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to let me watch them arrest one of their salespeople. Afterward, I ran home, wrote up the story in a rush of adrenaline, and everyone was happy. Or so we thought. When The New Yorker’s fact-checkers called the Manhattan department store to run my facts by them, the loss-prevention people were horrified. They could hardly believe that I had put everything that I had seen into the story. They thought I just wanted “background.” Whatever that is. I found myself on the phone trying to calm the detectives who had been so generous with their time and so open in revealing the tricks of their trade. I felt a little like I’d performed an act of theft right under their noses. We agreed to obscure all identifying details about the store and they reluctantly, grudgingly, gave their blessing to the story. But they aren’t talking to me anymore. Which is why, unfortunately, I cannot give a follow-up on the fate of the store employee who was arrested. (I was never told his full name and thus can’t look up his case.) But suffice to say that there is every reason to believe, in the current state of the economy, that loss-prevention departments are busier than ever.

Matt McAllester

TRIBAL WARS

FROM Details

SHAFI AHMED WAS 5 YEARS OLD, too young to understand what a tribe was or why the men in these tribes had turned his city into a war zone where, without warning, you could be pulled from your car and shot dead. He and his seven siblings could hear the explosions and crackle of gunfire coming from the streets outside their house in Mogadishu. His mother was terrified, his father desperate to protect the family.

It was January 1991 and the Somali civil war, a conflict that continues to this day, had just started. With the ousting of President Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia’s long-simmering tribal rivalries had erupted into extreme violence—many people were fleeing Somalia, driving south to the safety of Kenya. Shafi’s family was running out of food. So his father decided to make a dash to the store. He barely made it through the front door. A bullet tore into his chest, and he bled to death on a dusty street of the capital, among the first to die in a conflict that, according to Human Rights Watch, has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Two days later, Shafi, his mother, and his seven siblings fled. As they walked through Mogadishu, some neighbors passed them and offered to give the family a ride out of the city. From there they took a bus to Kenya. Eight years later—most of them spent in refugee camps—Shafi Ahmed and his family made it to America.

Seven years after that, in the early hours of May 29, 2006, Shafi was dead. Like his father, he was gunned down in the street in what appears to have been part of a Somali tribal war. But this time the killer likely came from a new kind of tribe: one of the Somali gangs of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

OFFICER JEANINE BRUDENELL WORKS for the Intelligence Sharing and Analysis Center of the Minneapolis Police Department and has come to know more about Somali gangs in Minnesota than probably anyone else in the Twin Cities law-enforcement community. She strongly believes that the situation needs to be addressed before it escalates.

“It’s going to be like when we decided to ignore the African-American gangs when they came into Minneapolis and we pretended we didn’t have gangs,” she says. “It will grow into a more organized crime syndicate.”

While Somalis currently constitute a small percentage of the Twin Cities’ gangs (African-Americans make up the largest portion, police sources say), Brudenell believes that if the cities’ Somali community—which some Somalis estimate to number as many as 60,000 people—continues to grow and the local authorities don’t start paying attention, the problem could spiral out of control.

“A lot of very young people were involved in the civil war,” says Shukri Adan, a community leader who was commissioned in 2006 by the city of Minneapolis to write a report on Somali youth issues. “They witnessed extreme violence.”

This is confirmed by officials within