In St. Louis, a former rival could end up springing Felix Key from a 28 year sentence.

Rio de Janeiro drug gangs are embracing evangelical Christianity.

A girl gang rules over a neighborhood.

Inside the struggle to survive in a tiny Honduran neighborhood surrounded by competing gangs.

The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death.

“GOD Almighty, you can get killed in Baltimore—for no reason at all.”

In El Salvador, more and more young women are choosing—or being forced into—gang life.

The impact of a life map and a stipend on those in the gang life in Richmond, CA.

“If we’re sitting here bored, getting high and we got guns around, it ain’t nothing else to do.”

Three days, 64 people shot, six of them dead: Memorial Day weekend in Chicago.

In Brooklyn’s Brownsville, being in a gang can mean as little as being born on a specific block. Ackquille Pollard spent his final free days as a viral rap sensation, before being jailed as the leader of a sect of Crips.

The Bandidos, Texas’s biggest motorcycle gang, say goodbye to one of their own.

How the feds went after Thick Neck, Guilty, Stomper, Gunner, Lucky, Menace, and the rest of the Amernian mob in Los Angeles.

The gangs of Brooklyn’s Brownsville, an area with the higest concentration of public housing in America.

On the rise of Indian Posse, the largest of Canada’s native gangs, and the fall of its leader.

A respected anti-gang crusader shoots and paralyzes another man.

A Hells Angel informant’s path from destruction to redemption and back, and a family’s trouble with witness protection.

The triple life of G-Rock: upscale house painter, lifelong Crip, FBI informant.

On L.A.’s Homeboy Industries, which offers former felons—including at least one disgraced CEO—the chance to work.

Rogue cops in the LAPD Rampart division’s anti-gang CRASH unit (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) were involved in everything from drug smuggling and bank robberies to, allegedly, the murder of Christopher “Notorious BIG” Wallace.

Chains, knives, fists, and, of course, those crude and unreliable homemade affairs called zip guns were the staples in the more vicious gang wars in the 1940s and 1950s. Today there is scarcely a gang in the Bronx that cannot muster a factory-made piece for every member—at the very least, a .22-caliber pistol, but quite often heavier stuff: .32s, .38s, and .45s, shotguns, rifles, and—I have seen them myself—even machine guns, grenades, and gelignite, an explosive. One gang, the Royal Javelins, has acquired some walkie-talkie radios.

Nicky Louie and the Ghost Shadows.

The narcocorrido-immortalized Pacific coast traditionalists, the kidnap-crazed Gulf coast Zetas, and massacres that no longer seem tied to a discernible purpose; inside the ruins of the Mexican-American border.