My Bloody Life

My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King is an autobiography by Reymundo Sanchez (a pseudonym) about his life as a teenage street gang member in Chicago.[1][2]

The author of the book, Reymundo Sanchez, was a lost boy - disowned by a physically abusive mother and step-father and sent to live with a step-brother who could not care less whether he came home or not. He soon learned that survival on the streets depends on whom he counted on among his friends and to which gang he belonged.

Initiated into the Latin Kings by performing his first hit at the age of 14, Lil Loco, as he became known, quickly earned a reputation for violence, rape, attempted murder, drug dealing, gangbanging, and living up to his name...Lil' Crazy.

For ten years a 30-block area of Chicago defined his reality. Lil Loco, still as a child, a minor, then a seasoned gangbanger, broke every rule in the book. Even snitching on rivals, in his own words "we told them almost everybody was there, then pointed out the rival gangs triggermen to the police, who threw them in the van. It was just another day in the 'hood". This was when the same police would throw him out of a police car in the middle of rival gang territory, to be either killed or beaten severely.

Lil Loco was inducted into his gang by a timed "beat down", and once inducted, any perceived breach of the gang's ever-changing laws resulted in a "violation", or punishment by the gang. Needless to say, Lil Loco gained his respect by enduring many of these punishments.

My Bloody Life is the story of Lil Loco's odyssey through the ranks of the Latin Kings, one of America's largest and most violent Latino gangs, and the insanity, and the heartache that came with it.