Wow excellent book about how a couple of American teenagers in Laredo Texas became hitmen for the Zeta Cartel. ( )

If you can read this book and still wonder why we need to Build the Wall on our southern border, I am shaking my head. Mexico is one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. Drug dealers and assassins cross the border between the United States and Mexico at will. This book is frightening and terrifying. Build that damn wall! Two thumbs up on the book! ( )

Wolf Boys by Dan Slater is a grisly story about how a Mexican drug cartel known as Los Zetas chose, groomed and trained two American youths into assassins in order to help secure their foothold in America. The setting is the border town of Laredo, Texas during the early years of this century as the violence was escalating into an all-out war between gangs that were vying for control of this valuable smuggling route across the border and into the American heartland.

Author Dan Slater is an investigative journalist who centers his story on both sides of the law with Robert Garcia, an honest police detective coming up against these young murderers, Gabriel Cardona and Rosalio Reta. Between them, these two boys were responsible for the deaths of over a dozen, targeting those who opposed the Zetas. Most of the violence occurred across the Rio Grande, in Mexico where this battle between the cartels went on for years. Over 150,000 people were killed or went missing during this time period. The cartel also instructed them to kill people on the Texas side of the border as well and this eventually lead to their downfall. Both young men ended up in Texas prisons with long sentences but both also appear to be unrepentant as Reta’s comment, “I like what I do” shows.

I found this an interesting story but a bit uneven. The author included a lot of fact and figures that I thought were unnecessary to the main story. He researched the history of Laredo and border disputes that went back to the 1700’s. The beginning of the book and the last 100 pages or so were compelling as the violence of the drug world with it’s viscous competition, murders and brutal retaliations were exposed. ( )

At fifteen, Gabriel Cardona had it all. He was smart, handsome, a fine athlete and a born leader. By the time he was twenty he was a drug-slinging, cold-blooded killer. What happened?
This meticulously researched book, covers Gabriel's life in Laredo Texas, near the Mexican border, a tough place to be brought up and an easy place to be lured in by the Mexican drug cartels that own the cities, on both sides of the border. Much like inner city ghettos, these areas offer very little opportunities for poor kids and the allure of easy money is overwhelming. Recruiting is a piece of cake. One boy is arrested or killed, five more take his place.
This is a fine piece of journalism and the author covers all angles of the war on drugs and the grip that the cartels have over officials in the U.S. and Mexico. A fair warning- this is a brutal story. The violence and viciousness is overwhelming at times. Life is absolutely meaningless to these people, but if you can stomach it, give this terrific book a try. ( )

TRUE CRIME
Dan Slater
Wolf Boys: Two American Teenagers and Mexico’s Most Dangerous Drug Cartel
Simon & Schuster
Hardcover, 978-1-50112-654-7 (also available as a paperback, an ebook, and on Audible), 352 pgs., $26.95
September 13, 2016

“The Mexican immigrant who became the American cop busted the natural-born Americans who became the cartel crooks.”

At nineteen years old, Gabriel Cardona wore Versace, drove a Mercedes SUV, and was “being primed for a managerial position in a global enterprise”—Los Zetas. He was a sicario, an assassin. A United States citizen, Cardona was useful. He could work both sides of the border. Cardona also recruited his friends from the slums of Laredo, including Bart Reta, the second teenager mentioned in the title. He was thirteen when he began working for the Zetas.

Robert Garcia immigrated from Piedras Negras, Mexico, to Eagle Pass, Texas, as a child. After some time in the U.S. Army, he joined the narcotics unit of the police department in Laredo. An Officer of the Year Award earned him an offer to join a Drug Enforcement Administration task force. The whiteboard over Garcia’s desk resembled “a graduate-level math proof that could be worked forever but never solved.” He became disillusioned with the “War on Drugs.” Then Los Zetas arrived. “Without attacking demand in the United States, [Garcia] couldn’t see the point of putting so many resources into stemming only a fraction of traffic. But violence spilling over was another matter.”

Wolf Boys: Two American Teenagers and Mexico’s Most Dangerous Drug Cartel is creative, narrative nonfiction by Dan Slater, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Slater incorporates demographics, sociology, and economics—the elementary supply and demand—in his recounting of this familiar story. He gives it some context with a brief, incomplete history of vice prohibition in the United States. “Every new regulation presented a new smuggling opportunity,” he writes.

The history of Laredo’s politics is interesting, but the picture Slater paints of the border town is unnecessarily harsh. Facts are facts (the patrón system and kickbacks), but Slater’s characterization of Laredo as “a giant, unimproved truck stop” is myopic. The history of cartel formation, beginning with the Gulf Cartel in the 1940s, and continuing with PRI institutional regulation, is well and clearly told. When the PRI fell from power in the 1990s, “privatization” of the drug industry created a new landscape of independent, competitive subsidiaries” and “traffickers preferred to hire private armies rather than outsource ineffective protection to the state.” Enter Los Zetas.

Slater doesn’t romanticize the cartel thugs and their lifestyles as has been done so often, and he gives equal time to Garcia and law enforcement. He provides a thorough breakdown of how the drug business and the cartels operate, complete with vicious details not for the squeamish. Slater is best at the straight facts. When he gets creative, he verges on the purple: “Laredo was the border frontier’s petri dish of implication.” The narrative moves along steadily, keeping the pages turning despite a tendency to repetition, and the sting that finally brings down Cardona and Reta is intense.

Startlingly, Slater admits to buying and using cocaine in Laredo with Cardona’s older brother.

Wolf Boys is a serviceable, if uneven, contribution to the story of Mexican cartels and United States law enforcement. The details are fascinating and provocative without being prurient, but most Texans won’t find much new here.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. ( )