He runs a bodega in East Boston, just outside Maverick Square, and from his perch behind the counter he watches the rhythm of a neighborhood with the skilled eye of a sociologist.
“The Dodgers hats,’’ he said. “That’s when I knew. Years ago, you’d see Red Sox hats, Yankees hats. But then the kids started wearing Dodgers hats, and I knew.’’
He knew for years what most everybody else in and around Boston only became conscious of on Friday, when the Feds started rounding up members of the MS-13 street gang. The blue and white of the Los Angeles Dodgers is the blue and white of MS-13.
If it was news to many people that MS-13 posed such a threat, that it engaged in such callous and casual violence, it’s old news to local Latino immigrant communities, especially in East Boston and Chelsea. For years, MS-13 has been smoldering in those places like a cigarette dropped between sofa cushions.
This is history repeating itself. It is noticeable that the places where the cops say the MS-13 presence is strongest — East Boston, Chelsea, Everett, Revere — are the same places where a criminal enterprise called La Cosa Nostra established itself and grew last century.
MS-13 fashions itself as something of a new Mafia, complete with rituals and traditions that allow its “homeboys’’ to engage in the pretense that they are part of some noble brotherhood rather than just a band of vicious, venal criminals.
What the Mafia calls soldiers, MS-13 calls homeboys, and to become a homeboy, like a Mafia soldier, you have to get wet, kill someone. Instead of pricking a trigger finger and burning a saint’s card, homeboys are initiated in a rite in which their fellow homeboys beat them mercilessly as a leader counts to 13 slowly. Violence is a sacrament, an essential part of the cult.
Within the Mafia, there was a caste system. Sicilians sat on top, but they gradually allowed other Italians, and eventually even non-Italians, to become associates. The same thing has happened with MS-13, which has its roots in El Salvador. Salvadorans rule the roost, but an increasing number of members and associates have their roots in other Central American countries.
Like the fledgling Mafia did a century ago, MS-13 preys mostly on its own communities. But the idea that MS-13 only hurts other criminals died on a bedroom floor with 35-year-old Katerin Gomez two years ago. She was a single mother of three, living in Chelsea, when she heard a commotion outside her home. It was MS-13 members jamming with other kids.
“She looks out the window and takes a bullet in the head,’’ said Chelsea Police Chief Brian Kyes.
One of the men charged with her murder, 22-year-old Hector “Cuervo’’ Ramires, had been free on bail on two separate charges of armed robbery when she was shot. One of those robberies was of a man who freely admitted to Chelsea police that he was down with the 18th Street gang, MS-13’s chief rivals.
It is that enduring conflict, between MS-13 and 18th Street, that explains much of the violence in recent years that has left so many young Latino men and teenagers bleeding all over East Boston and Chelsea.
Consider the case of Irvin de Paz. He was 15 years old when he was stabbed to death last September on Trenton Street in East Boston. Born in El Salvador, he joined his mother and stepfather in Chelsea when he was 8. He had just started his freshman year at Chelsea High last fall when he found himself at the age when the gangs aggressively recruit prospective members they call paros.
Both MS-13 and 18th Street approached him, sniffing around, and he put them both off. But you can only put them off so long. According to the indictment, an MS-13 paro — a fledgling member — named Joel “Animal’’ Martinez and other MS-13 members surrounded Irvin and stabbed him to death. If Martinez thought this was his ticket in, he was sadly mistaken. He was beaten, per the ritual, but homeboy status was withheld. Martinez persisted and a few weeks ago, inside an auto repair shop in Everett, he was reputedly promoted to homeboy.
The details of what happened after that suggests the Feds had an informant at the ceremony, or had the auto body shop wired up. Or both.
This is just the beginning. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz said the 56 men indicted for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder constitute roughly a third of the MS-13 members in these parts. That means there are about 100 of them still out there, willing to use a knife, a machete, or a gun to get what they want.
It took generations, and successive prosecutions, to reduce the Mafia to what it is now, around here, a shell of its former self. That’s because it was more than a criminal enterprise. It was a subculture, a way of life.
That’s true of MS-13, too, the only street gang in the United States considered to be a transnational organization.
In the meantime, the good people of East Boston and beyond will have to deal with the day-to-day threat from rash hoodlums like Rogelio Alvarado.
A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the afternoon, Alvarado was on a Blue Line train when he started jawing with a guy who belongs to 18th Street. When they stepped off the train onto the platform at Maverick Station, Alvarado allegedly pulled a gun and started shooting, wounding the 18th Street hood and some other guy on the platform.
Last week, the Transit Police got a warrant for Alvarado’s arrest and circulated a photo of him. In the photo, he is wearing a Dodgers hat.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
