Prison Gangs by Walter Roberts

Author:Walter Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Prison, Gangs, Murder, True Crime, violent, mafia, outlaw, criminal
Publisher: RW Press
Published: 2014-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Tango Blast

It is a prison gang unlike any other. Other gangs have a well-defined structure, strict codes of conduct and initiation rites. Tango Blast is a leaderless group that varies from grouping to grouping in the way it organizes and governs itself. It is a rapidly growing gang, however, and it has now surpassed the Mexican Mafia as Texas’s biggest gang threat according to a Texas Gang Threat Assessment Report recently published by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Origins in Texas

The membership of Tango Blast is overwhelmingly Hispanic. It first appeared in the prisons of Texas in the early 1990s, a branch of another prison gang, the Texas Syndicate. Tiring of being used by the senior gang to undertake menial tasks, the members of the fledgling gang broke away and began to establish themselves as a distinct grouping whose members protected each other from other gangs. In fact, it became the gang to be part of in prison if you did not want the extreme commitment demanded by the other gangs – membership for life based on the principle of ‘blood in, blood out’. There are some who claim that the name is symptomatic of this desire to avoid membership of the main gangs, saying that ‘Tango’ stands for ‘Together Against Negative Gang Organizations’. It seems more likely, however, that the word ‘Tango’ is derived from the Spanish slang for hometown. ‘Blast’ is said by some not to refer to the actual group but to individual gang members who have been more criminally active than others. They use the term ‘blasting’ to describe involvement in violent or disruptive criminal behaviour against other gang members or criminal justice personnel, particularly inside the Texas prison system.

This latter definition would seem to be appropriate, given that the various groupings within Tango Blast define themselves by the cities or hometowns where their memberships originate. The four original chapters –known as the ‘Four Horsemen’ or Puro Tango Blast – are Houstone, from Houston; ATX or La Capirucha, from Austin; D-Town, from Dallas; and Foritos or Foros from Fort Worth. Houstone is the largest in number, although it is difficult to say just how many members there are. There are also Tango gangs from other cities and regions – El Paso, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, the Rio Grande Valley and West Texas and these groups are sometimes at odds with the original four. It is believed by some that there are many thousands of members and that the entire membership of Tango Blast in Texas could number 17,000.

Membership

The large number of members may be explained by the ease of enlistment. Other prison gangs are far more fussy about who they allow to join and there is an arduous process, sometimes lasting several years, to be undergone. Prospective members are often expected to commit a violent or serious criminal act; knowledge of this can always prove useful later if the member betrays the gang. With Tango Blast the initiation process varies but is often based on the prospective new member being able to take on two other members in a fight.

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