{"id":698,"date":"2018-12-31T13:30:33","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=698"},"modified":"2018-12-31T13:30:33","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:30:33","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-70","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=698","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Kirkus, <\/span>freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com, and a moderator at the 20th annual Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, High Country News, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho River Review, Monkeybicycle, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, <\/span>and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>TRUE CRIME<\/p>\n

Dan Slater<\/span><\/p>\n

Wolf Boys: Two American Teenagers and Mexico\u2019s Most Dangerous Drug Cartel<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Simon & Schuster<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-50112-654-7 (also available as a paperback, an ebook, and on Audible), 352 pgs., $26.95<\/p>\n

September 13, 2016<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Mexican immigrant who became the American cop busted the natural-born Americans who became the cartel crooks.\u201d<\/p>\n

At nineteen years old, Gabriel Cardona wore Versace,<\/span> drove a Mercedes SUV, and was \u201cbeing primed for a managerial position in a global enterprise\u201d\u2014Los Zetas. He was a sicario,<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s desk resembled \u201ca graduate-level math proof that could be worked forever but never solved.\u201d He became disillusioned with the \u201cWar on Drugs.\u201d Then Los Zetas arrived. \u201cWithout attacking demand in the United States, [Garcia] couldn\u2019t see the point of putting so many resources into stemming only a fraction of traffic. But violence spilling over was another matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wolf Boys: Two American Teenagers and Mexico\u2019s Most Dangerous Drug Cartel<\/span><\/a><\/span> is creative, narrative nonfiction by Dan Slater,<\/span> a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal.<\/span> Slater incorporates demographics, sociology, and economics\u2014the elementary supply and demand\u2014in his recounting of this familiar story. He gives it some context with a brief, incomplete history of vice prohibition in the United States. \u201cEvery new regulation presented a new smuggling opportunity,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n

The history of Laredo\u2019s politics is interesting, but the picture Slater paints of the border town is unnecessarily harsh. Facts are facts (the patr\u00f3n system and kickbacks), but Slater\u2019s characterization of Laredo as \u201ca giant, unimproved truck stop\u201d 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, \u201cprivatization\u201d of the drug industry created a new landscape of independent, competitive subsidiaries\u201d and \u201ctraffickers preferred to hire private armies rather than outsource ineffective protection to the state.\u201d Enter Los Zetas.<\/p>\n

Slater doesn\u2019t 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: \u201cLaredo was the border frontier\u2019s petri dish of implication.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Startlingly, Slater admits to buying and using cocaine in Laredo with Cardona\u2019s older brother.<\/p>\n

Wolf Boys <\/span>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\u2019t find much new here.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is contributing editor at Lone Star Literary Life, reviewer for Kirkus, freelance writer, member of the National Book Critics Circle, blogger at www.TexasBookLover.com, and a moderator at the 20th annual Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, World Literature Today, High Country News, South85 Journal, The Review Review, Concho […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}