His first assignment was in his working-class east London for the Observer, accompanying the American writer Clancy Sigal (who came to Britain as a McCarthy fugitive in the mid-1950s) to report on a violent teenage gang with which he'd been associated.
Unfortunately, she uses the self-defense techniques her daddy taught her on the wrong bully at school — the nephew of local meth kingpin Gator Bodine (James Franco, bringing shades of humanity to the backwater villain), who alerts the biker gang with which Broker was once undercover as to his current whereabouts.
Tonight the studio is crawling with rappers, producers, and crews affiliated with Lil Durk's Only the Family (OTF) clique, along with miscellaneous members of the 300, a faction of the nationwide street gang Black Disciples, with which Durk and Keef reportedly affiliate.
The researchers also prepared "sociograms" — visual representations of the dynamics among the different gangs — in which gangs allied with each other were connected with green lines, and gangs pursuing conflicts were connected with red lines.
None of this suggests that countries in the region are overtly ganging up on China, with which they would like stable relations.
The spiral of violence also feeds off the ease with which gang members impose their terror.
"What will prevail are armed gangs with Kalashnikovs and which one has the greatest number of Kalashnikovs will count … we will end up in civil war".
None of this has made headline news; in Veracruz, as in much of the rest of Mexico, such horrors have become the norm.On the other side of the country, in the northern desert state of Sonora, police fought a pitched battle with drug gangs last month, in which 22 people were killed.
Most kidnappings here are the work of local criminal gangs, many of which have connections with the police; the kidnappers demand and often receive high ransoms.
Mr Maliki, however, needs Mr Sadr, who is one of the few leaders to have any influence over the Shia sectarian gangs, most of which claim association with his Mahdi Army but in practice operate autonomously.
The Scottish star is being lined up to play the Scots-born leader of a bike gang who became involved in a shoot-out with a rival gang in which seven people died in 1984.
