods and Barrio 18. But there isn’t an exact date or a precise moment when MS-13 came to the Valley. It first emerged as a logo, an idea. Youths obsessed with Mini Toys started donning MS-13 t-shirts without really knowing much about the gang. They grabbed hold of a rumor, a war cry, a foreign flag that called to them, and they waved it up and down the Valley.
In the final days of 1985, the Salvadoran war had reached its climax. The guerrilla fighters of the FMLN knocked the army back every time they made a move. They attacked the largest military barracks, though without gaining any decisive advantage in the drawn-out war. The fighting had been going on for close to six years. Everybody was weary. That exhaustion further opened the faucet of Salvadoran migration to California. More and more deserters from both sides of the war came to the United States. Men and women whose lives bore the mark of violence, either because they’d inflicted it or had suffered it.
One of those deserters was a man about thirty years old, an ex-member of the National Guard and originally from the western Salvadoran city of Atiquizaya. With his down-turned nose and deep black eyes, he was almost certainly a descendant of the indigenous people slaughtered in 1932. His name was José Antonio Terán, but he was known in the Valley as El Veneno (the Poison).
When Terán arrived in the Valley, the Mara Salvatrucha 13 had officially joined the Sureño game. It hadn’t yet ballooned to the size of gangs like Pacoima Flats, or the fearsome Pacoimas 13, Pacas for short. The first Angelino battle fought by this most recent iteration of the MS-13 was against a clique of the Barrio 18 known as North Side. Their battleground was a street. And the name of that street was Fulton.
The terrifying savagery the Salvadoran gangsters displayed in fighting for that piece of the Valley sounded the alarm bells of the area’s criminal ecosystem. Those ex-combatants and refugees knew how to fight. And this daunting fact would be made ever clearer over the following years.
A former Salvadoran gangster, Fuentes, took notice of the new group. He saw that a strong marero muscle was being flexed in the Valley. Once involved in deadly fights to gain control of small segments of the city, Fuentes had recently adopted a new strategy. He’d started dealing both crack and cocaine. And he offered the Salvadoran gangs a new type of relationship with drugs: selling them.
But there was one obstacle. For the Fulton Street clique to be able to sell Fuentes’s wares they had to rid the area of another gang that had monopolized the trade. Along the way, the Tijuana Locos were wiped out.
The Tijuana Locos was a Sureño gang with a clear Mexican lineage. Its livelihood was also its ruin. The Locos smoked a large part of the crack and snorted a large part of the cocaine they peddled. And so they came up short to Fuentes, or, sometimes, they simply gave him nothing.
Fuentes offered the same business to the mareros of the Valley. He’d seen the beatings they meted out when any member was caught consuming drugs, and he liked their style.
In a matter of months, the Tijuana Locos had been exterminated. One on this corner, others in that alley. The new clique of the Mara Salvatrucha 13 became one of the most respected groups in the Valley, and other gangs soon learned their name: the Fulton Locos Salvatrucha.
A War between Equals
King Boulevard, 1989. In an alley behind a row of apartment buildings, a party of Sureño gangsters is going full swing.
The Mara Salvatrucha had grown. In the land of Califas they’d watered their crops with blood, Sureño blood. The confrontations with other gangs had been brutal. The Drifters had bludgeoned the western clique’s homeboys; the Crazy Riders 13 had bled out the Verendo clique; MS-13 was besieged on all sides.
The MS-13 was forced to bury many of their members. But then more joined them from Black Sabbath. Dozens more. The day of the party on King Boulevard, there’d been as many mareros present as there were members of the Barrio 18.
“The problem was this one kid who’d been MS, but came to the party as an Eighteen,” El Zarco tells us, sounding a bit confused. He stares fixedly at a plastic table in a McDonald’s in El Salvador, decades after the events. “He’d asked us for permission to get out and we’d given it to him. He said his mom was sick. But that was just a lie, he only said that to join the Eighteens. So at the party we told him that to get out of MS you have to go through the same ritual as you do to get in: thirteen seconds [of a beating].” He doesn’t seem to totally trust his memory. His time in the California jails and his subsequent deportation to an unrecognizable El Salvador have done to his memory what a hurricane does to a roof.
He says his own clique, the Western Locos Salvatrucha, was present. He says that Boxer, of the Barrio 18, after witnessing the beating of his new homeboy Pony, asked for a “one-on-one”—a sacred request in the Sureño code. It’s a fight between two gangsters, something akin to the duels of European nobility in the nineteenth century, something you can’t refuse if you want to uphold your honor and maintain your good name. Zarco remembers Boxer as a tough guy. Representing MS was Popeye, one of the youngest members of the clique, a dark-skinned, long-haired kid, still rocking the stoner style. Boxer hit hard, Popeye did too. It was a tie. Then another Eighteen asked to fight, because someone had to save the honor of the gang that had claimed California for decades. The Soldier—representing the MS—accepted the challenge. He used to be in the Salvadoran army, and he won.
The Eighteens left, choking on their defeat. When they came back they brought an automatic rifle, but of the MS members, only Shaggy remained at the party. They shot him in the legs, and he bled to death. According to Zarco, at any rate. That’s how he remembers it.
What’s certain is that these gunshots, in the following decades, would mark the lives and deaths of thousands of men and boys across the United States and Mesoamerica.
One of those marked was only six years old in 1989, and living on a coffee plantation in western El Salvador. The future Hollywood Kid.