Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Stephen Dudley, he's the director of Insight Crime

He's a crime and public security reporter and an author

MS-13 are one of the best known gangs in the world

President Trump declared war on them and called them a national security threat today

We get to hear exactly how the gang works from the most informed MS-13 expert on the planet

So today expect to learn how MS-13 have become so dangerous without any single leader

How the gang initiates new members the terrifyingly difficult prospect of trying to leave the organization

How the gang are both victimizers and victims the danger of them entering into politics and

Much more one of the most interesting takeaways that I got from this conversation is that a lot of our ideas around how criminal

Organizations cartels and gangs are run is very jaded by what we saw towards the back end of the

1900s we saw the Mexican cartels and we saw the New York Mafia and stuff like that

But in reality there are gangs who are operating very hand-to-mouth like MS-13

They don't have huge swaths of cash and submarines and airplanes that they're flying all over the place

They're just doing low-level

local

Pretty unsophisticated crime. They're not very well organized. They don't have a central power structure

And they don't have that much money which genuinely does make you reframe exactly what's going on with gangs in 2021

Before I get to other news

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