The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [138]
The Minnesota Gang Strike Force, a combined-law-enforcement group that combats gang activity in the Twin Cities, now has 52 Somali gang members listed on its classified roster—but law-enforcement officials and Somali community leaders say that figure is only scratching the surface. One federal agent who has significant experience investigating immigrant gangs says that he has rarely come across a closer-knit, harder-to-penetrate gang culture. Very few ethnicities are structured so strongly along tribal lines.
Somalis, who made up the largest percentage of refugees admitted to the United States in 2004, 2005, and 2006, have turned Minneapolis into the Mogadishu of the Midwest. In 2006, 25 percent of all refugees to come to the United States were Somalis. What worries Brudenell is that the gang problem isn’t being addressed. Another 4,000 to 6,000 Somali refugees are expected to show up in the United States during 2008.
Government officials and Somali community leaders estimate that the majority of these new arrivals will head for the Twin Cities because of the area’s well-established Somali tribal networks. At first the Somali refugees gravitated toward San Diego, but word spread before long that Minnesota—Minneapolis in particular—was the place to go. Its people were tolerant; the city and state welfare systems were comparatively welcoming; there were lots of good jobs in meat-packing plants and on assembly lines for which you didn’t need more than a few words of English; and more and more in the Twin Cities and throughout the state of Minnesota, there were familiar and friendly faces from back home. Only California is the initial home to more Somali refugees than Minnesota—and not by much; the difference is only two percentage points.
Many of the arriving Somalis are expected to be young: In 2006, nearly 42 percent of Somali refugees coming to the United States were age 17 or under—which makes them more likely to be recruited by gangs. And among them are Somalia’s very own lost boys—who see violence as the norm.
EVEN THE SOMALI KIDS WHO WERE DEEPLY involved in the closed-ranks violence of the Twin Cities Somali gangs (the Murda Gang, the Hot Boyz, the Somali Outlaws) knew Shafi Ahmed was a good kid. He was proud and studious, a little nerdy. He would memorize the Koran while his Somali classmates were finding other, less safe ways to combat the intimidation and violence they encountered as non-English-speaking refugees in an American city.
It was, to the first wave of refugee kids’ surprise, the African-American kids who beat up on them the most. (“Go back to Africa, animals,” some of them would say.) The Mexicans and the Asians got their licks in too. Shafi was occasionally beaten up by African-American kids, just like everybody else, his mother says. But he turned to his studies and his religion for succor.
His prom photo, from 2004, shows a good-looking, clean-cut young man. He has a slim face with high cheekbones. He’s wearing a gray polo shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. Nothing about him could be described as gangsta, but he was encountering rivalries nonetheless—as do many young Somalis.
“I don’t hate blacks,” one former Somali gang member tells me. “But for us Somalians, blacks put us through hell. They didn’t like how we looked—they never accept us as black like them.”
The African-Americans’ hostility did not prevent Somali kids from imitating their tormentors. There’s nothing more embarrassing to a Somali kid than to be called a “Flight 13” by other Somalis. Flight 13 was a legendary early plane load of Somali refugees. To be a Flight 13 is to be fresh off the