How we cannot get along, i think that is annoying and timeconsuming, but also the source of our greatness and at the fact that we have this place across the street from our head of governments house where people as George Hw Bush said, they would beat those damn drums when i was trying to have dinner , i think this is something that we as a people and you and your city should be enormously proud of and i think the fact that it is named after lafayette, i think, that would probably be to him his greatest honor. I think it is, also. Good night. [applause] good night. [applause] when i tune into on the weekends, usually it is authors sharing their new releases. Watching the nonfiction authors of booktv is the best television for serious readers. They can have a longer conversation and delve into their subjects. Booktv weekends, they bring you author after author after author thats spotlighting the work of fascinating people. I love of booktv and i am a cspan fan. Now on to tonights main event. Im excited to host dance later to share his new book wolf boys. The book has been getting some rave reviews, including from author Michael Connelly who said if the truth is stranger than fiction and sometimes its much more harrowing. Wolf boys is one of those are densely has put together a riveting story that takes us on an unforgettable descent into the dark part of the drug trade. A former reporter for the wall street journal, and is written for the New York Times, the new yorker, the washington post, the boston globe, new york magazine, 11, g2. Is the author of love in the time of algorithm, graduate of colgate and brooklyn law school, he lives in new england. Tonight is in conversation with david samuel. David is the author of the runner. His articles about con men and dog truck, nuclear weapons, spies, pilots, rock stars, pot use, president and other subjects have appeared in harpers, the new yorker as well as online. Without further ado please give them a warm welcome. [applause] i just want to start off by saying that i rarely leave my house, and i never endorse the work of fellow writers because, you know, why give them a leg up . Its your competition. But i made an exception to both those, you know, professional because of this book is an extraordinary piece of reporting. Its an incredibly gripping story, and its a story that on so many levels its about where america is at right now in 2016. We are a country that has lost the ability to look in the mirror and see ourselves clearly, because the mirror that we have for known as century was where the familiar cross of newspapers, magazines, the rest has been shattered over the last 10 years, collapsed. Its been replaced by a flood of images and impressions that exist outside of any editorial guidance for control. And while there is a lot of good to be said from the energy, i think that certainly in the short run we are just looking at something thats broken. In a mirror we see the charged, and then when things come back in the form of political candidates or social crises, we say thats not america, except it is america. We are all in it together, and being in has done the thing that twitter doesnt do, and facebook doesnt do, which is that he actually went somewhere. He went on a journey not just to a place but emotionally and was able to connect with people that im sure when he started he couldnt imagine at all. He couldnt imagine with these peoples lives he would have an intimate feel for. As to what is going as someone whos been doing this kind of work for 20 odd years now, i think you know it when you see. When someone has succeeded in learning something in getting people to to life and understanding what it was that shaped them, you see that all on a page and its there or its not there. Its never there in the tweet, and its not there in the things that pass most of the time, but its in this book. So kudos to dan for writing and doing the extraordinary amount of work both in terms of time and in terms of putting yourself out there emotionally and being able to connect to people, that this type of project entails. And also to the people who publish this book and who made it happen. Because its rare and its hugely important thing that it exists at all, that people can read it, which they should. That done, why do we tell people, im sure some of you have read the book, and the rest of you should go home and read it tonight or you wont be able to put it down. I couldnt. And tell me a bit about the two characters at the heart of this, gabriel and bart, two American Kids. Wow, it will be hard to top that. Thank you. I learned about gabriel and bart i guess nearly seven years ago in a New York Times article. As much as we read on the press, had it not been for the times, had it not been for the times i wouldnt have done the story. The New York Times is a great newspaper. Spewing facebook is not a newspaper. So i read this article in june of 2009, and i had just been laid off from a job as a reporter of the wall street journal and was kind of at that point in your life when youve been cut down and are wondering what youre going to do with your future and where youre going to go. When youre a writer, a juneau and a lot of people in this room know, that its often hard because the avenue forward is obvious. But i read this story in the times while i was collecting unemployment insurance, and it was the sort of story you just dont forget. It was a story about two american boys who would become assassins, essentially contract killers for Big InternationalDrug Organization in mexico. And i couldnt stop thinking about them. I did know what they meant at the time. I did know to what extent they were anomalies go to what extent they represent something larger. A few months later my curiosity actually took me to mexico and then went to the state on the other side of mexico from was operated on the pacific side, and its been getting a lot of press lately because the cartel and its leader, escaping from prison, getting arrested, escaping and getting arrested. Outside of the capital city theres a cemetery known unofficial as the cartel cemetery. So i visited the cemetery, and they were a bunch of cocky mausoleums around the outside where a lot of the midlevel and i love men and the cartel are buried, their families have a lot of money and bought them, sort of these big houses that looked almost like a cheesy condominium in miami or something. Button in the middle of the cemetery is just a this open field with a plain headstones are. Went i walked around the middle, i started noting the birth dates on the headstones. I was there in 2010. Most of the birth dates were after 1990, started averaging out a dozen or maybe 30 of the headstones, the average age was about 18 or 17, and it wasnt unusual to see headstones for some who died at the age of 14. They were not a anomalies. Number. They were part of a huge trend and that everything i had been reading about the drug war, topol guzman, scarface, the real war on drugs and the cartel wars had nothing to do with those sort of mythic stories of the cartel. But the war in mexico and the war along the border was really about young men and boys slaughter and what another. That was essentially what it came down to. Break it down for people. You lost your job and decided to go to mexico. Youre wearing your glasses, looking at these headstones, and what comes next in your odyssey . Hey, could someone introduced me to whoever built it is god houses because it would have been the dream if i spoke fluent spanish for actual note that i spent the next several years reading everything i could on the history of the drug trade and the cartel. I wrote another book those called love in the time of algorithms, about the Online Dating business, totally different story. But i kept on reading about the drug world. And in the summer of 2013, shortly after the Online Dating book was published, i saw that a man by the name of mcgill tribune you have been arrested in mexico and he was the boss of the cartel and was personally recruited these boys in south texas and really kind of them to essentially be like him. Who were they . They were a cartel. They are a cartel that originated from the mexican military. We hear a lot about the corruption in mexico, police being on the payroll, but its sort of hard to grasp the true extent of the. There was a cartel that originated in the special forces division of the mexican military, equivalent to someone like the green berets here in the states. It is not all of a sudden it would be much more lucrative to go work for a cartel. So thats how the zetas started and they evolved from there, but that sort of militaristic take no prisoners ethos, you know, remained with them as they evolved. And that was the culture into which these boys were inducted. Where did these cartel scum from . The cartels can come from many different eras and sources are there some cartels like of the gulf cartel which they are very old cartel in mexico. They have been around since really the 1940s, but these days as a cartel world fractures in mexico, you see a lot of smaller ones tend to pop up and it starts with a Family Living in a village somewhere. Afrjts can you describe th that. Yes, the dri was the dominant Political Party in mexico for years, some people called it the dictatorship and others call it the perfect dictatorship and some call it oneparty rule. Its a definitional thing. They emerged after the mexican revolution in the 1920s and it was oneparty rule. And so, the cartels started to emerge during that time when it was possible to go to mexico city and essentially pay off one entity. As, and this is what is sort of ironic about the story of the cartel, is that as democrat istarted to come to mexico and this fracturing of the political environment happened, the cartel ward became much worse because it was no longer clear who to bribe. In the old days, the cartel could pay the high up officials for specific territory and they would write their checks and then theyd receive, you know, the list of what they could do and couldnt do, and had a kind of control. And each underneath that official fell in line and, you know, it bought you the right to do certain things. After a while, it was no longer clear it was a bribe. You bribe your local Law Enforcement, the federal police in mexico city, so, that was a factor, as was nafta. Nafta really accelerated thing because it made smuggling easier. Talk about that. Nafta was implemented in 1994 and it was a center piece of clintonion prosperity. It was going to be what remade the american economy. And one of the things it was going to achieve and really did achieve is that we here in america could get things a lot cheaper. Those sunglasses at walmart and such could now be manufactured in mexico and imported back without a tax. Now we were able to use the cheap labor. So that was a good thing. The less good thing, it made smuggling a lot easier and opened up the border and a city like laredo, texas at the time and now, even, its the biggest overland port in the western hemisphere. So all of a sudden, by the late 90s, laredo was seeing Something Like 50 or 60,000 trucks come north per week and it became impossible to monitor all of that traffic, if it ever was before. Now it just became harder and a lot easier. An infamous city, laredo where two boys are born, gabe gabriel a gabriel they were born in a world that and a half it helps to shape and the reality where the money comes from in the community they grow up in is what . How do you make money if you are living in laredo and born in 1986, 87. If youre born on the south side of laredo in many of those neighbors, the way to make more than 15 or 20,000 a year appears to be the wholesale narcotics market and the underworld generally. We think of it as the drug market, the drugs go north and the money goes south. It involves moving guns and moving vehicles and those involve going to mexico and sold to the cartels and so there are markets for the currency and markets for the drugs and thats a very buoyant, frothy market and so, when youre growing up in these neighborhoods, your examples of of people who made it are often people who made their money in that market. And so, thats the direction a lot of kids in laredo would like to aspire to. Talk to us about gabriel. Its an amazing story and for some reason hes the character of the two of them who really made an impression on me. What kind of family did he grow up in . What was his mom like and how did his life, as an american kid living north of the border become intertwined with Dynamic South . Gabriel was a fairly promising kid and he grew up in a pretty typical family. Hes from a ghetto on the south side of laredo called la techa and its been a smuggling community for pretty much 250 years. He was a Football Player. He was very charismatic, he did well in school. He attended sunday school every weekend and for a period in his life he appeared to be one of those kids who might leave the ghetto and do something more. It does occasionally happen and instead, he around his freshman year of high School Started getting involved in the street gangs of laredo and his descent from there was very, very fast. By descent, you mean what . Well, it began, ironically with him buying guns from a laredo cop and smuggling them across the border and selling them in mexico. This is a cop who, if i remember correctly, showed the kids catalogs of stuff available. A cop who used to do that . Yeah, there was actually a cop who would bring these kids, Law Enforcement magazines, for them to page through and so that was how he got his start in the underworld, yeah. And did he have family south of the border or how did he make those connections . He did have family south of the border. If fact, his mother had a family house in a sister city and he had lots of aunts and cousins. So he grew up from the time he was a baby, going across every weekend and he took pride in being an american because he knew how many more opportunities he had and when he eventually joined the cartel later, he was really a prized recruit because of his americanism, he could go back and forth between the cultures and spoke english. Theres a litany of explanations that probably dates back to the 1950s for what was then quaintly, probably called juvenile delinquency or something, where people would say, well, you know, its all economics or its the absence of a father in the household, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everyone is supposed to put on a pious face as we hear these explanations recycled over and over and over again. Theres another set of explanations that we all know to be true, which is that young men really like feeling powerf powerful, dont know necessarily how to get that power, having a weapon and the power of life or death over people at age 17 is a more powerful drug than any that ive ever mainlined. I dont believe that. So they say. And how would you, when you look at the trajectory of a gabriel or a bart, would you say, you know, well, if we only made families Stay Together and made divorce harder. Or if the economy was better, do you have a pious explanation for now gabriel could have been turned away from a life of crime . Or do you believe that there is there was something that drew him in . I dont think it was one thing. I do certainly i am a champion of the pious explanation. And you know, if we stopped talking about drug policy for a minute and step back and talk about policies, and again, here, you know, pious, fighting poverty, helping families Stay Together, providing more job students, yes, absolutely, because i do believe that once a family breaks up, once the father is gone, once you no longer have that role model and at the same time youre in a family with no resources, and youre in an environment where everyone is becoming a smuggler and thats the cool thing to do and the aspiration, yeah, at that point your chances look very grim. So, i do think that the pious explanation holds, but also, what you said is huge. The advantage of a boy is that he doesnt have a fully developed conscience yet and he also has very little sense of consequence because when he falls, he bounces and hell bounce for a little while. So i think thats partly what drove these boys. Now, if you talk to Law Enforcement people in laredo, one is here tonight, or you talk to the u. S. Attorney who handled the case, they all have their own explanations and it just shows that it isnt really one thing. Here in the u. S. I feel the pious route is to focus on policies, nafta, Marijuana Legalization or the opioid problem as if these things can be dealt with in a vacuum and i dont think they can be dealt with in a vacuum. Being occasional different points in my life, i was especially fascinated by your reference on and off throughout the book to something called roaches. What are they . Roaches used to be known to an earlier generation as spanish fly. And theyre known to our generation as roofies. Its illegal here and easy to get in mexico. How did they get this noon . Theyre produced by a Company Called hoffman and laroche. And they the kids call them roaches. Theyre very, very strong and they have varied effects and what they did with gabriel is essentially render him insensate and he it was under the influence of roaches that he was able to engage in a lot of the brutality and the violence that he did in the cartel. Now, describe the way in which gabriel was turned from a promising delinquent child in the American City of laredo, texas to a trained killer. That, to me, is the most mind blowing. It seemed like it happened slowly for a while and then all at once. He started living a life of violence around the age of 14 or 15, kind of when he got into his first fight. He shot someone when he was 15. Shot him in the leg. That was retaliation for when hed been shot. And then at 17 he met miguel travino, the sort of middle level boss and sent to the Training Camp in mexico and thats when he really learned how to kill in a professional and industrial fashion. When you say the Training Camp in mexico, could you describe that a little . Yes, so, its its a camp where they would send 50 to 100 recruits at a time. Most were mexico young boys and young men, but some of them were americans. He was one the first to attend the camp, certainly one of