Gangs

Friday

Charles Lipson

Roadblocks prevent Trump from deporting millions of illegal immigrants

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here. It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems. The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

Immigration

Wednesday

Juan P. Villasmil

Behind the Venezuelan migrant crime wave

Jose Antonio Ibarra, a twenty-six-year-old Venezuelan illegal immigrant, was charged in connection with the gruesome murder of Laken Riley, a nursing student at the University of Georgia last week. Another Venezuelan, thirty-two-year-old Renzo Mendoza, was arrested last week on two felony charges for sexually assaulting an underage child in Virginia.  These cases, along with a series of others connected to Venezuelan migrants, have become central to the debate on immigration policy. Tuesday morning, for instance, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security asking for more information about Ibarra.

tren de aragua venezuela

Tuesday

David Honigmann

Thugs in drape jackets: when the Teddy Boys ruled the roost

From our UK edition

In the wake of wars, youth cults spring up, those too young to have fought behaving in a way to scandalise those who did. The Bright Young People were the younger siblings of those who perished, battalion by battalion, on the Western Front. (Come to that, it was after the end of the Peloponnesian War that Socrates’s corruption of the youth became intolerable to Athens.) So when Max Décharné describes the Teddy Boys as Britain’s first youth counterculture, what he means is that they were Britain’s first working-class youth counterculture. The Notting Hill riots of 1958 were largely blamed on Teddy Boys, possibly incited by Oswald Mosley’s sons  Décharné sketches in the elements that made the Teddy Boys a phenomenon.

Wednesday

Juan P. Villasmil

Ecuador’s gangs could trigger civil war

From our UK edition

Ecuador’s most-wanted prisoner escaped from a maximum-security detention center in the port city of Guayaquil on Sunday. Chaos has reigned in the South American country since then, with President Daniel Noboa – who was inaugurated fewer than 50 days ago – declaring a nationwide state of emergency for 60 days on Monday. The Ecuadorian government appears ready to deploy its full forces after years of escalating discord with the gangs The prisoner, José ‘Fito’ Macías Villamar, is the leader of Los Choneros, one of Ecuador’s fiercest gangs. The group has humble beginnings, acting as the military wing of Colombian narcos in the 1990s, but has since has evolved into an expansive and internally divided prison gang.

Friday

John Pietro

Why Haiti’s problems are America’s problems

Haiti tends to not get much attention in the American press, but it should. The country has descended into a state of near-anarchy, with gangs ruling the streets and the government more or less nonfunctional. There has not been an election since 2016, and both the legislative and executive branches of government have no elected officials in office. The country has been ruled by an unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry, since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Elections are tentatively planned for this year, but the timeline is not yet set. The crisis in Haiti is a problem for the whole region, including the United States.

Friday

James Snell

How Syria became another narco-state

There is a drug war brewing in the Middle East, and Syria is at its center. The country has been destroyed by its eleven-year civil war, and in the ruins of what was once a prosperous country, an entirely different economy now takes shape. It’s an economy of poverty and privation, where food and energy prices are perpetually high, and supplies of basic commodities are uncertain. The regime of Bashar al-Assad, now unlikely to be overthrown, has become the Middle East’s biggest moocher — a rent-seeking entity that begs for “reconstruction” funds from nearby monarchies to keep its own corrupt machinery in operation. Wartime brings its own economic calculations.

Saturday

Paulina Neuding

How gang warfare took over Sweden’s streets

From our UK edition

Nils Grönberg was 19 years old when he was shot and killed: one bullet to his chest and one to his face. Images of his lifeless body lying on the ground in one of Stockholm’s more affluent neighbourhoods – the hyper-modern Hammarby Waterfront Residential Area – soon spread on social media. Many Swedes heard the news from their children. Nils Grönberg, or ‘Einár’ as he called himself, was one of Sweden’s most popular artists. And while middle-class Swedes keep hoping that their kids can be kept away from what goes on among the country’s criminal gangs, the murder of Einár once again proved that this is a mess we’re all in together.

Wednesday

Senay Boztas

The shooting of a journalist – and the dark world of Dutch organised crime

From our UK edition

In an attack that has rocked the Netherlands, a leading Dutch crime reporter is fighting for his life in hospital after being shot in broad daylight. Last night, at around 7.30 p.m., the investigative crime journalist Peter R De Vries was shot five times on a busy street in central Amsterdam after leaving a television studio where he was recording a talk-show. The horror on the face of the Amsterdam mayor was visible at a hastily-organised 11 p.m. press conference to discuss the attack, while tributes for De Vries flooded in from everyone from Dutch king Willem-Alexander to caretaker Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Rutte called the shooting ‘an attack on the freedom of the press… appalling for our democracy, justice system and society’.

Tuesday

Jamie Collinson

The Ryan Gattis guide to Lynwood

In 2015, after a 10-year hiatus that followed his debut, the novelist Ryan Gattis published a masterpiece. All Involved is a compulsive, symphonic novel set during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, telling the stories of gang members, a firefighter, a nurse and a graffiti artist, among others, as they try to navigate six notorious, brutal days in LA. This month, Gattis returns to this milieu with The System. Much of the novel is set in troubled, entrepreneurial Lynwood, South Central Los Angeles, where Gattis has spent many hundreds of hours on painstaking research.

ryan gattis lynwood

Thursday

James Walton

Classic tangled thriller: Sky’s Gangs of London reviewed

From our UK edition

There were plenty of TV shows around this week designed to cheer us up. Sky Atlantic’s Gangs of London, however, wasn’t one of them. After decades of desensitisation, it’s not easy for any film or television programme these days to make its screen violence genuinely horrifying. Yet, by my reckoning, Thursday’s first episode managed to do it at least twice before the opening credits had even rolled. By the time they did, it was clear that two terrified Welsh lowlifes from some kind of travellers’ camp had been tricked into carrying out a hit on Finn Wallace (Colm Meaney), London’s most powerful criminal boss — rather than, as they’d fondly imagined, ‘just some paedo’. But that was clear only to us.