Peter Edwards

Luis Najera

Joined by an award-winning Mexican journalist, leading organized-crime author Peter Edwards reveals the successors to Vito Rizzuto's criminal dominance, a motley assortment of millennial bikers, gangsters and Mafia whose bloody trail of murders and schemes gone wrong led to the arrival on Canada's doorstep of the world's most dangerous criminal organizations: the drug cartels of Mexico. Following the death of Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto in 2013, a group of young criminals rose to fill the vacuum in power on his old turf. Targetting the old guard of Mafia and 'Ndrangheta, still led in many cases by men in their seventies and eighties and steeped in a highly structured, quasi-religious criminal tradition, the newcomers were nothing like their predecessors. The impatient millennials leading this self-styled "Wolfpack" were organized-crime disruptors who grew up with technology at their fingertips in a socially networked criminal underworld. They're part of Canada's most ethnically diverse generation, and their organization was as inclusive as it is criminal. They shared an overwhelming sense of entitlement, with a self-assuredness that astonished their rivals but left them foolishly exposed to law enforcement, enemies and the force in global crime they were arrogant enough to think they could handle doing business with. The dominant and most violent force in the global narcotics trade through the 2000s, Mexico's Sinaloa and Los Zetas drug cartels, recognized the naivety of their eager new customers up north and invited themselves to Canada to take advantage. In times of chaos and collapsing orders, disruptors rule. But was this new gang the new underworld order, or just the latest challenger in an ongoing upheaval in the wake of Rizzuto's death? The bloody answers are in The Wolfpack.

The Millennial Mobsters Who Brought Chaos and the Cartels to the Canadian Underworld

The Wolfpack

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.

Luis Najera

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