In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city gang
life, Mark Bowden takes readers inside a Baltimore gang, offers an
in-depth
portrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI
investigation
that landed eight gang members in prison
Sandtown is one of the deadliest neighborhoods in the world;
it earned Baltimore its nickname Bodymore, Murderland, and was made
notorious
by David Simon's classic HBO series "The Wire." Drug deals dominate
street
corners, and ruthless, casual violence abounds.
Montana Barronette grew up in the center of it all. He was
the leader of the gang "Trained to Go," or TTG, and when he was
finally
arrested and sentenced to life in prison, he had been nicknamed
"Baltimore's
Number One Trigger Puller." Under Tana's reign, TTG dominated Sandtown.
After a
string of murders are linked to TTG, each with dozens of witnesses too
intimidated to testify, three detectives set out to put Tana in prison
for
life. For them, this was never about drugs: It was about serial murder.
Now an acclaimed journalist who spent his youth in the white
suburbs of Baltimore, Mark Bowden returns to the city with exclusive
access to
the FBI files and unprecedented insight into one of the city's deadliest
gangs
and its notorious leader. As he traces the rise and fall of TTG, Bowden
uses
wiretapped drug buys, police interviews, undercover videos, text
messages,
social media posts, trial transcripts, and his own ongoing conversations
with
Tana's family and community to create the most in-depth account of an
inner-city
gang ever written.
With his signature precision and propulsive narrative, Mark
Bowden positions Tana - as a boy, a gang leader, a killer, and now a
prisoner -
in the context of Baltimore and America, illuminating his path for what
it
really was: a life sentence.
