Life Sentence

The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore's Deadliest Gang Leader

By: Mark Bowden

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Hardcover | 11 April 2023

At a Glance

Hardcover
320 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 15.88 x 3.18

Hardcover

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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 prisonSandtown 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.

Industry Reviews

"Most of the TTG gang members are now serving life sentences, but as Bowden starkly illustrates, neutralizing one criminal enterprise won't solve the great ongoing tragedy of violence in poor, isolated urban Black communities, nor will it fix the devastation fueled by racist policies from the 19th and 20th centuries." -The Washington Post

"A ground level view... The masterful yarn is a riveting true narrative about an FBI investigation that landed eight criminal bosses behind bars in the city profiled in the popular American television crime drama 'The Wire.'" - Associated Press

"Life Sentence is a masterpiece, right up there with Black Hawk Down and Guests of the Ayatollah. It's gripping, it's fast, it's deeply insightful and empathetic, and it's brilliantly and exhaustively reported. People should read it." -Matt Bai, Washington Post contributing columnist and author of All the Truth Is Out

"Gripping and revealing. . . A powerful, nuanced depiction of gang violence in America that makes a strong case for meaningful reform beyond policing." -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A scorching true-crime narrative. . . Bowden pulls no punches in his indictment of the ways in which the richest country in the world has allowed Black children for decades to be born into blighted urban neighborhoods, and saddled them with burdens that they must struggle to surmount to lead meaningful lives. This account of "young men growing up in a place where murderous violence has become a way of life" will haunt readers long after they finish it." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Praise for Mark Bowden:

"A Woodward that outdoes even Woodward." -Malcolm Gladwell, New Yorker

"Amazing . . . One of the most intense, visceral reading experiences imaginable. . . The individual stories are woven together in such a compelling and expert fashion, the narrative flows so seamlessly, that it's hard to imagine that this is not fiction." -The Philadelphia Inquirer on Black Hawk Down

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