Dan Slater - Wolf Boys Two American Teenagers and Mexico’s Most Dangerous Drug Cartel

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Copyright 2016 by Dan Slater

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2016

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Interior design by Lewelin Polanco

Jacket design by Grace Han

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-2654-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-2662-8 (ebook)

A s dusk settled over South Texas, Gabriel Cardona stood in the kitchen of the safe house and offered a last-minute tutorial. You walk up to him and just poom ! he told his newest recruit. En la cabezota . But with both hands. In the crown, poom ! Youll fuck him up. Otherwise, poom! poom! poom! poom! Four in the chest. And then en la cabezota, to make sure.

The recruit nodded, and scattered to his preparations.

Four days had passed without a successful action. Other than one bungled job, in which they nearly killed the wrong guy, theyd been hanging out in the rented house, a charming brick rambler on Orange Blossom Loop, eating fast food, mowing the lawn, shopping for housewares at Wal-Mart, and talking to girls on their wiretapped cell phones. They were young and vigorous, fiery in their belief of success. Now they were getting ready to kill again.

Its time to take care of business! Gabriel yelled, clapping encouragement like a high school football coach on Friday night. Hed come quite a way from the ramshackle house across town on Lincoln Streetthree blocks north of the international border between Mexico and Laredo, Texaswhere his mother raised him and his three brothers on less than $20,000 a year. Gone were the days of borrowing moms Escort, of dressing in jeans and generic white T-shirts. His closet was now stuffed with brand names like Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren, Versace, and Kenneth Cole. He still cut his hair at Nydias Salon. That would never change. But now he drove new carsa Jetta, a Ram, a Mercedes SUV. His silver Benz was being customized; it would be ready any day.

He paced the kitchen, threw away a greasy fast-food bag, and washed the dishes left in the sink.

Success, the young man was finding, came with its own stress: the hangers-on, the wannabes, the phony homies, the unwanted attention from a certain detective. The competition . Richard, his new lieutenant, was growing more subversive by the day. Uncle Raul, his mothers brother, a perennial troublemaker, kept hitting the clubs across the border and mouthing off, relying on his nephews reputation to keep him out of trouble. Uncle Raul would not last long if he kept that up. And then there was Christina, she of the pretty face and the not-too-wide hips, who felt abandoned while her boy worked constantly, always on the run.

It was six months from his twentieth birthday, and Gabriel Cardona was being primed for a managerial position in a global enterprise. A bilingual businessman, savvy in two cultures, he could work both sides of the border with ease. A born leader, handsome and serious, he had caramel skin, full lips, and the dark, brooding eyes of a sad Catholic saintthe type that lined the walls of his mothers home in fading lithographs. The deity, fellow decider of fates, had cut him strong and wiry. Angel of the Lord, lord of the hood. A thug. The chuco that even preppy girls competed over.

Hed made some mistakes. But any man of action did. Hed proven himself a firme vato, a loyal soldier with balls of steel. In the shit-nothing town of Laredo, Texas, where Company membership was the pinnacle of achievement, this status meant everything. His boss, Comandante Cuarentaor simply Fortyprecisely the most feared drug lord in Mexico, liked him. Liked him so much that he wanted to protect him. Recently, Forty instructed Gabriel to exclude himself from jobs, to hang back and direct via cell phone but not participate unless necessary. Liked him so much, in fact, that Gabriel had been bailed out of jail, not once, but three times in the last eight months, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars.

The law kept letting him out. The Company kept paying for it. What clearer validation could there be?

A year earlier, when Forty began sending him on jobs in Texasas in the States Gabriel was reluctant, caught between the futureless fringe of his birth country and the narco-state where success accrued to the ruthless warrior. Doing missions in a place where authorities frowned on homicide was not an appealing prospect. But it was Forty asking. That a boy from Lazteca received orders directly from El Comandante, even for suicide missions, was immense.

Gabriel had long imagined a moment such as this, one of great responsibility, an opportunity to advance in a way his community admired. For months hed been breakfasting on roches, a heavy tranquilizer, and Red Bull. And risk, well, it was the toll of immortality. Look no further than Forty himself. Stoic. Serious. Never asked you to do something he wouldnt. Loyal to friends. Enemy to enemies. A good man, for and about the idea . Gabriel was part of something, and a true Wolf Boy never said no.

That evening, the cars had been cleaned, the weapons loaded. Everything was ready. This was it. The beginning of something. He could see a future. As the battle with the Sinaloans, the rival cartel, drove up costs and pinched smuggling profits, the borders underworld economy cycled down. The transport business would come and go. But enforcement was steady work. He would stack money. He would be transferred to deep Mexico, where he would run his own city. If he could cook his nemesis, La Barbie, a Sinaloan, then third-in-command was not out of the question. The other boys looked up to him. Richard would fall in line. Christina would calm down. She was mad. But earlier that evening they had returned from Applebees, where they had had a constructive conversation. When he dropped her off, she told him to hug her. Tighter, she said.

He moved about now with quicker steps, rolling a fist in a palm, rubbing the scars beneath his buzzed hair where shotgun fragments remained from old battles. If Gabriel could cement his reputation as a leader, if the past year could ever make sense, it would have to come now, at the battles most crucial point, under a flood of spotlights, before hundreds of men who would either anoint him the next mero mero, the true shit, or throw him to the hungry tigers like one more disposable spic.

Forty said 2006 was the last year of war. Forty said Mexicos next president was on lock, paid for, and the country would be theirs. Todo va a ser de La Compaa. Everything will belong to the Company.