An interview with prison gang expert, Mike Tapia

This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023 but what if we didn't get the whole story the moment you look at the whole picture the case collapsed what if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe oh my god, I think she might be innocent listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Campsite Media. Larry Ortiz was a lot of things to a lot of different people. He was a father, a husband, a friend, a brother. But he was also an ex-con, a drug dealer, and a gang member. On this bonus episode of The Brothers Ortiz, we're talking with an expert who can help contextualize that last part of Larry's identity. A chairman, a shot caller for Tango Blast. Mike Tapia, a sociologist at Texas A&M Commerce, has been studying gangs for more than a decade. He never met Larry Ortiz, but he's met a lot of people like Larry. I sat down with him to talk about the origins of prison gangs, the current landscape, and the inner workings of groups like Tango Blast. Take a listen. Just tell us who you are, your interests, your affiliations, and obviously your name. My name is Mike Tapia. I'm an associate professor of criminal justice at Texas A&M Commerce. I'm a criminologist. I'm a sociologist by training who studies nothing but crime, pretty much, almost exclusively. I'm known, I would say, first and foremost in my field as a gang expert of sorts, particularly in Texas and particularly with prison gangs. I do focus on Chicano prison gangs and Chicano gangs of all stripes. That's to say Mexican-American gangs. And my latest research pursuits are with drug cartels and violent spillover on the Texas-Mexico border. So when we first told you about this story, about Gabe and Larry, these two brothers end up doing very well for themselves on different sides of the law. You weren't terribly surprised by that. Is that accurate? I wasn't. There are many such tales that I collected similar in nature from San Antonio in a book I wrote that published in 2017. and it's a hundred year, you know, historiography of Chicano gangs in that city. You know, especially when you study history, there are so many things that come out of the woodwork in that regard. And a lot of them are strikingly similar to this story here. Is there a thread that runs through these sort of, for lack of a better term, good brother, bad brother stories? Or is it just, you know, there's so many brothers in the world, some are going to turn out like this? I think, you know, it's just the age old adage about a black sheep from an otherwise good, traditional Mexican-American working class family. I think that scenario gets played out quite a bit. I mean, it's also probably about how close any of us ever really thinks or feels we might be to the criminal element. And some of us are positioned in the social world to be closer than others. And, you know, so, yeah, I think there's access sometimes opens up for certain people and sometimes they they walk through that door. Can we rewind that a little bit for just a little bit of a history lesson? When did prison gangs become a force? In Texas in the early 80s. Can you walk us through it? Who did it start with? Why? Yeah. And it really surprisingly hasn't changed much in terms of their structure and norms to this day. Folks gravitate toward, you know, others that are similar to themselves, right? And so one really important marker there is geography. Where are you from? It's so fundamental and important to the social sphere in prison, right, in state prison in particular. And so guys click up on that basis and they go to war against each other for fighting for meager resources and so on, competition for the drug trade and controlling the illicit things that happen in prison. So it's kind of a microcosm of the outside world, if you will. There's also a pretty important, I think it's as important to note the structure of the prison itself. How Texas in particular managed this large group of unruly men and the system that they devised, it's a crappy job to be a correctional officer. The standards are pretty low to get in. The pay sucks. and it's a thankless job. It could be a very dangerous position. And so one way to control populations in prison is to let them police themselves and sort of a social Darwinism kicks in. And so those that emerge as leaders, as charismatic, as strong physically and intimidating get some responsibility. They're offered responsibility to sort of manage, help the guardsmen and wardens and so forth, manage populations and keep people in line. So the state Supreme Court of Texas made that practice illegal. And so they told prisons, prison administrators. You can't keep letting inmates police their own kind. It's called the turnkey system. And these guys had keys. They had access to different parts of the prison and everything. So they were, for all practical purposes, unpaid employees of the prison who got certain benefits. So when did this turnkey system start? Oh, I'd say that it's probably always been there. It seems like just to be part of the nature of the beast of locking people up. I mean, it's almost impossible to diminish it or make it obsolete, you know, just because of the very nature of being locked up with other individuals. some strong leader will emerge. Now they call it a pod dog, right? And so that's a big part of how and why these groups form, you know, just political, you know, microcosms in the penitentiary. So actually, so you covered my next question is, despite whatever the Texas Supreme Court letter of rules. Is it even possible to make this system go away? No. I mean, they also ruled that it's illegal to group inmates on the basis of race. But there again, that will never go away. And that is another strong basis that I shouldn't leave that out. I would even say that that probably is one of the primary reasons that prison gangs did form also is for self-protection and preservation for racial conflict reasons. You know, Blacks against Whites against Mexicans, essentially, in Texas prisons. Can you give us sort of the geography of the current situation? I mean, what are the big gangs? What's moving around? Who's prevalent now? Sure, their nucleus is some, you know, some Texas city, right? Texas syndicate, traditionally, home base is Austin, Texas, right? To some extent, also Houston, and that has evolved in that way as well. San Antonio has always been Texas Mexican mafia. El Paso has been Barrio Azteca. And there are others that kind of file in between with less tied to geography but there are like the from the Laredo area that makes reference to a caliber handgun So there are other like lesser known you know prison gangs that by administration are still, you know, considered what they call security threat groups. You know, there is a hierarchy in prisons, in the gang world, with prison gangs per se, being on top for most of the past, you know, 40 years, we'll say roughly, since their inception, right, in the 80s. And so right underneath that highest status are folks that are just sympathetic to the cause. Maybe a younger generation who were street gang members and who just sort of do the dirt, if you will, of the larger prison gangs with the hope that, you know, they would get selected for full on membership at some point if they prove their loyalty. And so those are what's known as tangos, right? So tango is this term that's been used pretty much since the inception of prison gangs. And it's just basically backup to the extent that prison gangs are. But the tango structure just lies right beneath that layer. And sometimes the most capable amongst them, you know, would be called up to the big leagues. You know, there's a baseball analogy there, you know, with the minor leagues and the big leagues. And so somebody's number gets called up and they put in enough work, as it were, do enough dirt in the name of the furtherance of the gangs, you know, whatever its business is. And so that's the structure that I think that Larry fit into. And he was old enough to be part of probably that junior structure when he was first incarcerated. And so, yeah, he would have fallen in line, Houston being Tango Blast and probably answering at some point to the Texas syndicate. But just because prison gangs originate and have a home base, you know, in a large Texas city in particular, it doesn't mean that the prison system doesn't shuffle them around the state and that they don't find each other. So there are probably smatterings of every gang in every prison in Texas. But amongst the prisoners, it's always known who runs that joint, whose canton is this, which basically means whose house is this, right? And so different prison units, and there's so many, you know, dozens of prison units across Texas, there is a primary gang that whose canton that is, right? And there's always a leader, you know, Gallo Mayor, you know, like the big rooster. I mean, you know, there's all this whole terminology that goes with it. So yeah, that's, that's the basic structure. And that I think that, that Larry filtered into at some point. He was a, I'm probably going to mispronounce it. Acia, a Cilla. Acia. Yeah. So he was a shot. Okay. It's like a pod dog. That's a, that's really, it's a synonym for it. You know, it's, it's somebody who, yeah. calls shots, you know, inside. And I really don't know if that translates to the outside world. I assume that I never asked that question of any of the guys I, you know, studied or spent time with, but I would assume that it probably, you know, carries some weight in the outside world as well. What would it mean on the inside world? Yeah. I mean, everything a shot caller does pretty much racks up a lot of the profits from drug sales, coordinates those things. You know, discipline. The gangs in carceral settings are real quick to punish their own for transgressions and for not rising to the occasion when called upon. All these things that happen that the CIA controls is, they call it disciplina, you know and um you know they there's an old terminology you know if you don't have enough which is you know spanish for short for corazon right if you don't have heart for the gang and you don't show it uh when called upon to do so to go steal something or beat somebody up or you know go deliver this dope or you know whatever it is then there's going to be consequences to pay so So, yeah, the CIA pretty much coordinates and controls all that and probably has other right hand people to help with that stuff as well. So when Gabe was telling us about this, he made it sound basically like that. But there were a few differences. He was telling us that the Tongos, unlike Aryan Brotherhood, Texas Syndicate, isn't a blood in, blood out organization. that you can be a tango while you're in prison and then come out rehabilitated, go back to your civilian life. That's correct. And it's evolved to that point. So at some point, the tangos became so numerous. They're the younger generation. We had an incarceration binge in Texas. People were going to prison for everything under the sun. Texas is a nail-em and jail-em state, you know, a real hardcore law and order place known not to be shy about incarceration by any means. And so with that critical mass of young guys, the economy of Texas being what it is, job opportunities, the educational system, so on and so forth, all these things that are thought to contribute to children turning wayward and going to the streets instead. Well, yeah, guess what? You know, you're going to have a critical mass of these streetwise kids entering prison. And at some point, realizing their potential and saying, why are we taking this stuff from these guys? You know, these guys are so old fashioned, you know. So it's sort of like just the age-old tale of a younger generation coming of age and saying, we're not going to take it anymore. And it was sort of a defensive posture at first because that's a pretty gutsy move. And for younger guys that are not as criminally embedded, if you will, or not as sophisticated as the older guys in the ways of the joint, it was pretty clumsy at first. But they eventually got some internal structure and they decided instead of being hierarchical and strict about membership and rules. And it was it was designed from the inception as being very loose. You know, it was meant to be like come in here. We're your we're your protection society while you're here. When it's time for you to bounce out of here, you go back to your regular life. You know, we don't have, you know, exactly like you said, the blood in, blood out oath. But as with all things, you know, that defensive posture will evolve into an offensive one and will start to compete with these prison gangs as these guys age out. And so, yeah, it's just a matter of the younger generation evolving, taking over, becoming more numerous. And so, yeah, Larry would have been right in that age to see all that stuff. You know, all those things that happen in prison bleed out to the street. At that point, it becomes a personal choice. I think you're not beholden to the tango anymore. You don't have to have any loyalty to it out on the street. But those opportunities do exist if you so choose. And people do eventually mature out of the street life and the gang life as well, because they want to see their grandkids grow up and stuff like, just like you and me, you know? China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict? A villain? A nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP AKA Neuro Linguistic Programming is a blend of hypnosis linguistics and psychology Fans say it like finally getting a user manual for your brain It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America was out of breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, was something like the Tongos, was there sort of a rival in evolution? is someone who studies this, is it, are they a less benign force in the grand scheme of prison? Were the tangos a good thing or a bad thing? Their evolution and development. Yeah. I mean, the Texas Department of Public Safety has a gang security threat report that it puts out every year. As someone who studies gangs, the lens through which they see this is very narrow, very limited. So they have placed Tango Blast, for example, super high on the threat list. For law enforcement, Tango Blast, they've become one of the big boys. You know, they are probably Houston's primary prison gang. They've since, you know, sort of pushed out the old guard. But yeah, when I see news headlines these days about, you know, what makes the news about inner city crime and stuff, it's usually tango guys that are, and they're already in, you know, in our age group, you know, they're up in age because they've been around for a while. And yeah, they've sort of evolved into shot callers and stuff. They probably spend a lot of time going in and out of jail and prison. And so, you know, they really never leave that life. You know, they've, they sort of adopted it and so on. So yeah, I think it's probably fair to say that tango is the new game in town for Texas criminals. So back to Larry. So when he was a kid, he started his little pretend gang. They saw this movie called South Central, which is actually pretty good. And they decided to start their own gang called Deuce. They were like 11. But after that, when Larry started making money, these guys were claiming to be crips. so would the Crips really have an outlet or a branch wherever in Brazoria County or were you just claiming a name it's hard to tell but I'm sure that someone didn't fly in from Compton and say I'm going to set up a chapter of the Crips you know here in Brazoria but yeah no by the time that Larry was out in the streets doing their thing there was a lot of copycat stuff going on you know gang culture had sort of swept the nation. It was kind of a popular fad. And for street kids that don't have a lot to do, if America's not investing in its inner cities, you know, with little league baseball and, you know, as those things go away, well, kids are going to fill in the gaps with other stuff and they get creative with it. I did a study in Indianapolis, for example, because I went to a graduate school at Ohio State. And so this was in the early 2000s, right? What I saw as a student of crime at the time were scrawlings on the wall in these places in the Midwest, pretty far from the Southwest, right? Like Serenio 13, one of the most popular, you know, California-based, LA-based gangs that have pretty much spread to every major city in the United States. But the Latino population was so small in these places, right, that I was like, can that be real? can this happen? Is it a franchising of sorts or is it just copycat? Are there drug markets to be cornered here and there is expansion? You know, that was my research question, right? So I set out, got some money from the NSF and got this study funded up there to try to find out, you know, started writing with cops and they would take me to these gang members' homes to interview them, you know, about, okay, so like, where are y'all's roots? You know, Where are your origins? Why are you claiming a gang that exists in Houston and San Antonio and in the southwestern large cities? Like, are you all really here? You know, 18th Street, MS-13, like every brand name that you'd ever heard of in the gang world, right, was present. And it didn't take me long to, like, crack that world and gain some entry and kind of see it for myself. And I published papers on it and everything. And it never really fully answered. It's always, you know, the answer is always somewhere in the middle. It's always a little bit of both, right? There is one guy, you know, there that knows something that brought from Third Ward, Houston, you know, his uncle was a real Crip somewhere. He moved from L.A. or whatever. And then it just, those kind of cultural norms sort of get passed on and the knowledge you need to be a crip and how to do the crip walk and, you know, how to, you know, all their norms and stuff. And so, yeah, it's just pop culture. I know nobody's got a crystal ball, but do you see any major changes coming? You know, gangs are going to go away. They're going to take more power. They're going to get bigger. They're going to get smaller. Is it just going to be more of the same? How's that for a question? Sure. No, it's a valid one. And I contend in most of the stuff that I've written that street gangs, as we've known them for so long in American cities and so forth, have gone by the wayside. This has a lot to do with the rise in technology, the methods that kids use, what they spend their days doing now. We have these like sort of social media gangbangers who don't hardly ever go to the street. To put it this way, you know, gangs of old used to posture literally on street corners, right? They occupied turf within the city, whether they claim that street corner as their place to sell drugs, run girls, you know, fight other proximate groups. You know, that harkens back to like, you know, 1950s sort of urban gang lore. Law enforcement has also cracked down on gangs in the 90s. Gang units, if you will, gang task forces and such were pretty rare. But as the social problem grew, then law enforcement responded accordingly and started forming all these specialized units. And so gang common sense also evolved to adapt to that and say, we can't be putting ourselves out on the street. Literally, you know, we have to do things a little smarter, stay behind doors, use technology to continue our craft. And, you know, so it has changed in that regard. And kids don't really like, you know, Bloods and Crips, we used to hear in Urban Myth, and this is probably pretty true at some point, is, you know, they used to shoot each other over colors. They were shooting complete strangers based on their affiliations in larger cities. Groups used to get around and sort of migrate and travel across the city and just go wild and go on theft and violence binges and so on and just go around like looking for targets and stuff. I mean, that probably was a very, very short period in American, you know, urban history and was just not sustainable. Gangs are often misconstrued as like being these wild thugs run amok, you know, just vandalizing stuff. But they're a little bit more purposive and they do sort of evolve, you know, with their surroundings, you know, that including technology. And so I ventured that, you know, gangs, their common sense did evolve as well. And they realized this is pretty foolish. You know, you can go away for a long time for pulling the trigger on somebody you don't know. It's sort of become a lot more local, a lot more utilitarian in terms of their criminal activities. It's all about money. You know, a lot of gangsters you see these days with, you know, whereas you might have seen like loyalty affiliation type tattoos and stuff, which we still have, right? People want you to know who, you know, who they're down with. But the youngsters, they put stuff like MOE, you know, money over everything, you know, sort of the mantra that like the only color that matters here is green. You know, they make affiliations with unlikely others. If you look at census data, you know that that race category called two or more races, you know, mixed, right, that that group of society, mixed race people is really growing. And so with urban dysfunction and poverty and everything being what it is, people filter into those social classes, regardless of what race they are, and their kids join gangs. And all of a sudden, your kid's claiming tango, and he's half black, he's half white, because you live in Houston, and that's where he got incarcerated when he stole that car with his friends, you know? And so it has become a bit post I know it sounds strange to talk about gangs in that way because they thought to be so antisocial and so you know like uneducated and just these menacing, you know, figures who are ready to victimize anyone. But they're not really like that. They're kids just like you and I were. And they're pretty, you know, they're stupid too, you know, but they do some dumb things still. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's a unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. no voicing of any skepticism or doubt it'll cause so much harm at every single level of the british establishment of this is wrong listen to doubt the case of lucy let be on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts what if mind control is real if you could control the behavior of anybody around you what kind of life would you have can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America was at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. to be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's still sort of shocking to me that, I mean, Gabe's job when he was in El Paso, he was a gang investigator for the Department of Public Safety. And he completely missed it with his brother. I mean, all this, I mean, he knew when he was going to prison, obviously, but after he got out of prison for the last time, he was oblivious to it. It's interesting what you will overlook in your own family, I guess. Yeah, I mean, you know, the term gang member is such a misunderstood and misconstrued, like the imagery that we get. I mean, of course, there are your archetypal gang members, you know, cholos and homies, you know, on the street who love to dress the part and play the part and all that sort of thing. But I mean, that's probably another way since you're asking about how things have changed over time. Gang members have sort of adopted a posturing, you know, where if law enforcement and their gang task forces and so on are going to key in on those signifiers, then you start to disguise them. That's also a progression of gang life is to, you know, wear long sleeves and hide your affiliation. And if you do happen to get booked into county jail on something, do not disclose to the classification officer your affiliation. Don't put tattoos on that make that so obvious. You know, it's it's a double edged sword. Right. Because, I mean, if you know, if you don't put those, you know, block us on yourself. these gang affiliate tattoos, then, you know, they speak volumes when you walk into a pod, but they can keep you a lot out of a lot of trouble if you avoid them, right, with law enforcement. So it's always a slippery slope and these guys all know it, you know, but we make our choices. As much as society is structured around this and creates or misses these things or whatever, I mean, individuals on the micro level, you know, do have to navigate those worlds and make those choices, right? So it's always going to be the case. Well, thank you so much. This has really been helpful. It's some context we can get in here. Prison gangs is one of those topics that has been so mythologized that it's nice to have some clarity on it. Well, I hope it's helpful and it's always fun. Good. It was a good conversation. If you'd like to learn more about Mike's research, he's published a few books. His most recent titles are gangs of the El Paso Juarez Borderland, and the Barrio gangs of San Antonio, Texas. The Brothers Ortiz is a production from Campsite Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Brothers Ortiz was written, reported, and hosted by me, Sean Flynn. Lane Rose is our senior producer. Story editing by Audrey Quinn. Sound design, mix, and engineering by Garrett Tiedemann. Original music by Garrett Tiedemann. Fact-checking by Savannah Wright. iHeart Podcast executive producers are Lindsay Hoffman and Jennifer Bassett. Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. A special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slavin, Ashley Warren, and Sabina Mara. If you enjoyed The Brothers Ortiz, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks for listening. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast exploring NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle? A shady hypnosis scam? Or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.