#How MS-13 went from wild kids to the most feared street gang in America

Long before it became America’s scariest street gang, MS-13 was little more than a band of long-haired teens who skipped school, got high and partied to the songs of Megadeth and Iron Maiden. They looked about as threatening as extras in a Cheech and Chong flick.

Among them was Alex Sanchez, a junior high school troublemaker who had been spirited out of El Salvador as a boy and reunited with his parents in Los Angeles in a grim, grimy ghetto near that city’s Koreatown, where he was constantly bullied.

He joined the gang soon after it formed in LA in the early 1980s because no one else would defend him.

They told him they were called MSS13 — the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners 13. The pothead dropouts were so broke none of them could even buy a gun, so they turned to the inexpensive machete as their weapon of choice, according to the new book “MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang” (Hanover Square Press) by Steven Dudley, out Tuesday.

Dudley chronicles the gang’s transformation from humble origins to an “evil” threat to America, as President Trump has described the gang — an assessment backed up by the August arrest of alleged leader Nelson Alexander Flores and a series of savage murders on Long Island starting four years ago.

“They kidnap, they extort, they rape, and they rob,” Trump told a law-enforcement group in 2017. “They shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims, they beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes. They have transformed peaceful parks . . . into blood-stained killing fields. They’re animals.”

Dudley lays out MS-13’s rise through central players like Sanchez and ascribes its extreme violence to El Salvador’s brutal civil war and shocking levels of domestic abuse among families who remained there as well as ones who fled to the United States.

The change happened around 1985, when a member of Sanchez’s Stoners was shot dead and his clique got drawn into the crack-fueled gang wars in Central LA, though MS-13 generally avoided dealing drugs.

Instead, they acted as go-betweens — selling access to their neighborhoods or peddling small quantities or collecting for other dealers.

But as criminals, they earned all Fs.

They “borrowed and stole from each other,” says Dudley in the book. “They consumed the products they were supposed to sell . . . They floundered, just above break-even.”

Even the name, Mara Salvatrucha, was cobbled together.

“Mara” came from the 1954 Charlton Heston film “The Naked Jungle,” translated for Spanish audiences as “When the Ants Roar.” The ants in the title were dubbed marabunta. “Salvatrucha” mashed up “Salva” — short for El Salvador — and “trucha,” meaning watchful or savvy, Dudley writes.

The gang decided their best bet was to partner with the better-run and better-armed Mexican Mafia, which led to an alliance with the nearby 18th Street gang in LA: sharing territory, members, gang colors and even the MS-13 trademark hand signal of devil horns.

The marabunta — that inexorable army of ants — knew how to overwhelm any rival.

 – Author Steven Dudley on the rise of MS-13

The choice of machete turned out to be fortuitous. Not only was the weapon cheap, it was legal, which meant less jail time for anyone caught carrying one. And its use was terrifying, creating a “psychological impact on their would-be rivals,” according to the book.

The gang expanded with an influx of Salvadoran refugees, including ex-soldiers, paramilitary or rebel insurgents who could handle a rifle and were familiar with military tactics.

“The marabunta — that inexorable army of ants — knew how to overwhelm any rival,” Dudley writes.

After MS-13 and 18th Street split, the Salvadorans found a new partner in the Mexican Sureños, with whom they had previously been at war in the California prison system. Striking a deal to join forces cost MS-13 all of $5,000 and five weapons.

“There was no cheer, no celebration. This was business. Mafia business,” Dudley writes.

Sanchez helped by linking up with Nelson Comandari, a mara boss in Hollywood who did business with the Cali Cartel — which once planned to kill rival Pablo Escobar by dropping 500-pound bombs from a helicopter on the prison where the drug lord was being held. A snitch foiled the plan.

Unlike others in MS-13, Comandari was a natural-born leader: “sturdy, built like a stack of bricks, and stern,” Dudley writes. The book quotes an investigator saying Comandari was “educated. Smart. Forward thinking . . . And what he said he was going to do, he did.”

By the early 2000s, the gang had as many as 10,000 members in 33 states. But Comandari was up against the big problem of the MS-13 culture, an army of unruly combatants.

“With their distinct tattoos and peculiar style of dress, they were highly visible,” Dudley writes. “They lacked discipline, and their internal codes pushed them into public confrontations with other gangs that could lead to their capture and force them into cooperating with law enforcement.”

Comandari instilled the gang with discipline, putting a stop to in-fighting and making sure members did not terrorize their “civilian” neighbors. “He put some chivalry into the madness,” a federal investigator told Dudley.

Dealing pot, heroin, crystal meth and other drugs, Comanderi acted as a distribution network for the Mexican Mafia and was said to be the gang’s CEO — until Manhattan federal prosecutors indicted him in 2004. He’s now reportedly an informant.

Sanchez was also indicted under RICO, charged with drug trafficking and murder conspiracy.

Meanwhile, in El Salvador, a different leader was on the rise, according to Dudley.

A man he calls Norman, who grew up in El Salvador as the youngest of seven and under constant threat of armed militias, survived a harsh upbringing.

“Norman and his family had lived through gun battles,” Dudley writes.

“Death squads interrupted dinner. People in his neighborhood disappeared, and rebels executed a soldier on leave right in front of him,” he adds, noting that Norman watched as a single gunshot “shattered the man’s brains across the pavement.”

The teen was tormented by turmoil at home as well. His dad left to start a second family, hooking up with his own niece and fathering three children. The incestuous betrayal led Norman’s mom to try hanging herself; his brother heard the snap of the rope and saved her.

Norman’s life in MS-13 began when he reconnected with a grade-school pal who was a member of the gang in the United States but got deported back to El Salvador. Norman himself joined amid a new trauma — his older brother, a kind of surrogate father to him, was murdered in the US. By then two other brothers were also in the gang in LA.

“The MS-13, he decided, would be his family,” writes Dudley.

Norman, convicted of two murders and suspected in several others, spent 10 years in jail, during which he was nearly killed. It was one of five attempts on his life, he told Dudley.

After getting out in 2012, he traveled to the United States and requested asylum, saying he’d left the gang and that if he was sent back to El Salvador he would be killed.

“There is no departure,” he told a judge weighing his fate. “But rather they assassinate you.”

The judge granted his asylum request. And Norman promptly disappeared.

Perhaps the most troubling tale in the book is about a girl in El Salvador. Alma turned to the gang after being brutalized by her father, who beat her daily, and she was raped by her step-grandfather at age 8, after which she started carrying a machete.

When he attacked her again, she stabbed him with it.

Later, her father noticed an MS-13 tattoo on Alma’s hand and threatened to cut it out. A fight ensued, after which she took her own knife and gouged the tattoo herself, then cauterized the wound with a lit cigarette.

“Kill me!” she shouted. “I’ll be better off in the next life.”

The gang was her savior, she says in the book: “For me, they were my first family. I felt protected.”

But when Alma disobeyed an order to sell marijuana, a gang wannabe bashed her on the temple with the butt of a gun.

She had to leave.

So she fled for the United States on her own at age 14. Although she got help from family and enrolled in school, MS-13 continues to be a threat and a lure.

Alma “floated on the edges,” Dudley writes. “She didn’t exactly rejoin the gang, but she didn’t avoid it either.”