title: This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha: Inside the MS-13, America's Most Violent Gang
author:  Samuel Logan 
description: Using all of the tools of a capable police investigation, Logan, a journalist based in Latin America, connects the fortunes of Brenda Paz, a Honduran-American teenager, with the ultraviolent Mara Salvatrucha gang. After family difficulties led Paz's father to send her to Texas to live with her uncle, she witnessed a friend's murder by her boyfriend, the leader of the local MS-13 gang, and fled to Virginia following her boyfriend's arrest. Logan probes the secretive Mara Salvatrucha, which funds its illegal activities through extortion, kidnapping, prostitution, drugs and theft, causing the FBI to label it the most dangerous of all criminal outfits. Eventually Paz informs on the gang about the national leadership and crimes, and the Feds unwisely stash the restless teenager in the witness protection program. Placing the reader in the midst of this story with harrowing detail, Logan writes of a young life wasted and an evil crime empire. <I>(July)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: The MS-13 was born from war.
  In the 1980s, El Salvador was enmeshed in a bloody civil conflict. To
  escape the guerrilla assaults and death squads, many fled to the US and
  settled in Los Angeles. Among them were Alex and his brother.
  There, as a means of survival, Alex and a small number of Salvadoran
  immigrants formed a group called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a
  relatively harmless social network bound by heavy metal music and a
  shared identity. But later, as they brushed against established local gangs,
  the group took on a harder edge, selling drugs, stealing cars and killing
  rivals. As authorities cracked down, gang members like Alex were
  incarcerated and deported. But in the prison system, the group only grew
  stronger.
  Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on earth, linked to
  thousands of grisly murders each year. But it is also misunderstood—less a
  drug cartel and more a hand-to-mouth organization whose criminal
  economy is based mostly on small-time extortion sche