Joined by award-winning Mexican journalist Luis Nájera, leading
organized-crime author Peter Edwards introduces a motley assortment of
millennial bikers, gangsters and Mafia whose bloody trail of murders and
schemes gone wrong led to the arrival in Canada of the world's most
dangerous criminal organizations: the drug cartels of Mexico.
A man watching the Euro Cup on a restaurant patio is shot dead on a busy
Sunday afternoon in Toronto. Another dies in a sidewalk ambush just
outside a bus-tling college campus. Two men in a Vancouver hotel lobby
are gunned down in an attack that sends an American soccer star
scrambling for cover. In Mexico, a Canadian is killed at a Nuevo
Vallarta coffee shop, his death barely registering amidst the terrifying
death tolls of President Calderón's war on drugs and the cartels'
response; while a Montreal cop is beaten within an inch of his life in a
Playa del Carmen nightclub. An infamous heckler from an NBA Toronto
Raptors game turns up dead in a bullet-riddled car in a midtown
lane-way. Throughout the 2010s, these and other disparate acts of
violence entered the public awareness like iso-lated tragedies--but
there was nothing isolated about them.
In this masterly investigation, veteran journalists Peter Edwards and
Luis Nájera introduce readers to the common cause of a near-decade of
chaos. Meet the Wolfpack, millennial-aged gangsters from across the
spectrum of Canada's underworld. Vying to fast-track their way into the
criminal void left by the death of Montreal godfather Vito Rizzuto, the
Wolfpack sought advantage in a steady supply of cocaine from El Chapo
Guzmán's Sinaloa cartel, among the deadliest and most far-reaching of
criminal organizations. The juniors had just stepped into the big
leagues.
This is the roiling landscape of The Wolfpack, a brilliant examination
of a time of criminal disruption and rapid adaptation, when one gang's
unchecked ambition unwittingly gave away the most hotly contested corner
of the Canadian underworld without a fight. Brazen criminal disruptors
or entitled upstarts looking to get rich without paying their
dues--whatever you think of them, you will never forget the Wolfpack.
