by Dan Slater
EDITOR . . . . . . Ben Loehnen
PUBLISHER . . . . . . Jon Karp
AGENT . . . . . . Farley Chase
SPANISH EDITOR . . . . . . Sam Slick
A NOTE ON SOURCES
I based Wolf Boys on interviews, letters, law enforcement reports, and trial testimony. But for context and history I relied heavily on the work of others.
Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (2013), by Brown University’s Peter Andreas, is a landmark. Andreas writes: “Political appeals to ‘regain control’ of the nation’s borders are afflicted by an extreme case of historical amnesia, nostalgically implying there was once a time when our borders were actually ‘under control.’ This is pure myth; there never was a golden age of secure borders.” Smuggler Nation helped me understand the scope of the book I was writing, and served as a gateway to other important books, such as William E. Unrau’s White Man’s Wicked Water: The Alcohol Trade and Prohibition in Indian Country, 1802–1892 (1996), and John J. Adams Jr.’s Conflict and Commerce on the Rio Grande: Laredo, 1755–1955 (2008). Andreas’s first book, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (2009), helped me put Robert Garcia’s DEA experience in context.
For Mexico’s democratic transition, the impact of NAFTA, and the infamous oligarch banquet of 1993 (described in Chapter 8), I couldn’t have asked for a better guide than Andrés Oppenheimer’s Bordering on Chaos: Guerrillas, Stockbrokers, Politicians, and Mexico’s Road to Prosperity (1996). The Harvard PhD dissertation by Viridiana Rios Contreras, “How Government Structure Encourages Criminal Violence: The Causes of Mexico’s Drug War” (2012), drew a convincing link between political liberalization and underworld expansion.
What I know of the early Mexican drug trade comes largely from Elaine Shannon’s Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win (1988), and Terrence Poppa’s Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin (1990). Were it not for a fleeting mention, on page 92 of George T. Díaz’s Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande (2015), I never would’ve discovered Colonel Esteban Cantú, the first Mexican vice lord, nor the journal articles detailing Cantú’s reign over Mexicali: James A. Sandos’s “Northern Separatism During the Mexican Revolution: An Inquiry into the Role of Drug Trafficking, 1919–1920,” Americas 41, no. 2 (October 1984); and Eric Michael Schantz’s “All Night at the Owl: The Social and Political Relations of Mexicali’s Red-Light District, 1913–1925,” Journal of the Southwest 43, no. 1 (Winter 2001). As far as rabbit holes go, the Cantú research sent me down a great one.
“Yes, I would say Cantú is the first vice lord,” Díaz confirmed in an email to me. “The only earlier parallel I can think of is Santiago Vidaurri, who aided the Confederate cotton trade. Still, Vidaurri was nothing like Cantú, who profited from opium, gambling, and prostitution.”
My section epigraphs, all drawn from Inga Clendinnen’s Aztecs (1991), suggest the indispensability of that book. A Meso-American historian of equal stature is T. R. Fehrenbach; I regularly consulted the second edition of Fehrenbach’s Mexico history, Fire & Blood (1995).
Elijah Wald’s Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas (2001) is a singular work. For an update on the narcocorrido, I turned to Shaul Schwarz’s documentary, Narco Cultura (2013).
The short life of Tupac Shakur inspired many books; Randall Sullivan’s LAbyrinth (2002), the book Gabriel read in county, offers the most clearheaded and nonpoliticized account of Tupac’s life, and posits the most likely version of what happened on that Las Vegas evening in 1996.
Concerning hip-hop idols, it was interesting to compare Gabriel’s idealized impression of Carlos Coy, aka South Park Mexican, to the brazen pedophile profiled in John Nova Lomax’s 2002 article for the Houston Press, “South Park Monster.”
I’ve worked for a university, a literary agency, a law firm, a TV production company, magazines, newspapers, restaurants, a ranch, and a can-recycling company. In addition to my vast—and vastly unsuccessful—personal experience with office politics, Robert Jackall’s masterpiece of corporate sociology, Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers (1988), helped me articulate the social environment of the Company that Gabriel and other Wolf Boys described.
I am indebted to the staffs of the Laredo Morning Times and the San Antonio Express-News, as well as to the journalists whose reporting about the Wolf Boys—as well as about Chapo, La Barbie, and the cartels—provided loads of insight and factoids: Julián Aguilar, Randal C. Archibold, Malcolm Beith, Charles Bowden, Jason Buch, Damien Cave, Mary Cuddehe, Samuel Dillon, Luke Dittrich, William Finnegan, George Grayson, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Ioan Grillo, Anabel Hernández, Jesse Hyde, Marc Lacey, Samuel Logan, Patrick Radden Keefe, Elisabeth Malkin, James C. McKinley Jr., Julia Preston, Ricardo Ravelo, Sebastian Rotella, Ginger Thompson, and Ed Vuillamy. In The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail (2014), Óscar Martínez took me on a ride-along through what the Zetas eventually became: roving tyrants.
In his pitch-black memoir—Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey Through a Country’s Descent into Darkness (2013)—the swashbuckling Alfredo Corchado reports the agreement between the Zetas and El Mañana and chronicles his own role in publishing “The Barbie Execution Video” (2005). I make specific reference to Corchado’s interview with the “drug czar” and prosecutor alleged in the video to have taken money from the Company. “Why don’t you focus on tourism stories?” the prosecutor asked. “They’re safer.” I salute Corchado—sad grandstander though he may be—for declining to follow the prosecutor’s instruction.
I owe this book to the people of Laredo, so many of whom I met during my seven trips to the city. As a reporter, I am often paranoid by the sense my presence gives, that of a person who is way too eager to spin your life into a story for his own profit. I kept expecting someone to say, loud enough for me to hear, What kind of asshole just hangs around asking all these questions about our lives? I couldn’t have been more wrong, of course. It’s easy to make friends in Laredo, and I made many. The people are open and gracious, a warm bunch, on the south side and the north.
A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, DAN SLATER has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, New York magazine, The Atlantic, GQ, and Fast Company. He is the author of Love in the Time of Algorithms. A graduate of Colgate University and Brooklyn Law School, he lives in New England.
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