By Matt Delaney
Two cops shot in New York City. A jogger beaten to death in Georgia. A Texas hotel taken over by armed criminals.
The common thread in a sprawling nationwide web of violence, according to law enforcement officials, is a ruthless Venezuelan prison gang exporting its drug-weapon-human-trafficking operations north to U.S. cities.
But the gang’s leaders have largely eluded any effort to bring them to justice in the U.S., according to analysts who have studied Tren de Aragua, or TDA, as the gang is commonly known.
TDA’s secretive hierarchy has helped its crime bosses stay steps ahead of U.S. authorities, said Gregg Etter, a University of Central Missouri criminologist who has written extensively about the gang.
More than 150 TDA members have been arrested at the border, and dozens more inside the U.S., the past two years. But thanks to the group’s decentralized chain of command, police are mainly capturing low-level gang members, Mr. Etter told The Washington Times.
“When the FBI was taking down the Mafia … or one of the big motorcycle gangs, they’ll go all up and down the structure, horizontally and vertically, and then they’ll take down the whole group at once,” Mr. Etter said. “That’s kind of hard to do if you don’t have a command structure.”
Mr. Etter, a regular contributor to the Journal of Gang Research, said TDA operates in small bands designed to protect the decision-makers who supply the gang’s American outposts with high-powered weapons and criminal contacts.
The group’s franchise-style approach to bullying its way into new American crime markets has left authorities struggling to identify the leadership behind the mayhem.
But several recent high-profile incidents have put TDA on the radar for local, state and federal officials — and made the gang part of the national debate in this year’s presidential contest over out-of-control crime…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE…(washingtontimes.com)
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