Author(s): Dan Slater

True Crime

At first glance, Gabriel Cardona was the poster boy American teenager: great athlete, bright, handsome and charismatic. But the streets of his border town of Laredo, Texas, were poor and dangerous, and it wasn't long before Gabriel abandoned 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, joined him in working for the Zetas, boosting cars and smuggling drugs. Within a few months they were to become some of the cartel's most-feared killers: Los Lobos, The Wolf Boys...Mexican-born Detective Robert Garcia had worked hard all his life, struggling to raise his family in America. As violence spilled over the border, Detective Garcia's pursuit of the boys, and their cartel leaders, placed him face to face with the terrible consequences of a war he came to see as unwinnable...In Wolf Boys Dan Slater takes 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. Using the stories of these two young boys, kids whose actions and lives blended teenage normalcy with monstrous barbarity, Wolf Boys uncovers the dark truth about Mexico's cartels and the tragic failure of 'the war on drugs'...The result is an astonishing, immersive, non-fiction thriller informed by extraordinary research and vivid detail.