The Shadow Catcher
A U.S. Agent Infiltrates Mexico's Deadly Crime Cartels
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Living under an assumed identity and risking his life were all in a day’s work for U.S. Government Agent Hipolito Acosta. He worked regularly in high-stakes undercover operations infiltrating Mexico’s murderous immigrant smuggling rings and drug cartels.
Acosta’s investigations are legendary, both inside law enforcement and the crime cartels he helped neutralize. He had himself smuggled from Mexico to Chicago with a truckload of poor immigrants; worked his way into the confidences of a gang of international counterfeiters; socialized with some of Mexico’s most vicious drug lords; arrested a female smuggler by luring her across the U.S. border for an amorous rendezvous; and was the target of multiple murder plots by the criminals he put in jail.
For three decades, Hipolito Acosta’s work routinely made national headlines, and he quickly gained a reputation as a daring crime fighter who used his intelligence and audacity to stay one step ahead of those who would kill him if his cover were ever blown.
Acosta’s stories read like chapters from a page-turning crime novel, but The Shadow Catcher is more than a front-seat ride through the criminal underworld along the U.S./Mexico border. This heartbreaking exposé goes beyond sensational headlines and medals of honor to divulge what an agent endures in order to ensure that U.S. law is enforced and to reveal the unseen human side of illegal immigration.
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This somewhat plodding account of daring (even reckless) undercover work by a zealous U.S. Border Patrol agent reflects a push to pursue "bigger fish" in the system of illegal border crossings by targeting the organized groups smuggling people from Mexico, Central and South America, and elsewhere. With colleagues in the small antismuggling units of his Chicago district office and later in El Paso, Tex., and Monterrey, Mexico, the Spanish-speaking Acosta embarks on a series of undercover missions in which he flies solo in the world traveled by migrants. Throughout, he tries to refocus enforcement energies on smugglers crime syndicates and families themselves. Mexican-American Acosta's humble upbringing in a 1950s Texas border town leaves him sympathetic to those hungry and desperate enough to risk the harrowing journey north. Some readers may find the narrative self-aggrandizing, but Acosta reveals a sincere, conflicted conscience as he confronts men, women, and children caught in the clutches of opportunistic gangs or "living in fear in the land of their dreams." As a real-life crime thriller, the book gains on-and-off-again momentum. As an analysis of the intractable immigration issue, it remains circumscribed by the author's own orthodox, if qualified, perspective, and offers only a vague sense of the political and economic factors at work.
