This is the complete, edited and augmented transcript of e009 of the PSK Podcast, in which author Gregory Roberts is interviewed by co-host Graceann Bennett about topics and details of his True Crime / Prison memoir, Pirate Soldier King. This segment (Part 2 of 2) focuses on all aspects of the Ink Game in prison: Prison Gang Tattoos, how its done, what they symbolize… and, if the current wave of law enforcement profiling based on body art has any actual validity behind it. Enjoy.
Graceann Bennett
All right. Welcome to another episode of Pirate Soldier King. I’m your host, Grace Ann Bennett with Gregory Roberts, Liver of the Life and Teller of the Story.
We’re getting into it today because there’s a lot going on in the news with people being deported to Central America — specifically to CECOT, a massive prison colony in El Salvador, under contract by President Trump. And a lot of the selection of deportees is supposedly originating from the tattoos and the clothing that these people are wearing, as a way to “prove” their gang affiliation.
Okay, so you have a prison tattoo… but you yourself wouldn’t be deported based on that, or your other tattoos, right? You don’t have anything that’s on the list of questionable tattoos…?
Gregory Roberts
Not that they can read.
Well, Okay. But do you think that they got it right? What are your thoughts about the deportation and using those data points? What do you think about that approach? How close could they get to getting it right?
GR I think with tattoos they could get it easily right. Every gang, the whites, the Mexicans, the Asian, Yakuza… there’s a code to the tattoos and it’s… if they put a few smart people on it, they could figure it out. I’m sure they have people on it. They’re called patches. So you earn the patch. I mean, there’s certain clear gang affiliation tattoos — MS-13 on the face, for instance…
but there’s others that are patches; for instance a swastika — you can only get if you put in the work — for instance, stabbing a rival gang member. If you walk around prison with a swastika on and you haven’t put in that work, if you haven’t done it, you’re gonna get hurt very badly.
So there’s no patch ink where you say, “I think that looks cool. I think I’m gonna put one of those on my chest.” No. If you have that patch, it means you did something on behalf of the gang. Its a badge of honor, and people respect that.
Teardrops and Three Dots
GB: Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, what about the tear that comes out of someone’s eye? Have you seen that? What is that?
The tear means you’ve been in prison. You’re “crying” because you miss your people, you miss your family back in the Free. You get a black tear, in prison, (it says:) you’ve done time.
Then you might also get three dots, MCL, my crazy life, or “Mi Vida Loca”.
Oh, So that’s what it means.
Yeah, for a lot of people, Yes.
MCL, okay. So instead of a tear it would be M-C-L on their cheek?
No, no, three dots. It’s a little triangle of three dots. You can it on your face here next to your eye, or you can put it, some people put on their hand right here, between the thumb and index finger. I strongly considered getting one. It’s just: MCL! Mi Vida Loca, My Crazy Life.
Ha ha! I get it. Well, I think a lot of people that haven’t been to prison can put that on themselves.
Exactly. There you go. There you go. So profiling is a dangerous thing.
Dangerous, right? Okay: So do people like Machine Gun Kelly, or different types of people in the music industry, do they get gang tattoos, but aren’t actually in a gang?
I sure hope not! And there’s… I’d say there’s a spectrum of gang tattoos and cultural tattoos. One of the signatures of prison tattoos is that, a lot of times they’re unplanned “filler”… they’re improvised.
I mean, this was highly planned <points at his forearm tattoo>, but a lot of times you just go into the cell and you’re like, “Hey, I trust you as an artist. Let’s just do drugs and you can put tattoos up and down my whole arm. Let’s go.”
There’s a certain style to that; it includes a lot of skulls and demons and dark themes that you can pretty much read if you’re an aficionado or if you’ve been certain places. So I would guess that people, for instance those deeply ingrained in the hip-hop culture or in the more hardcore music culture… that they would have enough respect that if they had any kind of gang related tattoos, that they had actually put in some work or had real relationships with those gangs.
Mm-hmm. OK, well maybe I’ll have to do some digging, some sleuthing on that front.
I, for one, ain’t doin any digging!
Haha, well I might just chatGPT that, you know, just to see what’s going on. Yeah, can I?
Yeah, I mean, go for it. It’s a fascinating education for sure. But back to your original question, Graceanne, I do believe profiling is a worthwhile tool, for anyone.
We put these marks on our bodies in order to broadcast information. So like I said, you’re walking the yard, you’re on the mainline: you see people’s tattoos from a distance, and that tells you information that you need to know: whether you steer wide around that person, or whether you’re going to walk right up and say “Hey, yo! What’s up?”
So a familiar tattoo, or an enemy tattoo, will determine how are you going to interact with that person. They’re basic tribal markings. Not butterflies and birthdays, but real allegiances and origins.
Why?
Area Codes
Well, for instance, because you’ve got the same area code tattooed on your back. You’re from the same hood. You grew up there, you were neighbors of a sort.
Right, okay. So that’s a whole thing. Area codes, didn’t know that.
Oh yeah, yeah, I mean I’m talking about, you know, letters that are like 18 inches high. Like 3-1-0.
What? So it’s just like 818? 310?
Yeah, wherever your hood is.
2, 1, 2? Oh, I see.
That means: “that’s where I was raised up, that’s where I came up in my crew, and that’s what I represent. …and that’s who I roll with.”
So not a zip code? It’s an area code?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I didn’t see any zip codes. Well, maybe a couple.
But that might actually be better. A zip code is more local.
Well, more specific, but it’s easier to… I mean, it’s just the Lingo. It’s like: “Yeah, yo: you from the 415! What’s up?”
I think it’d be pretty funny to do a 90210 on your back. That’s a whole t-shirt thing where we’re putting gang tattoos in fancy neighborhoods. That could be the new hip. In fact, I think I need to make a t-shirt. We just do like fancy neighborhoods, but gang style. Beverly Hills Gangster. Anyway, I don’t know how well that would go over.
I think we call that co-opting the culture. I’ll leave that to you.
It could be a thing.
Oh, I’m sure you’d get take on it. I don’t know if there’d be blowback…
Prison Gang Tattoos & Profiling
Right? No, that’s interesting. So how about people, but in terms of just the idea about being innocent, like profiling, okay, that could be helpful, but does that still replace due process and being innocent before proven guilty in your mind?
No, it does not. And there’s people who are dropouts, that’s the term. It means you were raised in a gang, you pledged your affiliation to the gang, and you decided, often in prison, but sometimes back on the streets, that that was an unhealthy lifestyle.
And so you leave the gang. Often there’s a price put on your head if you do that. So it’s a… it’s not a decision made lightly… but after you leave the gang, you still have all those tattoos, both the affiliations and the patches.
There’s actually places in most major cities that do laser tattoo removal, specifically for gang members for free. Because that’s an expensive…
It would help them… like a nonprofit?
Yeah, yeah, they’re like, “you dropped out of the gang? Okay, we’re gonna do this laser removal for you, for free.” Because that’s a pretty expensive process for a normal person.
You know, there’s a famous comedian. I’m trying to figure out who that person is… he was on Saturday Night Live, he took off all his tattoos. He was famous for his tattoos, and then he took off all of his tattoos. So I’m going to look it up. Got rid of all the tattoos.
Personally, I’m keeping mine.
How to make a Tattoo Gun in Prison
Okay, switching topics: I told you about how to make the tattoo gun in a jail, but let’s talk about prison.
Okay, yeah, okay.
So jail is amateur hour… prison is professional level. So in prison, you have a library that you get access to maybe once, twice a month — if you’re lucky — and in the library, there happens to be some CD players.
Well, a CD player has a high-precision-controlled motor to spin that CD. CDs are ancient, but they have that in there. So you go in, jam your fingers in there, into that slot, take out your knife, and you pry out that motor. Now you have the motor to the CD player.
Now that’s worth at least 200 bucks on the yard, easy. Now a skilled person, binds that rotary motion with like a rubber band and some pulleys and things, and he can basically make a needle go at very high frequency; there’s your tattoo gun.
I mean, it’s essentially a professional rotary tattoo gun built from a CD player motor. And then to power it, you take like six AA batteries and you wire them in series and you make a little box out of paper and tape and… boom! You strap that battery pack to your forearm, you have a completely wireless, high performance tattoo gun.
How Clean is Your Cell?
But what about cleanliness? Aren’t there germs?
Ha! Funny you mention that. Check this out: I got moved to a new unit, and I was given this derelict celly — who was going home, thank God. He was a total drug addict, and the cell was a mess. But he was out of the cell inside two days. So nowI had my very own cell, a single man cell. That’s what everyone covets – a little bit of privacy in the midst of Hell.
Well, We were on lockdown so the likelihood of getting a new celly was pretty low. And so what do you do? I got 48 hours without the door opening. So I just cleaned it, floor to ceiling. You know, clean all the gunk of 50 years off all the lockers, the walls — get the chemicals and go at it. I just cleaned it. And I was really proud. I was like, “Yeah: I’m a clean motherfucker.” Like: “This cell is good.”
Haha!
Well, came out of lockdown and we had to do some cell moves, and so I actually moved in with AK and then a guy named JD moved into the cell I was in. And the first time the doors popped again, I went up to JD and said: “Hey, so you got my cell, man. How’d you like the fucking cleanup job I did?”
And he’s like, “Dude, that cell was filthy.” He goes, “I spent three days scrubbing the walls. I don’t know how the hell you lived in that.”
What?
I was like, “Dude! I spent two days scrubbing the walls and the floor. Come on!”
He’s like, “Haha, well, you’ve got some things to learn. It’s not up to my standards. Not even close. But no worries, its clean now.”
Wow.
The Prison Tattoo Studio Pro
So when I was ready to get my tattoo, I asked around on the yard: “Who’s the best tattoo artist? Because I want to get some ink,and I don’t want some messy shit. I want the right guy.”
They’re all, unanimously, like: “JD’s the man.”
I’m like, “Oh, haha! That’s the guy who got my cell.”
And sure enough, when I went to get that tattoo done, his cell was so clean, it was like a brand new cell that had been built yesterday. I thought, “Oh my god, this cell is cleaner than most pro tattoo studios I’ve been to in America.” I was shocked.
And he even had the medical gloves that they had stolen from the prison hospital, and like the badass wireless rotary gun, and then the pro ink that the guards had smuggled in… and he was so good and so efficient.
This whole tattoo took like 40 minutes and the ink’s perfect, it stays and that’s homemade ink, you know, with a CD engine gun that would have taken, I think that tattoo would have taken two hours in the shop, you know, on the street.
That’s crazy.
That is crazy. And that’s how it was.
Okay. Going back a second: that comedian is Pete Davidson. He dated Kim Kardashian, and he got rid of all of his tattoos. Literally all of them.
Yeah, in three years, he’ll be all tatted back up again. That man is…
No, he got rid of them all. Like, yeah, it cost him $200,000 in tattoo removals.
Because he went to a bougie place.
Yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, he’s trying to go into the whole health and well-being kind of… Anyway, it’d just be interesting to see like what’s going on in that man’s head… but he wanted a clean slate.
So I guess it does make sense though, because when you have the ink, you’re telling your story, you’re telling people who you are, you’re expressing yourself in a certain way, and you might want to just… start with a clean slate it, start fresh… because you could change.
The First Tattoo
That’s an interesting idea. I mean, that’s kind of the antithesis of why you get a tattoo in the first place. For me, a tattoo has always meant full commitment. Permanence. And when I got my first tattoo, there was no laser removal, that didn’t exist.
Oh. So what was your first tattoo?
That one right there, it’s a Ram’s head. That was the logo of my first company. We got into dire straits… we were on the verge of bankruptcy, we had to fire a lot of the staff, and I was thinking about just fleeing the country, disappearing into deep Africa.
I felt like, my life is a wreck. I was in deep personal debt, and I looked deeply inward. I actually swam naked in the ocean late that night, under the moon, and made up my mind. I decided: “I’m just gonna stick it out.”
And so I went to the tattoo parlor… I mean, back then, it was a stigma. One step up from going to the drug dealer. So I went to like this weird little hole-in-the-wall place with like a Hell’s Angel guy, a shirtless dude with a leather vest. He was kind of fat with a big beard. And as I walk in he puts out his cigarette and says in this deep gravelly voice: “Don’t worry: I clean all my needles.”
I hope so!
I was like, okay, sounds good! And yeah, he put that on me. And that, I think, is the essence of a tattoo. Like a tattoo is commitment. It’s like, “This is something that matters.”
And I went my office next day and all my employees were like, “What’d you do?”
And I said: “I got a tattoo. We’re going to make this happen.”
And my team was like: “Oh my God, you’re crazy!” But at the same time, they knew that I would stay the course. And sure enough, we teamed together, we forged our will, and we pulled it off. We forced that ship to sail. We made it through the gauntlet.
Tattoo Culture Today
Now these days, you know, tattoos are common. They’re accepted. For instance, with, God, who’s the guy? Not the Weekend, but tha guy who did the Doritos commercials…
Elliot Travis Barker?
Gregory Roberts (27:01)
No, somebody else. Anyways, I mean today, even facial tattoos are common. When Mike Tyson got his facial tattoo, everyone was like, “He’s crazy. He’s utterly lost his mind.”
Now, like every other musical artist has tattoos on their face. The Secretary of Defense has full arm tats, you know: “We the People” here and some very interesting symbols on his shoulder and back…
Okay, so it was about commitment when you did that tattoo.
Yeah, yeah, all my tattoos, 90% of them are deeply personal. They’re about people and relationships that matter to me. So I would never remove them.
Is Donald Trump hip to Tattoos?
Right, right. But this state of current affairs… just thinking about what’s going on in the world that we live in, and getting back to that. Do you think at least this administration is actually hip to what’s really going on?
I don’t think they get it. No, no.
I mean, maybe, yeah, maybe just a little. Like I said, Trump was the very first person to bring MS-13 into the popular conversation, way back in his first election cycle. And back then,I thought it was some made up thing, so I looked it up. And yeah, it’s a real gang.
But then when I got to prison, I came to an entire new understanding of the power of that gang. When it comes to the Eses, I mean: they run the show. Everybody knows: you don’t fuck with MS-13. Like it’s… it’s very real. So at that point, I thought: “well, I have certainly never heard of MS-13 from any other government official or news source anything.” So maybe he is more hip to it than we think.
Trump threw it out there way back in 2016, and now today they’re looking at this Venezuelan gang, TdA, Tren de Aragua. And again, I had never heard of them. And looked it up and: “Yep. that’s a pretty serious international criminal organization.”
So yeah, actually, I guess I do think he’s hip to it. And I think he’s just giving excessive power to those who have that information. So we’re over-reaching with these arrests and deportations. But Biden all about ignored the problem… perhaps even encouraged it. So Trump swings hard the other way… it’s a pendulum.
Maybe Biden was too weak and Trump’s too strong.
Prison Gangs vs. Street Gangs
Right. Like an overcorrection. So how much do those prison gangs actually rule from inside prison to these kind of global networks? Are they effective at reaching the outside?
Yeah, yeah, there are street gangs and there are prison gangs and they’re not totally equal but they have strong interfaces. Most of the people who are being most seriously punished in prison have been sentenced through something called the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, which is essentially “sentence enhancement by gang affiliation.”
And if they tag your case with RICO, that ups your “level of crime” and ups your sentence, your classification, and everything. So that’s how they attempt bust the large gangs.
So a lot of people doing major sentences in prison will have deep street gang connections, and those are generally respected inside the prison. Because if you put in the work on the streets, if you’ve done violence to rival gangs or protected territory or completed missions, then word follows you, and you’re going to get respected for that on the inside.
As in, you’ll be treated right.
Mm-hmm. Right. OK, so that’s the “soldier” part of the Pirate Soldier King equation. Those are more the soldiers. Or both, pirates and soldiers.
Well, most every gang member is a soldier. Gangs are a sort of pyramid scheme. There’s very, very few at the top. Those would be like the heads of the cartels and certain generals, like the Black Hands for the Mexican Mafia, the Shamrocks for the Aryan Brotherhood, people like that. The validated royalty.
Okay, interesting. Wrapping it up: when we’re thinking about the news and what the New York Times gets wrong and right, what are some of the things that our listening audience needs to know about how the news media is getting this and what is really going on?
My biggest beef with the reporting is that they’re basically saying, “Well, it’s just a tattoo. Maybe they got it ignorantly. Maybe they didn’t know. Its not a gang…”
and I’m like, “No, it’s not just a tattoo. There’s reasons for these symbols, these brands, these patches… and it’s a… it’s a real thing.”
You could do a cursory Google search: “gangs and tattoos.” You’ll get 10,000 pages of results. Or: “ChatGPT, tell me about the relationship between gangs and tattoos.” Its not an accident.
So yes: innocent until proven guilty, and… when evidence starts to stack up, you need to look at it as objectively as possible.
Advice on Getting Inked
Okay, if someone’s out there thinking about the next tattoo they’re going to get, do you have any advice of a good choice of tattoos?
Yeah, I’d say: honor your family.
<points at chest tattoo> That’s Roberts right there. That’s my last name. That’s my family of 12 generations, going all the way back to Wales, England. Or I should say: Wales, to the west of England.
And yeah, make it really personal. I would never get a tattoo of a girlfriend’s name. And I would never get a tattoo of a sports team or something like that. Or maybe a sports team, but I would say just, something that is personal and unique to you.
Never use “flash” art. Get the artist to design something that is unique to you, because that’s what a tattoo is. It’s as unique as your body.
Have Phoenix design you a Tattoo
GB: Okay, now: are you available for tattoos for the listening audience? Maybe we can do some kind of contest and maybe for the most shares of the podcast, or something like that, you could design them a tattoo.
I think we should! I know I’m putting you on the spot right now, but you have designed a lot of beautiful tattoos. And that was one of the things that you did as gifts while you were in prison, for people… you would actually design tattoos for your family and friends in the Free.
So let’s come up with something for the listening audience…
GR: Okay! I’m gonna come up with it… allright. How about: whoever writes the comment that gets the most likes on it? On this show, this episode. Whoever that is, I will create a tattoo design for you.
GB: Okay! Okay, you heard it. You heard it here first straight from Gregory Roberts, the tattoo artist… The go-to tattoo artist in prison.
He is going to design a tattoo for the person who makes the comment that gets the most likes on this episode. All right, let’s see who wins this, this coveted tattoo art from our very own Gregory Roberts. Okay!
GR: Got it. So be sure to like and comment below… and subscribe! Thanks for listening!
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