This conversation about drug legalization was long and wide ranging. One possible view is that gangs exist wherever there is poverty; if it isn't drugs, it's sugar or milk or whatever they can control. The essential ingredient for gangs, in this view, is a large supply of young men with few alternatives in the legal economy.
In the middle was Tyler, arguing that legalizing drugs would reduce crime, but not by that much, because the gangs would persist.
On the other side was me, arguing that the crime reduction benefits should be large.
I've been thinking a lot about this over the last few days. It still seems to me that gangs are hard to support when there is good policing. Gangs flourish in places like Rio because the police force is corrupt and doesn't care about the favela inhabitants. They flourish in drugs and prostitution because contracts are not legally enforceable--if you can't sue to get the drugs you're owed, you need to use violence. Since there is safety in numbers, you get a gang.
As it happens, I'm reading The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier's excellent book on poverty traps in the developing world. As you can imagine, it has something to say on the subject of lawless bands of young men preying on the populace. A lot of it backs up the first position. "Civil war," Collier says, is much more likely to break out in low-income countries: halve the starting income of the country and you double the risk of civil war."
He expands:
. . . according to psychologists, on average about 3 percent of any population have psychopathic tendencies, so you can be sure that some of those in the recruitment line will be psychopaths. Others will be attracted by the prospect of power and riches, however unlikely; if the reality of daily existence is otherwise awful, the chances of success to not have to be very high to be alluring. Even a small chance of the good life as a successful rebel becomes worth taking, despite the high risk of death, because the prospect of death is not so much worse than the prospect of life in poverty.
Later he notes:
So what characteristics did make people more likely to engage in political violence? Well, the three big ones were being young, being uneducated, and being without dependents. Try as one might, itis difficult to reconcile these characteristics of recruitment with an image of a vanguard of fighters for social justice.
And even if you nominally resolve the source of the conflict, that doesn't necessarily end the violence:
Once a war has begun, the economic damage undoes the growth achieved during peace. Worse, even aside from this economic damage, the risk of futher war explodes upward. Civil war leaves a legacy of organized killing that is hard to live down. Violence and extortion have proved profitable for the perpetrators. Killing is the only way they know to earn a living. And what else to do with all those guns? . . . the emerging pattern seems to be that guns become cheap during conflict because so many get imported through official and semiofficial channels that a proportion of them leak onto the informal market. The legacy of conflict is cheap Kalishnikovs . . .The end of the political fighting ushers in a boom in homicides. Presumably, this is part of a wider surge in violent crime.
So at least in the early stages, this seems to indicate that legalizing drugs wouldn't reduce crime too much; indeed, by disrupting a somewhat stable market, it might increase crime.
But over the long run, I think Collier's evidence supports my position. At the same time that he tells us that rebels are often attracted to money and power, he adds:
The key point of Weinstein's research is that in the presence of natural resource wealth--oil, diamonds, or perhaps drugs--there are credible prospects of riches, so that some of the young men in the queue to join will be motivated by these prospects . . .
Slightly later on, he says:
And where are the violent groups most likely to form? One might think it would be in the districts that are most deprived of social amenities, for that is supposedly what it is all about--oil wealth being stolen by the oil companies and the federal government instead of being used for the benefit of local communities. But Aderoju found that . . . there was no relationship between the social amenities that a district possessed and its propensity to political violence. Instead, the violence occurred in the districts with oil wells.
This suggests that an opportunity for economic rents--like, say, a line on a way to import a highly illegal substance--at the very least increases the supply of potential gang members, and gang violence.
There's also the fact that we seem to be exporting our drug-related violence elsewhere; according to the book, 95% of the world's supply of hard drugs are produced in conflict countries. Obviously, this is in part because conflict generates a zone outside of government control--but given the observation that violence clusters in areas where there are economic rents, it seems plausible to say that profits from the drug trade also increase the incentives for violence.
So I stand by my conclusion that the social benefits of legalization would be large, both here and abroad. It would not be without cost--I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't see more drug addicts if we legalized them. But the spectacular violence associated with vice trades, and the glamor drug rents lend to criminality, seem to outweigh the social cost of more drug abuse.
Of course, this does raise the question of what all those young men will do with themselves.
Update One participant emails:
On the one hand you argued that the drug wars implied huge wasted rents leading to crime. On the other you cite Levitt etc on the low returns to drug dealing. These two positions cannot be reconciled. If there are mostly winner take all rents in drug dealing, and the average returns are small, then the artificial rents due to drug control cannot, ipso facto, be large. Thus, one has to ask, if small rents with winner-take-all markets are sufficient to generate this huge amount of crime, then (probably) smaller rents due to legalization (and having to find substitutes) should still be sufficient to generate gang problems in the absence of a cure to the policing problems in poor areas with dysfunctional groups.
My response is that it all depends on the relative opportunities--absent the drug rents, would other rents be high enough to attract so many people into the tournament? Or would the legal sector become relatively more attractive?
That's an empirical question that I don't think we can answer without legalizing drugs and waiting fifteen years. But I suspect that there is a tipping point--that the gangs are supported in part by the fact that so many young men in their neighborhoods are criminals, which creates a culture hospitable to criminals. If you start moving more young men into legal work, you may hit a tipping point where criminality becomes stigmatized, and the social institutions that support it collapse. I'm not saying that there would be no criminals, obviously, but that the dominance of crime in some areas would cease.
Still, this is a very good point that I'm still pondering.
Shout-out to the peripheral but obvious recognition that, yes, flooding these poor undeveloped countries with weapons that are more lethal than previously does, in fact, increase the frequency and lethality of violent crime.
Only in America do we attempt to deny such wildly obvious correlations.
I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't see more drug addicts if we legalized them.
Very good point that is often swept under the rug. Legalizers need to resist the urge to argue that legalization will make *all* drug-related problems go away, when the more likely result is that some things will get worse, some better.
Good morning Megan
In my view, it is well established that prohibition creates crime.
I am glad to see that all participants in your debate agreed on the fundamental issue that the current legal regime is a failure. A good starting point
I haven't had the time to read through all the comments over at the Marginal Revolutions post, so please excuse me if I repeat some points that were made over there.
Your essay reminds me of organized crime here in the US pre-Prohibition. Highly organized gangs formed along ethnic and family lines existed, but they were not particularly troublesome to law enforcement except in some very localized neighborhoods.
Prohibition allowed the gangs to consolidate and expand, not only into other criminal enterprises and other territories, but the profits from illegal booze also meant that they had the resources to expand into the political arena. Al Capone, for example, had so many politicians in his pocket that he was considered invulnerable.
But cutting off the single most important source of revenue didn't end the gangs. The Mafia has seen their influence and power erode over the decades, but this is more to innovative policing techniques than anything else. Even so, they are still a force to be reckoned with seven decades after booze was made legal again.
Rescinding all of the laws concerning illegal drugs won't make the present gangs which rely on that particular commodity go away, either. Maybe in a century, too slow for anyone but social scientists five generations from now to notice.
But keep in mind that the social costs you mentioned in passing above, such as an increased number of addicts, would be immediate and noticeable. Even if you could persuade enough politicians to sign on to your little social experiment, their careers would be ruined when the voters note that suddenly legal drugs are causing problems while the benefits don't ever seem to appear.
As an aside, you might be interested in a post I wrote a while back where I helped jail a Japanese Yakuza gangster who traveled to Columbus, Ohio in order to recruit local gangs as drug pushers.
James
Yes, until Prohibition, the Sicilian, Irish, and Jewish mafias in New York and Chicaqo were nortorious for their violent competition to control the milk and sugar markets, and they started right up again after booze was made legal.
Sarcasm aside, yes, a supply of young men without opportunities in the legal economy is a formula for gangs, which is precisely why it is an exceedingly bad idea to expand the sphere known as the "illegal economy", and shrink the sphere know as the "legal economy", via legal prohibitions of things and services that many people very evidently wish to purchase. Do you want young men to be hired by R.J. Reynolds, Anheuser Busch, and Harrahs, or do you want young men to be hired by Lucky Luciano?
Mr. Rummell, you are absolutely correct that once Prohibition provides a criminal enterprise a huge source of venture capital, the enterprise is much more difficult to stamp out even after that source has been cut off. However, cutting off that source of capital is still essential to attacking the enterprise. Frankly acknowledgeing the unwanted negative outcomes like increased addiction is wise, but also while explaining that every addict is not the basket case of popular fiction. There are a lot of high functioning drunks, and there are a lot of high functioning addicts.
To answer your question Megan, the young men will push what they pushed before drugs were illegal: prostitution. Not "milk and sugar", but things that are illegal. If prostitution is legalized, they will push something else that is illegal (counterfit DVDs? I'm sure they'll think of something).
Freddie, I disagree that their enterprises are first illegal, and profitable second. I think they only enter illegal ventures because they appear to have the most profit for that person's risk appetite.
Interesting discussion. Yet I can't quite say I'm sold on the idea that legalization, which must by nature be piecemeal, would remedy the organized crime problem in chaotic and corrupt developing nations.
First, by piecemeal legalization I mean answering the question of which controlled substances are to be legalized: marijuana would be the easiest candidate, then most likely coca products and opiates. But what of other entirely man-made "designer" drugs? Or pharmaceuticals banned as medicines? Here in the boonies, we're seeing occasional reports of youngsters breaking into their parents' and neighbors' medicine chests to steal prescription drugs so as to put on "pharm parties" where everyone grabs some random pills and pops them to see what kind of fun might ensue.
Legalization could clearly never address all the possible banned substances that organized criminals could think of stealing and selling for illicit use at high profit margins -- and fighting violently with one another for greater market control.
Second, I'm not sure our society would accept a potential proliferation of addicts to such substances. These social cases generally wind up dumped on someone to take care of, when they're not getting themselves into trouble by committing theft to pay their suppliers. There's bit a bit of that around -- most recently the theft of catalytic converters from parked cars for their valuable metals and break-ins in mine shafts and electric power substations for copper (a rather suicidal enterprise).
Ultimately, it seems comparatively rational for us to "export," as you seem to be arguing, organized criminal activity to countries where it would naturally seem to flourish simply because of a lack of civil society and established property rights, too much political corruption, etc. It seems less likely that we as a society would be more willing to accept the potential costs to ourselves -- especially with little promise of any obvious direct benefits for ourselves.
The obvious thing for organized criminals to do after drug liberalization in the US would be to seek rents in human trafficking and selling other illegal substances such as other chemicals or counterfeit merchandise.
A bit of a side note:
One quote (by Mr. Collier) from your post goes unchallenged:
"the emerging pattern seems to be that guns become cheap during conflict because so many get imported through official and semiofficial channels that a proportion of them leak onto the informal market. The legacy of conflict is cheap Kalishnikovs . . ."
The Atlantic (in print) had a piece some time ago which came to the opposite conclusion; The price for assault rifles is higher in conflict areas, not lower. This totally makes sense since there is more incentive to have the means to defend yourself in a lawless area, than in well-governed ones.
Touching Levitt, I seem to recall that the drug rents are only low for the foot soldiers, the guys who stand around on street corners. The goal of the foot soldier is not to make a lot of money selling drugs; it is to become a gang boss, because the bosses do make quite large profits. Like acting, it's a small chance at a large payoff, with the expectation better than these men's opportunities in the legal economy.
There would seem to be a series of requirements here:
- something first has to be in significant, preferably relatively inelastic, demand.
- it has to be illegal,
a) to restrict supply, and so drive up the price that can be charged.
b) to eliminate the possibility of legal redress, and thus make private enforcement (call it gang violence or vigilante action) necessary
- there has to be a shortage of legal routes to prosperity, primarily to provide a supply of young (mostly men, on the evidence) who will provide the low-level thugs for the gangs.
There isn't much that can be done to address the first point. Which is to say, in the case of drugs, that little that can be done to eliminate the demand. At the same time, while there may be some increase in drug users at the margins from legalization, it seems unlikely to be substantial. Anybody who wants to get drugs today can probably purchase them, with small risk of legal problems (at least the first time).
Therefore any attempt to deal with the situation has to start with the other requirements. As with anything else, attacking more than one of the causes increases the prospects, and speed, of success. Not that it will necessarily be quick. Those who are already in the gangs probably will not easily transition into another lifestyle. But the attraction for new members drops off.
I have seen a little restaurant blown up by the mob perhaps; nothing on either side in this strip shopping center was affected. This was 30 years after prohibition, but the mob was doing things in Chicago during prohibition; it was not an export business. I doubt the cartels have as deep local roots. At any rate this wasn't being in places where prople were shot in public as occured in my wife's grandmother's case. I think if the country found a way to allow drug testing in employment, welfare, school, and vouluntary association venues after legalization, drug legalization would be a net positve. As it is, the opposite of illegal possession is too complete a liberty which greatly reduces the political viability of the legalization alternative.
As other posters have pointed out, we already know the answer to this question; just look at what happened during Prohibition. Smuggling and distributing illicit liquor was a hugely profitable business so they turned to that. Once prohibition ended and the legal distribution channel took over again, the Mafia turned to other avenues for their profit, whether it be extortion, gambling, prostitution, smuggling other illegal substances like heroin, or legitimate businesses in real estate, garbage, trucking, and so forth capitalized by earlier criminal activity.
Gangs and organized crime are in the drugs business because the black market makes it profitable. If you reform or get rid of prohibition, you will indeed reduce drugs related "crime" because possession and dealing and so forth will no longer be criminal acts. Will you reduce crime overall? I doubt it. Criminals will just move on to other businesses. But it's not the fault of the drugs that gangs or organized crime exist in the first place.
The argument that drugs liberalization will cause more people to become drug addicts is in my opinion bogus. Every country on the planet with a more liberalized drug policy than the United States shows lower rates of drug addiction and drug crime. You can buy alcohol at any corner store but not everyone is a drunk. Hell, not everyone even drinks. Why would it be any different for marijuana? Pretty much anyone who wants to do drugs is already doing them illicitly.
Besides, you're forgetting that under our current system, very little harm comes from the drugs themselves. The greatest harm to the individual comes from society itself. Drug users have a hard time getting jobs because of pre-employment drug testing. People have their lives, careers, and education interrupted by being prosecuted for harmless drug offenses. These same people have a harder time getting jobs subsequent to prosecution because they have a "criminal record". People who want to do drugs are forced to spend exorbitant amounts of money to get them. Drugs don't cause this to be the case. People do.
Remember that all of this stuff was perfectly legal prior to 1937 or so in the United States, and society got along just fine.
I guess the question should be: What is the limiting factor in crime? The availability of profitable illegal activities or the supply of a criminal labor force?
My guess is that if you eliminate a big chunk of profitable illegal activity (drugs), then there might not be enough paying crime to support the current numbers of criminals and so some may leave that industry.
Are protection rackets the original source for mob money?
To address some of STC's points, drug-screening will always be a requirement as long as we have truck drivers and heavy machinery. If nothing else, insurance companies will demand it.
And, as alcohol has shown, the negative aspects of chemical recreation hit the poor the hardest (as do the drug laws, I admit). There will come a time when tax payers will resent providing welfare to people who cannot work because of their recreation choices.
I should point out, in passing, that "drug addict" =/= "unable to function in society." Quite a few addicts, if allowed maintenance doses, can chug along just fine. Nobody, AFAIK, knew that Rush Limbaugh was hooked for quite a few years; William Burroughs wrote quite a few books (admittedly, I don't care for them, but I am under no illusions as to my status as Divine Arbiter of Literary Taste for The Cosmos), and so on. Making the stuff illegal, though, forces an addict's life to revolve around getting his or her next dose.
You know, prior to the eighties, there was really no drug screening at all, and yet the world kept on turning.
You perhaps have a leg to stand on if you're talking about airline pilots, nuclear power plant operators, railroad engineers, and so forth. But that sort of justification holds no water for your run of the mill office or retail worker. That's not even to discuss the big issue to me - what does it matter if the person has metabolites in their system so long as they aren't intoxicated on the job?
Drug screening is pretty bunk in general. All it does is cause a lot of problems for pot smokers due to the uniquely long lived nature of cannabis metabolites within the body. And cannabis is the most innocuous of illegal substances. Things like cocaine, meth, opiates; not to mention most of the hallucinogens; have by way of comparison very short metabolite half-lives in the body. Given a couple of days notice a coke or opiate user can just abstain briefly and will most likely pass just fine. I find it ironic that drug testing basically rewards the use of the most hazardous of illegal drugs.
There will come a time when tax payers will resent providing welfare to people who cannot work because of their recreation choices.
Most drug users do work, either because they are fortunate to have found an employer that respects their privacy and does not screen, or because they were a casual (or lucky, or clever) enough user to be able to slip through a pre-employment screen. Of the drug users who aren't working, I don't think you can just say out of hand that it is always because of drug use. In any case, we are just talking pointless generalities here; it is no justification for the moronic drug war to say that one thousandth of one percent of people are going to have some kind of problem with drugs if they were more easily available. In all likelihood these people are already down and out. If they are using drugs; and many probably already are; who can begrudge them for trying to ease their pain a little bit.
I don't think most people on welfare are necessarily drug users. I would be more inclined to think that most people are on welfare because they are undereducated and could not restrain their urge to breed. In any case, the taxpayer is a fool. More public money is probably (mis)spent on police, court time, and jail for harmless and otherwise productive drug users than it is on welfare or a wide range of other government programs. Did you know that it costs the state over thirty thousand US dollars to incarcerate someone for a year? That's a years income for a lower midlde class job, after taxes. If the taxpayer had any brains, or more realistically, any actual control over their government, I am sure that a more beneficial use of those sorts of funds could be found.
You know, prior to the eighties, there was really no drug screening at all, and yet the world kept on turning. It probably seemed to turn even more stoned. But then, 'prior to the eighties,' we didn't have technology to allow us to restrict use by anything other than possession laws; so this offers an alternative.
A perfect example of why we should be wary of the impact of technology upon personal liberties. I hate to think of what it will be like in a few hundred years. Maybe they'll find a way to engineer out free will entirely.
"Are protection rackets the original source for mob money?"
Probably so. Most gangs in this country at least have arisen in settings where government has not protected people. The gang serves as local government, and protection rackets are their taxing authority. Tghis how the Italian organizations got statred; they were simply duplicating the situation they had left in Italy.
If you look at the two main types of gangs in the US, street gangs and prison gangs, most of them began for mutual protection. This is true of the Mara Salvatrucha, which started in the 80's when Salvadorans fleeing their civil war and settling in LA barrios needed protection from Mexicans. The same mechanism led to the formation of the wah ching and simialr gorups in the Bay Area, when Sam Yup Cantonese coming to the US as asylees had to organize to protect themsleves form pre-existing communities of Sei Yip Cantonese.
But then once you have this organization, and find yourself in a setting with few job opportuniites, you go into business for yourself, and it has to be in sectors where there is the least competition. Simple as that.
And then once you have made a name for yourself as a business entity and also as capable of protecting your people, you are in a position to make alliances. So the Maras linked up with their former enemies, the Sureno gangs, and aded 13 to their name - MS-13. Now the MS-13 control rail routes in Mexico and smuggle aliens as well as drugs. That means they have connections to the cartels on the border, probably all of them, despite the cartel's quarrels with each other. Business is good.
Gnags like this can evolve into bona fide governments. The Traids began as mutual protection societies for Fujianese merchants, then got involved with anti-Qing insurgency for a while, then evolved into a multi-national trade net in SE Asia, and now they are the basis of the government of Singapore. That's what you get when government is run like a business - smooth and trending totalitarian.
Taking drugs out of the equation is just a minor setback for people like these.
In the story about the Teflon Don, there was one senior mob guy who was told by another, 'My son just got in (the mob).' Though this was delivered as if good news, the response of the first guy was 'That's too bad.' On of his own sons had gone to Princeton and the others had gone elsewhere and gotten out of the mob life.
Will Allen left a comment.....
"Yes, until Prohibition, the Sicilian, Irish, and Jewish mafias in New York and Chicaqo were nortorious for their violent competition to control the milk and sugar markets, and they started right up again after booze was made legal."
Although he is attempting to seem clever through the use of sarcasm, Mr. Allen has managed to unwittingly stumble upon something that is topical.
Booze during Prohibition and drugs today get all the attention because they cause the greatest number of problems, and those problems are greatest in scope. But there have always been less flashy ways to earn an illegal dollar.
Besides prostitution, numbers running, and gambling, smuggling has always been a crime that brought in steady and reliable profits. Cigarettes and booze pre-Prohibition were both legal, but not if it was free from taxes. That is why small, extremely fast speedboats are known as "cigarette boats" as the largest block of customers for those vessels are smugglers who would bring in tobacco that avoided being taxed.
This was why the organized gangs managed to sweep aside the competition when the Eighteenth Amendment was passed and reap the huge windfall from banned booze. Smuggling requires a network to move a large amount of product to maximize profits, and they already dominated that particular illegal service industry.
James
I side with Cowen on this one. My admittedly anecdotal impression of today's street gangsters is that they act tough to impress neighborhood friends. Kids join gangs to be known and feared as gangsters rather than to strike it rich in the drug trade. Drugs are at most a sideline for the vast majority of youthful gangbangers. The murders they commit have less to do with bad drug deals or controlling drug turf than with attacking needed enemies who run with the wrong crowd, live in the wrong neighborhood, or belong to the wrong ethnic group. Street gangsters more often kill rivals to impress friends than to gain an economic advantage.
I think law enforcement tends to exaggerate the drug angle in the same way they exaggerate the organizational capabilities and reach of most gangs. To hear many in law enforcement and media tell it, the MS-13 punk with tattoos all over his face is as sophisticated and enterprising as your average Gambino capo. For all but a handful of older and smarter gang members, it just isn't so.
Most street gangs are not sophisticated, well-oiled money-making enterprises, but loosely organized, degenerate subcultures whose members approve of crime and bad behavior in all its forms and who act accordingly.
A comment was left by STC where he states that the Mafia turned from illegal activities other than smuggling and distributing booze during Prohibition, only to return to those activities after alcohol was once more legal.
This is patently false since they never stopped performing any illegal enterprise, and they in fact used their new found wealth to expand into less profitable activities while they had the chance.
Half Canadian left a comment where he states that the protection racket was the original source of mob income. He is absolutely correct, and the Mafia certainly didn't stop shaking down the local merchants simply because they had set up some speakeasies.
Trying to define organized crime in business terms is not particularly helpful in a lot of respects, which is why I (a guy who actually helped put criminals in jail) find it to be just as surreal when the subject is discussed on a blog concerned with economic issues as the rest of you would if you came across a bunch of cops discussing steel tariffs. But there are a few aspects that align well enough.
Organized crime might have a core product or service that is their cash cow, but they don't sit still if they want to survive. Competition is fierce, and the gang on top will soon be in trouble if changing conditions results in slipping profits.
So they not only try to consolidate their position by wiping out the competition and expanding into new territories, but they also diversify so they will have fallback positions if their particular market niche...uh, dries up.
James
While low-level drug soldiers are making about minimum wage, keep in mind that the black youth unemployment rate is 20%, thus most have no other choice of employment at any rate.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/youth.nr0.htm
I'd suggest both ending the war on drugs, and reducing the minimum wage for 18-24 year olds ("youth wages" or "junior wages" are found in many countries).
Caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol are addictive psychoactive drugs, but hold little or no interest to the underworld because they're legal and cheap.
(For the purpose of this post, I define "cheap" as "priced so low that one can satisfy one's habit with an hour or two of minimum-wage labor a day.")
There's simply not enough profit in legal commodities to attract gang interest. Gangs need really high margins in order to maintain a presence in a market, because they're not economically efficient. They've got long, complex, opaque, and highly unreliable supply chains that feature huge mark-ups at every step of the way. To make things worse, they keep losing inventory and salesreps to both law enforcement and rival gangs.
If we legalize drugs, we'll dry up a major source of funding for a whole lot of very nasty organizations. It won't make them go away, of course; as others have said here, they're involved in all sorts of nefarious activities. But it will harm them.
And it will cut crime rates, because addicts will be dealing with a $5/day habit instead of one ten or twenty times more expensive. At $5/day, a high-school dropout can get his fix with an hour of washing dishes; at $50/day, he pretty much has to start sticking up convenience stores.
"I think law enforcement tends to exaggerate the drug angle in the same way they exaggerate the organizational capabilities and reach of most gangs."
Absolutely, because they have a vested interest in doing this. DEA and the cocaine cartels are in a symbiotic relationship - DEA keeps prices up and the cartels keep drugs coming in for DEA to pop (a small but politically useful amount) they feed each other. Beyond that, locla jusrisdictions are now BUDGETING based on what they expect too pull in on asset forfeitures.
"To hear many in law enforcement and media tell it, the MS-13 punk with tattoos all over his face is as sophisticated and enterprising as your average Gambino capo. For all but a handful of older and smarter gang members, it just isn't so."
This is also absolutely true. In fact the "shot callers" in MS-13 do not have tattoos and make a point of looking as suburban as possible. MS-13 is fairly sophisticated as an organization, but that does not mean that the MS-13 cholos on the street are equally sophisticated.