Wolf Boys
Two American Teenagers and Mexico's Most Dangerous Drug Cartel
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The true story of two American teenagers turned cartel assassins—and the Mexican American detective who fought to stop them. Wolf Boys is “a hell of a story…undeniably gripping” (The New York Times), a harrowing nonfiction thriller that reads like a crime novel but is rooted in extraordinary investigative reporting.
Journalist Dan Slater tells the unforgettable tale of Gabriel Cardona, a bright and promising Laredo, Texas, teenager who becomes one of the youngest hitmen for Los Zetas, Mexico’s most violent drug cartel. Lured by power, money, and survival in a border town overrun with smuggling and gang warfare, Gabriel joins a network of juvenile recruits tasked with carrying out executions on both sides of the US–Mexico border.
As cartel warfare spills into Texas, the story collides with that of Detective Robert Garcia, a Mexican-born homicide investigator who has dedicated his life to keeping cartel violence out of the United States.
With chilling precision and emotional depth, Wolf Boys exposes how teens become soldiers in a global drug war, and how law enforcement, outmatched and outgunned, is forced to confront a rising wave of youth-led organized crime.
At once intimate and explosive, Wolf Boys is a devastating account of the real-life consequences of America’s war on drugs—and the price paid by its youngest victims.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Slater (Love in a Time of Algorithms) offers a grim, gripping account of the lives of two boys caught up in the drug wars. In a dramatic prologue set in 2006, the reader is introduced to 19-year-old Gabriel Cardona, a soldier for the drug cartel known as the Company, who is in the midst of pep talk with a neophyte hit man. But before Gabriel and his comrade can go into action, he's arrested. Slater then backtracks to the mid-1990s in Laredo, Tex., "the poorest city in America" and Gabriel's hometown, to delineate how Gabriel went from an ordinary child to a murderous would-be manager for narcotics traffickers. Young Gabriel is depicted as a model student with perfect attendance and advanced reading skills. The details of his childhood are made all the more poignant by knowing where he will end up. The book also provides the story of one of Gabriel's cohorts, known as Bart because of his resemblance to the Simpsons character. Bart, who "carried the rage of a poor boy whose family couldn't feed him," turned to gang life at the age of 12, and ended up killing more than 30 people. Slater effectively alternates between Gabriel's perspective (based off extensive correspondence with his subject) and that of dedicated cop Robert Garcia, who worked tirelessly to capture and convict the two young men. Slater ends on a depressing note as he is led to troubling conclusions "about evil as a natural product of human consciousness." Slater's effective use of historical context, including tracing the roots of the Mexican drug trade back to the 16th century following the conquest of the Aztec Empire, elevates this above similar accounts..
