Blood in the Fields

July 7, 2014
Journalist Reynolds’s debut offers a well sourced account of the most important criminal organization you’ve never heard of: Nuestra Familia, a violent prison gang that controls drug trafficking in the correctional facilities and agricultural towns of Northern California. Nuestra Familia poses special challenges for law enforcement, as Reynolds well documents. Only career criminals can advance in its hierarchy, and its top brass operate out of supermax prisons—making the organization extremely difficult to infiltrate. Efforts to dismantle it have, in consequence, resorted to questionable tactics. Reynolds is especially critical of Operation Black Widow, the late-1990s federal initiative that was marred by its improper use of criminal informants and endangered public safety. Individual gang members receive humanizing attention from Reynolds, as do their girlfriends, their families, and their victims. Among the gangbangers, Reynolds finds duty and loyalty in abundance—albeit perverted to criminal ends. These “character” portrayals are valuable, as they demonstrate the complex ties that bind gang members to each other and the gang. Whenever Reynolds’s treatment turns too “fiction-like,” however, her narrative falters. When characterizing emotional states she often lapses into cliché; her strength lies in gathering and assessing of facts. Fortunately, her account of Nuestra Familia need not be a triumph of imaginative literature in order to register as substantive, compelling, and important.

July 15, 2014
Brisk, detailed exposeof the little-understood gang Nuestra Familia.Monterey County Heraldstaff writer Reynolds, a recipient of Harvard's Nieman Fellowship, spent 12years covering the gang (including as co-producer and writer of a PBSdocumentary), and it shows in her intense, intimate approach: She beginsabruptly, without much context regarding the unique nature of Latino gangs.This one began in Northern California prisons in the 1960s as a rival to thepowerful Mexican Mafia and has since gained territory via a street-leveloffshoot, the Nortenos. Reynolds builds a long-term narrative focused on avolatile NF clique in Salinas, receiving orders from gang superiors allegedlyisolated in the Pelican Bay Supermax prison. She personalizes this approach byutilizing the perspectives of a Mexican-American cop and several beleagueredgangsters, who became informants, accepted plea deals for violent felonies orwere themselves victims of violence. Looking beneath their pseudo-revolutionary"Cause" ("a shallow and manipulative ideology"), she portrays a criminalconspiracy fusing cold business acumen, a corporate-style structure and vicioushatred for "Surenos" (Southern California Latinos). By the late 1990s, "the NFhad blanketed the state and was now running regiments in every tiny[agricultural] town." However, the gang's fortunes turned when then-U.S.Attorney Robert Mueller decided to pursue NF federally. Soon, even the crew'shigher-ups were cutting deals with the FBI, leading to one imprisoned teenagekiller's bitter conclusion: "The Cause...was nothing but generations of lies toldto entice kids like him to do a few old guys' dirty work." Yet, after spawninga complex investigation, the feds desisted after 9/11, leading the local copsto decide that "the Mexican-American lives lost on California's back-countryroads were of little concern in Washington." Reynolds concludes that thehigh-profile prosecutions actually advanced their power: "With each new guiltyverdict the gang branched out" within the federal prison system.A sprawling, literary true-crime effort that will rewardpatient readers with its gloomy account of an unstoppable, violent subculture.

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September 1, 2014
Writer-producer Reynolds spent 10 years investigating California's Nuestra Familia gang, directed by leaders who, from inside their prison cells, commanded outsiders to do their bidding. Such bidding involved murders, drug running, thuggery, and more. By focusing on a few of the main characters on both sides of the law, such as young Mando, an idealist who killed for the NF, and Tony Reyes, who understood and sympathized with the NF but was a police officer, trying to do something about that madness so wrongly defined as honor, Reynolds skillfully limns the tough lives, heartlessness, misgivings, and bad decisions made for the sake of family and the home country of Mexico. Moving from Emergence, in the late 1990s, to Empire (ending in 2007), Reynolds brings to brutal life these misguided men and women, who found the easy money irresistible but the consequences harder to take. Along the way, she details the giant FBI thumb that held down the local investigations, finding it easier to prosecute for drugs than murder. A riveting tale of a monster of criminality that is still not dead but merely changing shape.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)