Wolf Boys

The true story of two American teenagers turned cartel assassins—and the Mexican American detective who fought to stop them. Wolf Boys is “a hell of a story…undeniably gripping” (The New York Times), a harrowing nonfiction thriller that reads like a crime novel but is rooted in extraordinary investigative reporting. Journalist Dan Slater tells the unforgettable tale of Gabriel Cardona, a bright and promising Laredo, Texas, teenager who becomes one of the youngest hitmen for Los Zetas, Mexico’s most violent drug cartel. Lured by power, money, and survival in a border town overrun with smuggling and gang warfare, Gabriel joins a network of juvenile recruits tasked with carrying out executions on both sides of the US–Mexico border. As cartel warfare spills into Texas, the story collides with that of Detective Robert Garcia, a Mexican-born homicide investigator who has dedicated his life to keeping cartel violence out of the United States. With chilling precision and emotional depth, Wolf Boys exposes how teens become soldiers in a global drug war, and how law enforcement, outmatched and outgunned, is forced to confront a rising wave of youth-led organized crime. At once intimate and explosive, Wolf Boys is a devastating account of the real-life consequences of America’s war on drugs—and the price paid by its youngest victims.

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.