on c-span2. >> welcome to the knights main event. i am excited to share his new book, two american teenagers the mexicans most dangerous drug cartel. the book has been getting rave reviews including praise from the author who said the truth is stronger stranger than fiction and much more harrowing. they put together a riveting story that takes us on an unforgettable event into the dark part of the dark trade. he has written for the new york times, the new yorker, the boston globe, the atlantic, gq and more. he is the author of love and a logarithm. he is a graduate of brooklyn law school and lives in new england. tonight he is in conversation

with david samuel. david is the author of the runner and only love to break your heart. he has articles about conmen, nuclear weapon, spies, rock stars, pot dealers, presidents and other subjects who have appeared in harper's, the new yorker and new york times magazine. without further ado, please give them a warm welcome. [applause] >> i just want to start off by saying this, i rarely leave my house and i never endorse the work of fellow riders because why give them a leg up, there your competition, but i made an exception to both of those professional tonight because

this book is an extraordinary piece of reporting. it's an incredibly gripping story and it's a story that, on so many levels, is about where america is at an right now, in 2016, we are a country that has lost the ability to look in the mirror and see ourselves clearly because the viewers have, for nearly a century, the familiar track with newspapers and magazines has been shattered over the past ten years.

it has been a flood of images and impressions outside of any editorial guidance for control and while there's a lot of good to be said, i think that certainly in the short run we are looking at something that is sharp and when things come back at us in the form of political candidates or crises, they say that's not america, except it is america. we are all in it together and dan has done the things that

twitter doesn't do and facebook doesn't do which is that they are on a journey to a place emotionally and was able to connect with people who i'm sure when he started he couldn't imagine at all who they have an intimate feel for. as someone who's been doing these kind of work for 20 odd years now, i think you know it when you see it. when their action is precluded in learning something and getting people through life and understanding what was, you see that on a page and it's there or

it's not there. it's never there, and it's not there and things that pass most the time, but kudos to dan for doing the extraordinary amount of work, both in terms of time and putting yourself out there emotionally and being able to connect with this type of project and the people who made it happen because it's rare and it's hugely important that it exists at all and that people can read it which they should. with that done, why don't we tell people, i'm sure some of you have read the book and the

rest of you should go home and read it tonight, you won't be able to put it down. tell me a bit about the two characters of the heart of the two american kids. >> it would be hard to top that. i learned about gabriel nearly seven years ago, a new york times article so as much as we rip on the press, had it not been for the times, i wouldn't have thought about the story. the new york times is a great newspaper. i read this article in june of 2009. i had just been laid off as a reporter at the wall street

journal and was at that time in your life when you're down and wondering what you're going to do with your future and where you're going to go when you're a writer and you know and a lot of people in this room know that it's often hard because the avenue forward is not obvious, but i read the story in the times while i was collecting unemployment insurance and it was the sort of story that you just don't forget. it was a story about two american boys who become assassins and become contract killers for a big international drug organization in mexico. i couldn't stop thinking about them. i didn't know what they meant at the time. i didn't know to what extent they were anomalies or what extent they represented something larger. a few months later my curiosity

actually took me to mexico which is a state on the other side of mexico from where they operated on the pacific side and it's been getting a lot of press lately because it's his antics, escaping from prison in getting arrested. outside of the capital city, there's a cemetery known officially as the cartel cemetery. so i visited the cemetery and there were a bunch of godey model lambs around the mid level high-level men in the cartel are buried in their families had a lot of money and bought them these big houses that look almost like a tv condominium in miami or something. then in the middle of the cemetery is just this open field where the plane headstones are

and when i walked around the middle, i started noting on the headstones and i was there in 2010, most of them were after 1990 and they started averaging out a dozen or thursday of the headstones and the average age was 17 and so i thought back and it struck me that they were anomalies, they were part of a huge trend and that everything i have been reading about the drug lords and the generation before that i grew up with, the real war on drugs had nothing to do with those mythic stories but the war in mexico along the border is about young men and

boys and that's eventually what it came down to. you've lost your job and you go to mexico and you're looking at the test zones and what comes next, you're like hey could somebody introduce me to the people that are on these, that was in the dream if i had spoken fluid spanish but i actually went home and spent the next several years reading everything i could read on the history and drug cartel and actually wrote another book called love in the form of a logarithms and it was about the online dating business, a totally different story and i kept on reading about the drug world and in the summer of 2013, shortly after the dating book was published, i

set saw a man that he was the person recruited these boys in south texas in the radio and really trained them to be like him. the zeta's were were a cartel, they are a cartel that originated from the mexican military. we hear a lot about the corruption in mexico and being on the payroll but it's hard to grasp the full understanding of it. kind of like the green berets here in the state. they decided it would be much more lucrative to go work for a cartel. that's how they started and they evolved from there, but that militaristic, take no prisoner

remained with them as they evolved and that was the culture in which these boys were inducted. >> where did these cartels come from? >> the cartels can come from many different eras. there's some that are very old cartel in mexico that have been around since the 1940s, you see a lot of them pop up and it starts with the family living in a village somewhere that the sides were going to take over our village or our town and to take over that town and sometimes they want to get rid

of the cartel and they get some power as the vigilantes and then there often adrift. >> there's a wonderful addition to the story. it's offhanded but deeply informed take on the political and social structure of mexican society that enables the network to flourish. it shows how the cartels are bound up with the party in mexico. >> the pri was the dominant

political party in mexico and some of it call it a dictator dictatorship and some call it the one party rule and they emerged after the revolution in the 1920s and it was one party rule and they started to emerge in that time where it was possible to go to mexico city and pay off one entity. as the marcus he started to come to mexico in this environment happened, the cartel became much worse because it was no longer clear who to bribe.

in the old days they could pay the official and they would write their check and receive what they could and couldn't do. >> everyone underneath that official fell in line and it bought you the rights to do certain things. after a while it was no longer clear, you bribe the federal police in mexico city and that was a factor as was nafta, nafta really accelerated things. >> talk about that. >> so as many of you know, it was was implemented in 1994, it was really a centerpiece of prosperity, it was going to be what remade the american economy and one of the things that it was going to achieve and really did achieve meant that we here

in america, we could get things a lot cheaper. those sunglasses at walmart and such could now be manufactured in mexico and imported back without tax. now we were able to use the cheap labor. that was a cheap thing. the less good thing is that it made smuggling a lot easier. it really opened up the border and it was like laredo texas at the time and now even it's the biggest overland court in the western hemisphere. all is then by the late 90s, they they were seeing 50 or 60000 trucks come north for weeks and it became impossible to monitor all that traffic. now it just became harder and a lot easier. into the city, these two boys

are born. >> shortly before nafta was implemented. >> they call them nafta babies. it was in a world that nafta helps to shape and the reality of where money comes from as they grow up. how do you make money? you are living in laredo in 1986, 1987. if you're born on the south side of laredo, the way to make more than 15 or $20000 a year appears to be the narcotics and there's actually a vast economy that involves moving guns and

vehicles and those actually go to mexico and are sold to the cartel and so there's a market for the currency and the drugs and that's a very buoyant market and so when you're going up in these neighborhoods, there are examples of people who have really made it and their people who have made their money in that market. >> tell the story of gabriel because it's an amazing story. for some reason he's a character of the two of them what kind of family did he grow up in, what was his mom -like,. how did his life as an american kid become intertwined with the dynamic stuff.

>> gabriel was a fairly promising kid. he grew up in a typical family. he is from my ghetto on the south side of laredo, it's called aztec and it's been a smuggling community for 250 years. he was a football player, he was very charismatic and did wellin school and attended sunday school every weekend. for a time in his life he appeared to be one of those kids who might leave the ghetto and do something more. it does occasionally happen. instead, around his freshman year of high school his dissent from there was very fast. >> by dissent, you mean what. >> it actually 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 had a catalog. >> yes, there was actually a cop who would bring these kids law-enforcement magazines for them to page through. that was how he got his start. >> does he have family south of the border or how did he get those connections? >> he did have family south of the border. his mother had a family house and his sister and lots of aunts and cousins. he grew up from the time that he was a baby going across every weekend. 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. >> are there explanations that date back to the 1950s and it was probably called juvenile delinquency or something where people would say well, it's all economics or it's the absence of the father in the household, blah blah and we were supposed to put on a pious face as they were recycled over and over again.

another set of explanations that we all know to be true which is that the young man liked feeling powerful and he wanted more weapons and power over people and it's a more powerful drug been anything i've ever made mind. >> i don't believe that. >> so they say. >> how would you, when you look at the trajectory, would you say [inaudible] unless the economy was better or do you have a pious explanation for how he could've been turned

away from a life of crime? do you believe that there is evil. >> i don't it was one thing, i am a champion of the pious explanation and we stopped talking about drug policy for a minute and talk about policies and again here, fighting poverty, helping families stay together, more job opportunities because i do believe once a family breaks up or once the father is gone or you no longer have that role model and at the same time you're in a family with no resources and you're in an environment where everyone is becoming a smuggler and that's the cool thing to do and the aspiration, yes, at that point your chances look very grim. i do think that the pious explanation holds but also what she said is huge, the advantage

of a boy, he also had consequence because when he falls, he bounces. he will bounce for a little while so i think that's partly what drove these boys. if you talk to law-enforcement people in laredo, one that is here tonight or if you talk to the u.s. attorney who handled that case, they they all have their own explanations and it just shows that it isn't really one thing. here in the u.s., i feel like the pious note is focused on policy. marijuana legalization or the opioid problem. as if these things can be dealt with in a vacuum.

i don't think they can be dealt with in a vacuum. >> seeing the occasional drug user, i was especially fascinated by something called roaches. >> roaches used to be known as an early generation of spanish fly. to our generation there known as rupees and their powerful tranquilizer back, fearful was ever illegal in the u.s., it's not legal here anymore. it's very easy to get in mexico. >> they are produced by a company called hoffman and laroche. kids in the rado called them roaches. they're very popular as a party pill. they are very, very strong and they have varied effects and what they do with gabriel is essentially render them and it was roaches that he was able to

engage in a lot of the brutality and violence that he did with the cartel. >> gabriel was turned from a promising yet delinquent child from the american city of laredo texas to a trained killer, that to me is the most mind blowing part. >> it seems like it happen slowly for a while and then it happened all at once. he started living a life of violence around the age of 13 or 14 when he got into his first fight. he shot someone when he was 15, shot him in the leg. that was retaliation for when he had been shot and then at 17,

the leader at that point and that's when he really learned how to kill in a professional and industrial sense. >> would you say the training camp in mexico, could you describe that a little? >> yes, it's a camp where they would send anyone for 52100 recruits at a time. most of these were mexican boys and mexican young men but some of them were american. he was one of the first to attend the camp. certainly one of the first americans and you go there and it's run by a team of mercenaries and some of them are original members and they hire people from israel, they were hiring mercenaries from columbia to come and teach in the purpose of the training camp and the

people running the cartel and they can find that out pretty quickly. the ones who are able to do it and they get weeded out and set aside or the other ones get weeded out. >> as i was reading the details of the group some and heartbreaking and mind blowing, i kept asking myself, how was he able to get up inside these people's head in this intimate way. as a reporter i know how hard that is and i know how grounded that has to be to feel like,

especially under the course, did you ever meet him? >> i visited him in prison twice between those visits and after, we exchange a thousand pages of letters. that was really the basis for the book in addition to my trips with laredo, he was the homicide detective who really was the leader in pursuing these boys when they start to commit murders. [inaudible] [applause] so you actually were penpals with this guy.

>> yes, it was the most bizarre and one of the most interesting reporting experience of my life, exchanging letters over such a. of time. the relationship went up and down. >> you go through dating apps. >> penpal with the zeta killer. >> i see the blue line now. >> is a very smart guy. i think people can tell that from reading the book. he is very intelligent and this is how he decided to use his intelligence and his intellect. he was able to explain so much to me and he had this very detailed memory so i was able to combine that with letter writing relationships that i had with other boys who work with him who

are from the same neighborhood and who knew him since he was a kid. he was talking to his girlfriend , going to the clubs and the bars that they used to go to and the restaurants that they use to go to. >> how does that feel? that's one of those things that's discussed that as you're describing their lives going up and what it's like, i don't know why, but i feel like i'm there and it's because you were there. >> yes, it wasn't until the very end but it drew me in. i don't know why this is right but i know this is right. >> if i could just get on my book writing publishing soapbox for a minute, as a writer you can probably tell that last chapter was where i talk about

the reporting process. at an earlier stage that was more like an introduction. i read a book by catherine that came out in 2012 called behind beautiful forever and it's one of my favorite books, one of my favorite nonfiction books and she didn't have an introduction. she had and "after words" where they talked about the reporting and i thought that was the coolest thing because i hate introductions to nonfiction books. i feel like if you have to tell people what you're trying to say, you probably haven't said it properly. i wanted to force myself to focus on the body of the book and not the presentation of the book, not on convincing readers of what i wanted to be, but actually making it. all along, i was hoping to be able to make it a chapter or an afterword and it became the

final chapter. >> here's a question that people asked me often on with stuff i write write and i always hate this question so i would ask it to you and you can answer. >> why do you think these people talk to? why do you think gabriel wrote you 1000 pages of of letters? >> that's a great question. >> my agent asked a a couple times. he is essentially in solitary confinement and he will be there probably and definitely. he's been there since he was 19 and he is going to be imprisoned for life. i came along and he was used to

seeing reporters who were swooping in for the quick story and he got to know the ways of that world pretty well. i think the more i stuck around and the more i sort of showed myself not to be interested in the quick hit but something larger, the more comfortable he became with me. became more like a relationship than a sort of professional reporter subject thing. the scope of the project helped. what did he want from it? i think he wanted a lot of things. on different days he wanted different things. i think on his best day, he wanted to tell a cautionary story. >> in a way, yes. >> like maybe my life can be

used for something better. one of the things, the second half where he started to press on was the sense that were used to seeing the problems of mexico south of us, we are used to seeing those problems as something just outside, that's a distant country, that's across the border, that's their problem one of the things about the intimacy of these kids is that

you get the sense of them being kids of countries that are powerful in terms of shaping their lives. they wouldn't dream long enough of being a football player, maybe they were too short or whatever it was. in the end it was the life in mexico that was going to catch them up and say. [inaudible] it may me think as a kid who grew up between cultures, there are lots of kids who grow up half as kids and half as american kids and half as kids

from mexico or in my case, half a russian and half american kid. were all americans the moment you're born here, the moment your naturalized or your mom and dad become a citizen, except that's not what goes on inside our heads. we actually and then there are the moments where the narrative of one culture becomes more compelling, whether that's jihadism in the case of the person who set off a bomb or whether it is cartel warfare that you have to trace back culturally. in mexico.

[inaudible] we live our lives as a funny way as characters in stories and that's how our culture gets it wrong. it's not only about economic opportunity or whether someone calls you a bad name, it's what character of the comic book do you want to be. what superhero do you want to be and the narrative of the russian mob or a soldier to laredo's and i can take life whenever i want just like my aztec brothers, that saying that's actually how we live. these are very important to the stories that we tell ourselves and those stories of kids who

grow up between cultures can just as easily come from outside as they can inside, and that's a thought i had i as i was reading the second part of the book. it's a marginalized city. it's the least diversified city in america. 98% hispanic. the education system down there is a disaster. so for people like them, the cartel provides this vision of belonging and purpose and i think that was a very big part of what sucked them in and what sucked so many in. they are not unusual, particularly along the border. there are so many kids down there that want to be that. it's amazing and there's this very aggressive branding of the

cartel world that goes on in music and things like that that sort of adds to the pull of it. talk a bit about, i've heard some of it, it's a funny group of hip-hop that tells the tale of the race, gangsters and to see why that music makes a world come alive. >> so a lot of these songs are commissioned by cartel. they will approach someone who has become famous as a singer in mexico and pay them a couple hundred thousand dollars to write a song about them. then they come to a cartel party , there's a scene in the book where there's a holiday party where they sing this song and lionize this person, the boss.

one of the aspirations in mexico with laredo on the border is to have a song written about you. >> something to look for to. >> yes, that means you have really made it. interestingly from a perspective , i guess those bands have a lot of money so there's many ways you can use music and art to further your criminal careers. >> now, reading this book, another thing, i guess i probably read it three months ago or four months ago and then i once sought again because we be talking about it and i thought wow, this is even more relevant and current because

this is a book, you hear politics now, you set priority number one from a certain candidate and thereby cut off the traffic in narcotics and all kinds of other things. the second set is why is anyone suggesting that there is problem south of the border at all. clearly even the implication that there are armed criminal gangs in mexico is racist and after reading this book, i think it would be pretty hard for anyone to go on doing that with

a clear conscious. as soon as this thing could exist, a 2000-mile wall that would be built and paid for by mexico, if you assume that this exist, it would actually not achieve what everyone thinks it would achieve because history is shown when you add resources to the efforts, doubling law enforcement in the rado, for instance, you achieve the opposite of what you think your achieving. you often get more smuggling and that's because you have the risk of smuggling and the value of the products that are being smuggled so smuggling becomes much more attractive.

>> can you go into that point in more detail. >> yes it's in a calm me like anything else with supply and demand and risk and investment. a lot depends on the human cost, what's my risk of winding up and prison or dead if i get into this marketplace. as that risk goes up, the price of smuggling goes up and therefore the profit margin goes up. so more money winds up in the hands, it just becomes more alluring for people as they get richer and richer. >> across the border we have a society of law-abiding people who go to church and are eager

always to contribute to the welfare of the united states, that is also not entirely true if you look at the kind of horrific large-scale violence and cartel types and their heirs that's not something we really want in america, if we had a choice. >> do we want the violence in america. >> no, we don't want them in america. that would be bad. according to robert, they are right around the corner. >> where does all of this money come from, all of this profit. what product is it that produces so much money for horrific

large-scale killing. >> they like heroin and there's an enormous demand for that and as long as that demand exists, this world that i'm writing about will never cease to exist because it begins with us. [inaudible] i think the trend in legalization is probably wise. i don't know what the point would be of legalizing something like heroin which is really the devil, maybe cocaine you could argue, it's not clear whether you could get rid of the criminal element that way or not.

there are other products out there, but the powder is the big one. there is incredible demand for that here and it's small, compact, easy to smuggle and extremely profitable. >> there is something like creepy pablo escobar with arguments like this is our way of getting back in a cash transfer in the other direction. we finally found something. >> absolutely. it all starts with us. do you see cocaine being sold in your local pharmacy. >> it used to be. less than a century ago, but it

was a problem. part of the thing they want are these roaches. sometimes i think about it as a race between the pharmaceutical drugs industry and products engineered for social safety and conformity and the drug industry with the product and it can get you really high. >> it's like an arms race. >> yes, they come up with such good legal drugs that no one wants to use illegal drugs anymore. >> i think this is the right forum for your questions.

>> so when i read about the journalist, it's not usually a combination that ends well. i wondered if you were nervous during this recording or because this is on it felt like a safer endeavor. >> because my wife is here i'm going to say that it is all of the above and that is never any reason at all to be scared and that any conversation we've had about that. >> you are making your child cry >> silas wasn't born. i did go to veracruz, most of my

research is in laredo but i went on a trip to mexico for about a meat week and i was accompanied by a retired dea agent who went to veracruz which is a city on the east coast and it's a huge drug port. it's the sight of all kinds of smuggling and crime and the city is a mess. i spent two days there only speaking to reporters. they all gather at this local café which is a bizarre scene where essentially there is no reporting and veracruz. if you're a reporter you go to this one café in the morning and all the business and politicians are there and they tell you what you're going to print that day and you go off and you do it. you take a picture of them smiling and that's it. so, being a journalist in mexico is extremely dangerous. many are on the payroll, i don't want to say most, but many, most of the journalist are on the

case somehow. even if it's not from a drug cartel, maybe a politician who wants you to carry his water and write whatever he says. >> is that something in america that you can imagine. >> right. we have this amazing first amendment that is really serving its people, but i feel really, really lucky as a journalist, especially after this experience, we live in a country where we can write about the stuff and to answer your question, yes, it was a lot more comforting than the people in the book i was writing about, the people people on the criminal side were either no longer with us where they were imprisoned, most of them, forever so this was a historical story. i wasn't writing anything that was going to affect real-time business for everybody, but if

anybody writes a book like this, you have them in the back your head, he's an italian journalist who wrote a book that was published in 2007 and it was about organized crime in his hometown of naples and he is going to be essentially living with law enforcement for the rest of his life because there's a price on his head. he was writing about people who were still out there in power and active, but it's scary, very scary. >> thank you. can you hear me? >> yes. >> the context of my question comes from running an ngo in

africa in kenya. that's where they are recruited every day because that's the only similar way to make a living and save your life, a way to have aspirations. when you spoke about policies, to me finding other ways when i look at the metaphor in africa for child soldiers, the only way to get kids away from doing that is to find other ways to give them an aspiration to make a living or have a future. when you spoke about policy, you sort of spoke about it like that wasn't the answer so i'm curious. >> i think i agree with you. >> i'm curious. >> i was sort of looking at you, but now i'm looking at you saying to me it's the only answer and i'm curious what you think the answer is.

>> how do we fix this problem, how do we make the cartel disappear and the answer is legalization or build a wall and so that's what i was referring to, but i think that policy that helped bring marginalized communities and helps families stay together. >> i dedicated my life. >> i absolutely think that's a place of opportunity. i think that gets lost and it's very convenient to talk about it as a drug policy issue or a wall and we kind of sort of box these huge issues into something neat like that when it's not neat at

all. >> you mentioned, what parallel do you see between that world and the world you write about? >> organized crime is the underworld and that sort of the obvious parallel. the book is very different than my book, but there's a section that deals with the foot soldiers and it's an amazing scene. he goes into a pizzeria and naples were a lot of these 16-year-old hitmen hang out after their shift. they come in with their bulletproof jackets still on. they take a lot of enemy at bay and when they come down off the exit.

>> i don't speak from experience apparently, when you're coming down off ecstasy you get very hungry so these boys are naturally very hungry and they probably just sit there doing horrific things and they're just wolfing down buckets of soda. >> this is making me hungry. >> so, that was the part of his book. >> so your book has already been banned i heard. >> yes, it was banned by the

texas prison system, the people whom it's about are unable to read it. >> the state prison system bands a lot of books and they can state any reason they want. they have grounds for banning and they say that it contains information about the criminal scheme and they cited a sentence, it's amazing they got that far in the book, but i talk about one of the smugglers outfitting new vehicles in order to make them ready for smuggling

that's what everyone in the smuggling world knows, but they don't want to in the book. >> they do offer an appeal process. banned book week is next week so there you have it. >> you mentioned in your book, did you give that to sergeant garcia. >> we have the nypd here and the rate opd and sometimes you have to hang out if you're going to get the good stuff. so in the last chapter of the

book, where i finally written myself in and talk about the reporting process in the story itself, there was a night when i was hanging out with gabriel's brother and i kind of just told him look, i want to do whatever you would do on a saturday night so we went to the mall in the radio and we bought these narco shirts. it started with that and then we did go to this club and on the way to the club, he was like okay were to stop by and get 3 grams of cocaine.

we did that and went back to the hotel. : so you talked about both sides, the good, the bad. what was it like going back and forth between reading the story tr