Life Sentence

In this unprecedented deep dive into inner-city ganglife, Mark Bowden takes readers inside a Baltimore gang, offers an in-depthportrait of its notorious leader, and chronicles the 2016 FBI investigationthat 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 notoriousby David Simon’s classic HBO series “The Wire.” Drug deals dominate streetcorners, and ruthless, casual violence abounds.

Montana Barronette grew up in the center of it all. He wasthe leader of the gang “Trained to Go,” or TTG, and when he was finallyarrested and sentenced to life in prison, he had been nicknamed “Baltimore’sNumber One Trigger Puller.” Under Tana’s reign, TTG dominated Sandtown. After astring of murders are linked to TTG, each with dozens of witnesses toointimidated to testify, three detectives set out to put Tana in prison forlife. For them, this was never about drugs: It was about serial murder.

Now an acclaimed journalist who spent his youth in the whitesuburbs of Baltimore, Mark Bowden returns to the city with exclusive access tothe FBI files and unprecedented insight into one of the city’s deadliest gangsand its notorious leader. As he traces the rise and fall of TTG, Bowden useswiretapped drug buys, police interviews, undercover videos, text messages,social media posts, trial transcripts, and his own ongoing conversations withTana’s family and community to create the most in-depth account of an inner-citygang ever written.

With his signature precision and propulsive narrative, MarkBowden 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 itreally was: a life sentence.