
The story of two American teens recruited as killers for a Mexican cartel, and their pursuit by a Mexican-American detective who realizes the War on Drugs is unwinnable.What's it like to be an employee of a global drug-trafficking organization? And how does a fifteen-year-old American boy go from star quarterback to trained assassin, surging up the cartel corporate ladder? At first glance, Gabriel Cardona is the poster boy American teenager: great athlete, bright, handsome, and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, are poor and dangerous, and it isn't long before Gabriel abandons his promising future for the allure of the Zetas, a drug cartel with roots in the Mexican military. His younger friend Bart, as well as others from Gabriel's childhood, join him in working for the Zetas, boosting cars and smuggling drugs, eventually catching the eye of the cartel's leadership. Meanwhile, Mexican-born Detective Robert Garcia has worked hard all his life and is now struggling to raise his family in America. As violence spills over the border, Detective Garcia's pursuit of the boys, and their cartel leaders, puts him face to face with the urgent consequences of a war he sees as unwinnable. In Wolf Boys Dan Slater shares their stories, taking us from the Sierra Madre mountaintops to the dusty, dark alleys of Laredo, Texas, on a harrowing, often brutal journey into the heart of the Mexican drug trade. Gabriel's evolution from good-natured teenager into a feared assassin is as inevitable as Garcia's slow realization of the futile nature of his work. A nonfiction thriller, Wolf Boys depicts more than just Gabriel, Bart, and the officers who took them down. It shows, through vivid detail and rich, often moving, narrative, the way in which the border itself is changing, disappearing, and posing new, terrifying, and yet largely unseen threats to American security. Ultimately though, Wolf Boys is the intimate story of the "lobos" themselves: boys turned into pawns for cartels. Their stories show how poverty, ideas about identity, and government ignorance have warped the definition of the American dream.
Publisher:
2016
ISBN:
9781501126628
Branch Call Number:
E-Book
Characteristics:
data file
1 online resource



Opinion
From Library Staff
"I wasn't interested in chronicling the history of the cartels," writes former Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Slater. What he wanted to know was, "…what is it like to be an employee of a global drug-trafficking organization?" What he comes up with in this investigative repor... Read More »
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Add a CommentWolf 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.
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.