On behalf of our staff and Lisa Muscatine i would like to welcome you all to politics and prose. If you have not already, please silence your cell phones. And another writer by that pillar. Please hold your chairs and leaned them against something solid. Thank you im pleased to welcome you to politics and prose. As the criminal organizations [inaudible] the finest houses in the United States all with money from the empire. Systematic and narration that the criminal underworld and the intensity of the race with life on both sides of the border and the irresistible family ties. I am delighted to have joe here to tell us about this fascinating story. In addition, his work also appeared at the Washington Post please help me welcome. [applause] hello. Thank you everyone for coming. Now you can hear me. We are here to talk about the exciting and gripping and terrific new book that has everything it ever asked for. They were tidying up altogetherr if three fourths of the way through the book and as the president would say theres a lot of bad openbrac. Its the difference process that he went through reporting a book that isnt that difficult anyone can tell you being able to verify facts, not getting yourself killed, all these things are not easy to do when you are reporting on people like this but i want to talk about how you came to hear about the story and how it all started. Every morning i would get up and look for stories i was getting up really early at the time i would go through the newspaper and always look for things i could tear out and share with my reporters. I came across this one on the cover of the times. He was there with a big smile and hats and trophy and i started to read the story to figure out what it was about and he was about 20 minutes from where i live that had risen to prominence in this world of horse racing but i didnt know much about it because im from california. So i was immediately like this is something. We are always looking for a way to turn something into a fully realized story is so i was going to give it to one of the reporters and then i kept it for myself. But then three years went by. It wasnt that much to do with it in that moment. The fbi had raided a ranch in oklahoma so there wasnt much to go on in terms of court records. I would essentially gather on it slowly. They started walking by with full records. He was based not far from where i was at dallas and the Government Agencies that work counternarcotics generally dont talk about what they do fo but r all the dust is settled. That sort of got the ball rolling. You obviously want to find out about these brothers one is going to be living in a different of law on any side of the border. What first drew you to this was if the shakespearean nature of the contrast and what was it that you saw that makes you realize there was something more threatening about it . I thought about it before and i thought just the notion that they lived as a naturalized american citizen in dallas texas, laying bricks while not only miguel but another brother and other brothers in various places have all risen to prominence in the Drug Trafficking business and eventually became the leader of the cartel which is notorious for being hellacious levi went but how do you live that life and continue to make the choice to be a bricklayer everyday while your brothers have amassed riches and power when you add the fact that to get involved in some way in this world of quarter horse racing was a nobrainer. When you see about quarter horse racing what was it do you think for a man like jose was it about horse racing that made him want to finally get involved with if not the most common definitely the most murderous in mexico . They had grown up in mexico across the border in laredo and earlier on they were on the outskirts and their father had worked on a ranch with cattle and horses. Its mostly a sort of informal setting where they say we are going to have some beers and we are going to race, so that is the passion of a lot of people in northern mexico by texas oklahoma and mexico, so that was the draw for him it was something that he knew. I essentially saw it as he built it its what his death might have been able to do if his dad had been afforded more opportunities. How does he change as he gets deeper into this world that he didnt know until this point . He kind of gets his toes in the water and he starts to enjoy the success of a little bit and becomes more of a public face about it. If they win some races and have some success. First he wore a ball cap and then when he got into quarter horse racing and started showing up, he wore a white hat and later on in the story, i dont know why but around the time his brother was becoming a huge problem in mexico, kidnapping and killing indiscriminately outside of the already horrible bounds of the drug war, he changed briefly. I think it was a coincidence. So, he gets deeper into this and he starts wearing his hat he sort of takes on more of a flamboyance to this and the cartel despite the fact they were laundering money through horse racing is something you try to be more subtle about. Thats one of the things thats interesting about the story. Under the leadership they started this band in the war and we know them also from the mob war something is interfering in your business. Thathat would show too much attention. You keep a low profile. And miguel started to flaunt those rules started with the others of northern mexico that have been interested in horses and they would bu abide than ine United States increased them there. He obviously entered them into some of the races which drew attention into his brothers family. He ordered his guys to basically go to the American Quarter Horse association in texas and have them change all the names of their horses from these traditional names that honor the fires and the games of their breeding into names like number one cartel. The nickname was 40, and names like that. The industry knew and the industry has known that there is drug money involved and thats one of the interesting things about the story for many years they welcomed it because they liked the money. But they didnt ever really know exactly who it was and he helped make it clear. The book does a good job of the micro and macro being the sort of page turning narrative of what happens to his brother when he gets into acting and with the drug cartel and horse racing but there is a much Bigger Picture to this and the fact is you know, this is the result of times policies and the result of it and how this affects families on other sites of the borders. What were the big ideas into the biand bigpicture that you drew m reporting and writing on this book lacks the quarter horse racing industry into this in particular were a great window into it. Its nothing that was particularly surprising. We had a system of drug laws that was more or less designed to ensnare people of color and in many ways to protect or at least give a pass to wealthy white people. The story was great in that a couple of different ways the quarter horse racing industry which i just mentioned drug money for years and probably to this day touches every aspect of that industry is a multicultural industry. You have wealthy white ranchers and busines businessmen that owe race tracks and some of the best horses. You have the white trainers, all throughout the industry Insurance Brokers and then you have people of color and jockeys and trainers in the departments. Drug money, everybody in that industry is just like our country it is sort of part of the prope proper life and hes n particular are making a choice all the time of whether or not to do business with that money. They generally all make the same choice but the result in this case shows it is different depending on who they are. 18 indictments come everybody was mexicanamerican so i think that sort of shows you what we are dealing with. And his story is interesting there is a story of the character in the book named tyler graham a white rancher in Central Texas and he is just trying to bring back his fathers farm. If you want a good farm you have to start it, so he gets an opportunity to possibly believe this horse that is owned by the duchess and its the same horse that galls him into the business, so here you have a middleaged bricklayer from mexico and a wealthy white rancher and they both want the same thing they want to create wealth for their family at a sort of make a go of it in the Family Business and do everything that we all want to do and they both have the same horse write them for there to do it. In mexico he was very skinny and they raced him under the name with the title of the book comes from, so they both make the same choice like yeah it is drug money that this is my chance to ride. At the moment they are sort of both public facing in the business to government shows up, the fbi gets a tip and the government says thats interesting so what do they do . They let him keep going in this business and build his business and eventually they shoindividus doorstep. For tyler graham, they basically show up with a form that shows they want his cooperation so they show up literally with paperwork that shows you can keep doing this as long as you help us out and that is how it works. They literally show up with a form that looks upon the industry and in particular as one person is a sort of partner in helping to take down the bad old days and the other person is the bad ombre and in that particular case obviously his family ties were a big part of that havin is having looked at e broad industry they didnt need to family ties, all they needed was the country of origin and also shows this was an investigation it wasnt victimless. Someone ended up dead for the cooperation. Can you tell us what happened . Couple people ended up dead because of the cooperation and the story but there is a particular young man who was a horse broker essential that he would travel around the United States and by forces for the cartel and eventually various Government Agencies found out about that and started hearing about hamon wiretaps. They catch up with him and want to talk to him and he doesnt have much of a choice, so he starts cooperating with the government. It isnt clear what happened, but at some point he found out that he was cooperating or suspected that he was cooperating and, you know, people know if you read about this world there is nothing worse you can do so they eventually came for him. Writing stories about crime and the killing of drugs are great for a lot of reasons. Its great material to be writing about this stuff that keeps the readers interested and its importance to write about but its also difficult when you are a reporter because people dont want to talk. Lawyers sometimes can be were greatest friend or enemy as per is getting access to the sources and people wer were indicted ana lot of times dont want to talk because they are worried about what may come of this. So we would talk about that right before we came out about the pluses and minuses of writing a story like this and it can be a difficult thing sometimes and they also had some issues can you tell us about that . I mentioned my first break was getting to the government come into this great if i was telling terry that sometimes the agencies dont want to talk that once one of them do and the dominoes start to fall. You can go to the fbi like the irs told all about the work on the case in theater like a cake, no, we will talk with you. It really did seem to work this way. The irs and fbi telling us about this importanforthis important y did in the area of horse racing and they all sort of felt so thats great. Then of course you have to start to try to get to the other people involved. The people i hinged my entire story on thursday and tyler graham. He never got to the point that he felt comfortable telling this story and he never even want to tell me. And a lot of other reporters and editors would say someone is not giving access. Its the point people just say ive got to move on and write something else. But you soldiered on. What made you want to keep going . Fear of failure mostly. My editor and i. , book editors are different and newspaper editors which we can talk about later, but they never really ask. Essentially i have promised a book that would deliver this story and i was going to have to show up with it one way or another. I honestly hoped to get to one or both of those two guys were some of the other people that i didnt get to but i didnt. The flipside is that on this case which was a multiyear investigation there were two separate trials because of some of the deals that happened. There were mounds and mounds of records including testimony from a lot of the people involved. If the case ever goes to trial, there isnt the testimony. Over the course of the trials, we got long testimony from key players. So you could hear their voice and see it from their perspective. I would always stay talking to somebody but there is something to be said. The records dont lie and there are definitely people in this story who i would have loved to talk to but i dont know that they would have told me the truth and so it would have been great because it would have helped me understand where they were coming from a little bit and just to hear them talk that i may have ended up relying on the records anyway. So you are able to stitch together from the voluminous records and lots of different sources what can be very cinematic and vividly. Can you talk about thats what was your process as far as taking what can be thousands of records and distilling it into a 340 page book . It starts with just the reporting of amassing all of that and not stopping. It can be frustrating because you can go on for long journeys for the reporting that end up being sentenced or to the book. But, then you have to sort of have faith that it is all going to add up to a book. But that is obviously a first step is just going to stop amassing it and dont undervalue something that you might have to drive to san antonio to get four pieces of paper. There was a document that i put into the last draft of the book that was the result of a year and a half of developing a source that was kind of a pain in the bath for a year and a half to give me that much always talked about getting him off. They never came through long conversations on the phone, but at the very end, he calls me and says i have this document i dont know i if you are interesd comyoure interested,it was king about this childhood so you just stay with it and then you write way too much and then once you write it, it kind of tells you what else you need to fill it in and then you keep reporting and its just a matter of cutting it back and making it move. Every moment during a big project and story there comes that moment whethe moment when s just like what am i doing with my life right now. When did that happen to you . [laughter] pretty early on actually. I was about three months and until that ended up being a process. We ha had dailies, weeklies, nof you are on the weekly you still publish every day. I was the editor so if i wanted to take credit for these things i could. But you have that feeling every day of putting stuff out into the world and the audience is responding to it and it makes you feel important. Its for your ego mostly entirely probably. But, three months in not only was i not putting anything out there but i didnt have anything on paper. I was just reporting in people ask me every day how is your book and i would say fine but i was thinking like wha woodstock. I dont have a book. I basically just started writing and that really helped. First i realize i do have a loss and second of all, i realized i enjoyed this and it doesnt matter if anyone is seeing it, it doesnt matter if anybody ever reads it all a kind of matters takin pricking trivialin whether i get three comments in the afternoon and then once i realized that it hoped me breakthrough. Your voice is a work and theres a lot of ways to write the story dispassionately. Joe injected a love of waste into these pages and i want to talk to you about that. What was when you were thinking about how you were going to write this story and what voice you are going to go after because on one hand you are writing about people who died on the other antiwar writing aboutt horse racing and it can also be very light and funny like maybe this one is the number one cartel. So how did you strike that balance . I think i started with just the character i was writing about and one of the things that makes the book easy is that it does tend to jump from character to character. And each sort of little condensed steam zeroes in on one particular person or tries to tell it from their perspective to the extent i cant often with people that ive never met. And so, that was kind of the starting point of trying to figure out whose story is this little bit of it and how do they talk because there are some really Colorful People in this story and both of these rules so that was kind of the first thing. And then what you mentioned is important to understand what is the scene about and what is the tenor of the scene and can i capture some of the irony that exists in this horseracing world or is it more somber about knowing sort of where i am in the story. Then later on there were places where i worked hard with my editor was great about injecting some sort of more attitude into it and trying to make sure there was an argument, trying to sort of hide in plain sight in the buck. I would like to open up to any questions people might have. And there are some microphones. Theres one here. Theres just one microphone. Did you ever feel threatened physically at any time during this . No i didnt. I get asked that question quite a bit in different ways. Sometimes i get asked this anyone gets scared and i said yes because i scare super easily. But, no. I never felt threatened, nor did i have a reason to feel threatened. I think there is a theme in the book that helps explain that, which are taught early on about the rules of engagement of the drug war and one of the rules is itits great interest to reportn the drug cartels in mexico, and to an extent along the border. Mexican journalists are threatened, kidnapped and killed at alarming rates and its getting worse kind of fast. So, honestly every time somebody would ask me that or i would start to think like do i need to come i would remember that and think like though, and it is almost disrespectful for me to feel scared because what i was doing, reporting after the fact about what for the cartel was a sort of minor part of their business over, you know, it was a big investigation but in terms of the amount of money they longer, it wasnt that big of a deal. And it was all in the United States. Im a white guy in dallas. There was really no reason for me to feel threatened, i think. Do yo