Stories of gangsters who’ve left their life on the streets behind – podcast

What happens when a gangster leaves their life on the street? How do they transition to something new? In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we find out through the life stories of two people who joined gangs as young men and came out the other side.

Dennis Rodgers, a research professor at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, has spent decades studying youth gangs across Latin America, particularly Nicaragua. In 2019, Rodgers launched a global research project called GANGS to explore the commonalities across gangs, gangsters and ganglands around the world.

Rodgers says there are a huge variety of factors why somebody might leave a gang. This could range from having children or getting married, to experiencing violent trauma or being imprisoned. Other reasons he knows of have included:

Becoming bored, having a lucky escape, being conscripted into the army, emigrating, a death in the family, or moving away from the neighborhood … having a friend being killed in front of them, or parental pressure, or evangelical religious conversion, being betrayed, or finding employment.

The common thread here, he explains, is that “a lot of being able to leave the gang is being occupied by something else”.

Part of the GANGS project involved working with researchers to publish the life stories of 31 gang members across 23 countries.

Gaz, the head of a gang in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, was one of them. He’d spent time with a researcher called Kieran Mitton at King’s College London, who followed Gaz’s transition from the head of a street gang or clique called the Giverdam Squad, to poet and now a cooperative farmer with his former gang members. Gaz told The Conversation:

That’s the mission, to help take people off the streets, bring them to see the reality of life. Now I can boast of up to 32 cooperative members, all former gang members.

Drugs to tortillas

Another of the life histories collected for the project is that of Milton, somebody Rodgers first met on the streets of Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Milton was nine when he and a friend first joined a gang, because, he told Rodgers, “we were bored”. This was at the tail end of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. The education system was crumbling and the economic situation was dire.

Eventually the gang got involved in drugs, and become more violent, at which point Milton quit and went to live in Costa Rica. When he came back, he decided to set up a drug-delivery service, working to deliver drugs by bicycle to clients who’d text him their orders. When that went sour after a government crackdown, Milton turned to making tortillas, upending the usual production methods in the city to deliver fresh tortillas on demand in the same way as he’d used to deliver drugs. Rodgers explains:

The normal model is for one individual to make 150 to 200 tortillas a day. He’s making 3,000 tortillas a day … And you can see the way in which this has actually really profited him. His house is one of the few houses in the neighbourhood to have a second story, which is something that only drug dealers had.

Rodgers says the lives of people like Milton and Gaz shows that being a gang member doesn’t “condemn you to a particular kind of trajectory”. What happens to people after they’ve left the gang, and their successes and failures, are often not directly linked to the violence and criminality that dominated their lives inside the gang.

Listen to the full episode on The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear an interview with Gaz, and Dennis Rodgers. You can read more life stories from the GANGS project on The Conversation.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

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Dennis Rodgers has received funding from the European Research Council (https://erc.europa.eu) for a project on “Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography” (GANGS) within the context of the ERC Advanced Grant scheme (EU 787935).