Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore's Deadliest Gang Leader by Mark Bowden tells the story of ‘Tana’ Barronette and the West Baltimore neighbourhood of Sandtown, and the police and FBI investigation into the ‘Trained to Go/TTG’ gang responsible for multiple murders as well as drug trafficking. It’s a fascinating insight into police investigations, the amount of work that goes into successful convictions, but also the historic and present deprivation of places like West Baltimore helped create Tana and his gang, the drug trade and policing, and how difficult it can be to make change happen.
Sandtown and West Baltimore were central settings for David Simon’s The Wire (the greatest TV show ever), and even looking at the map at the start of the book, I was familiar with many of the street names and locations. Yet it was both striking and expected that how much of the world depicted in a series written and produced in the mid-2000s continued to exist and even got worse.
The story of Tana and his gang is a tragic one – young men growing up in a world with little opportunities to make an honest living and escape their circumstances, surrounded by the drug trade and where role models for success were almost always criminal. Sandtown was a place where most pathways to success were simply not an option, especially for young men and finding a path out of the neighbourhood and its situation very difficult.
Mark Bowden does a good job of illustrating how in many ways, Tana and his gang almost never stood a chance – a world where almost everything was stacked against them. Yet at the same time, he shows how the gang and Tana were incredibly dangerous and violent, even by the standards of the West Baltimore drug world and a serious threat.
Bowden also does a great job of exploring and explaining the why – why does this West Baltimore world exist, and the various historical and social explanations that fundamentally come down to the racism at the core of how the United States came to be, and how it has developed. Not only that but how many of the solutions have not worked because they’ve never really done something about this core problem - “what is lacking is not answers but will.”
The story of the investigation itself is also fascinating – involving Baltimore police and wider federal agencies like the FBI at a time when policing in Baltimore was fraught with problems and racism. The painstaking work of detectives and agents in building their case, cultivating informants, having to quickly react to circumstances, and still manage to put together a sprawling conspiracy case involving multiple crimes and defendants is a story in itself.
Overall, this is a great book to read – not just if you’re a fan of The Wire. Mark Bowden is a great storyteller, but he is also self-reflective and critical of the comfortable world he grew up, just a few kilometres from West Baltimore city but almost another world away.
Read more by Mark Bowden
Read more about Baltimore crime
Read more about race and social issues in the US
Aotearoa: A Gangster’s Paradise? WORD Christchurch: Saturday 31 August 4 to 5pm
If you like stories about gangs, this WORD Christchurch Festival event will be right up your alley. Find out more and book your tickets.
Drugs, dark money, gangs, white-collar crooks and guns lurk in the grimy underbelly and daily life of New Zealand society. Two recent gripping books delve into this dark reality: Gangster’s Paradise by investigative journalist Jared Savage explores the escalation of criminal enterprise and how New Zealand is fast becoming a gangster’s paradise, and political journalist Benedict Collins’ Mad on Meth asks how ‘tough on crime’ became ‘dumb on drugs’. They join Dr Jarrod Gilbert in conversation.
Check out our True Crime reading guide for more great reads, or our page on the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction award for non-fiction work on real-life crime or closely related themes.
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