and streets and parks got named after lafayette. and i think washington dc it's worth remembering that the most meaningful of any of these, no offense to lafayette ronald hubbard is lafayette park across from the white house because this is kind of our capital a protest. this is where we had-- as a people go to yell at our present i mean, i was kidding about lafayette being an only child, but one of the most only at child things he said was, he said i did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence. and so i think lafayette park or lafayette square as it's also called embodies that spirits and even though we beat ourselves up in this country for how much bickering there it-- this is and

how we cannot get along, i think that is annoying and time-consuming, but also the source of our greatness and at the fact that we have this place across the street from our head of government's 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 that's spotlighting the work of fascinating people. >> i love of booktv and i am a c-span fan. >> now on to tonight's main event. i'm 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 it's 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 harper's, "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? it's your competition. but i made an exception to both those, you know, professional -- because of this book is an extraordinary piece of reporting. it's an incredibly gripping story, and it's a story that on so many levels it's 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. it's 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 that's 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 that's not america, except it is america. we are all in it together, and being in has done the thing that twitter doesn't do, and facebook doesn't 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 i'm sure when he started he couldn't imagine at all. he couldn't imagine with these

people's lives he would have an intimate feel for. as to what is going -- as someone who's 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 it's there or it's not there. it's never there in the tweet, and it's not there in the things that pass most of the time, but it's 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 it's rare and it's hugely important thing that it exists at all, that people can read it, which they should. that done, why do 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 or you won't be able to put it down. i couldn't. 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 wouldn't 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 you've been cut down and are wondering what you're going to do with your future and where you're going to go. when you're a writer, a juneau and a lot of people in this room know, that it's 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 don't forget. it was a story about two american boys who would become assassins, essentially contract killers for big international drug organization in mexico. and i couldn't 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 it's 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 there's 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 mid-level 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 wasn't 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 guzmán, 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. you're 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 it's 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 that's 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 cartel's 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 one-party rule. it's a definitional thing. they emerged after the mexican revolution in the 1920's and it was one-party 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 i-started 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 they'd receive, you know, the list of what they could do and couldn't 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 wal-mart 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, it's 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 you're 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 that's a very buoyant, frothy market and so, when you're 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, that's the direction a lot of kids in laredo would like to aspire to.

>> talk to us about gabriel. it's an amazing story and for some reason he's 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. he's from a ghetto on the south side of laredo called la techa and it's 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. >> there's a litany of explanations that probably dates back to the 1950's for

what was then quaintly, probably called juvenile delinquency or something, where people would say, well, you know, it's all economics or it's 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. there's another set of explanations that we all know to be true, which is that young men really like feeling powerf powerful, don't 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 i've ever mainlined. >> i don't 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 don't 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 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, 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 doesn't have a fully developed conscience yet and he also has very little sense of consequence because when he falls, he bounces and he'll bounce for a little while. so i think that's 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 isn't 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 don't 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 they're known to our generation as roofies. it's illegal here and easy to get in mexico.

>> how did they get this noon? >> they're produced by a company called hoffman and laroche. and they the kids call them roaches. they're 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 he'd 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 that's 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, it's -- it's 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 the first americans, and you go there and it's run by a team of mercenari mercenaries, some are original assada members, some were from colombia, to come and teach. the purpose of the training camp for people running the cartel, can you kill? is it in your blood? and they can find that out pretty quickly. and the ones who are able to do it are known as the frios, the cold ones. so they get weeded out and set aside or the other ones get weeded out and set aside and you become one. >> as i was reading this and the details are alternately

gruesome and heartbreaking and, you know, mind blowing, i kept asking myself, you know, how does he know this? how was he able to get up inside these people's heads in this kind of intimate way? as a reporter, i know how hard that is and i know how grounded that has to be for it to feel right, especially over the course of a book. so how, you know, did you ever meet gabriel? >> i met him twice. i visited him in prison twice. at the start of the project and near the end of the project and between those visits and after those visits, we exchanged close to a thousand pages of letters. so that was really the basis for the book. in addition to my trips to laredo meeting robert garcia, who is here, the lead law enforcement character in the

book, he was-- he was the homicide detective who really was the leader in pursuing these boys when they started to commit murders on behalf of the cartel in laredo. >> and a hero -- [applaus [applause] >> so, you actually were pen pals with this guy? >> yeah, we were-- it was the most bizarre and one of the most-- and probably and surely the most interesting reporting experience of my life, exchanging letters with gabriel over a period of time. the relationship was up and down. >> did it go from dating apps to old-fashioned pen pals with the killer. i see that now. >> love and war. [laughter]

>> so he's a very smart guy. i think people can tell that from reading the book. he's very intelligent and this is how we decided to use his intelligence and his intellect, but 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 a bunch of other boys who were also now in prison who worked with him who are from the same neighborhood that he's from and who knew him since he was a kid. so, and also talking to his girlfriend. talking to his mother, i spent a lot of time in laredo with his brothers. you know, going to the clubs and bars they used to go to and the restaurants they used to go to. >> and that's one of the things, as you're describing their lives growing up and i don't know why, but i feel like i'm there and it's because you were there. >> yeah.

>> which you don't bring in until the very end, but it really -- it drew me in in a very effective way, so, it's just like, yeah, this is right. we don't know why it's right, but i know that these are right because they were true that you actually bothered to go there. >> if i could get on my book-writing, publishing soap box for a minute. s an a writer when i finally bring myself in and talk about it, in the earlier stage of the book project that was more like an introduction. >> i liked where it was. >> and i read a book by katheri katherine bood, one of my favorite nonfiction books and she didn't have an introduction, she had an afterward where she talked about the reporting and that was the coolest thing. i hate introductions in

nonfiction books, if you're telling people what you're trying to say, you haven't said it properly. so i wanted to force myself to focus on the body of the book and not convincing readers what i wanted it to be, but actually making it that. and so all along i was hoping to be able to move that section to the back and make it a chapter, make it an afterward and it became the final chapter. >> now, here is a question that people ask me, you know, off and on with stuff i write and i always hate this question, so i'm going to ask it to you and you can answer. why do you think these people talked to you? why do you think gabriel wrote you a thousand pages of letters? >> that's a great question. >> no, it's a sucky question. >> my agent asked that a couple of times.

how are we getting duped here? he's essentially in solitary confinement and he will be there probably indefinitely. and he's been there since he was 19. and he's going to be in life-- he's going to be in prison for life. i came along and he was used to seeing tv reporters and newspaper and magazine reporters who were swooping in, sort of for the quick story and he got to know the ways of that world pretty well. and i think the more i stuck around and the more i sort of showed myself to not being interested in the quick hit, but something larger, the more comfortable he became with me. and it became more like a relationship than a sort of professional reporter subject thing.

so that sort of-- the scope of the project helped. what did he want from it? i think he wanted a lot of things. i think on different dates, he wanted different things. i think on his best days, he wanted to tell a cautionary story. >> after-school special? >> in a way, yeah, yeah, like maybe my life can be used for something better. >> kids, don't pursue the wrong path. >> right. one of the things that was, you know, i think especially in the second half of the book, this element, you know, you started to press on it harder, was the sense that we're used to seeing had the social problems of

mexico, which is a large country immediately south of us, half of which we hate. we're used to seeing those problems as something that's outside of us. that's in a different country. that's across the border. that's their problem. and one of the things about the intimacy of the portrait of these kids in the book, you get the sense of them both being american kids and being kids for whom ultimately the dynamics of a country like mexico are more powerful in terms of shaping their lives. they didn't awe ply to college and they didn't dream long enough of being a football player or maybe too short or whatever it was, in the end, it was the life in mexico that was going to catch them up and shape who they were going to become in their very short time

as adults. and it made me think, you know, as a kid who grew up between cultures, the stories where our current pieties kind of fail us. because there are a lot of kids who grew up half as kids from afghanistan and half as american kids and half as kids from mexico and half as american kids. or in my case, half as a russian, and half as an american kid. and the american piety is always, well, you're all americans, the moment you're born here or moment you're naturalized or your mom or dad becomes a citizen. except that's not what goes on inside our heads. we actually live as-- between life and then there are the moments where almost the narrative of one's culture

becomes more compelling, whether that is jihadism in the case of the person who set off a bomb, you know, a few blocks from here the other night. or whether it's cartel and war father which you trace back culturally to the aztecs in mexico and we live our lives in a funny way as characters in stories and that's the thing that our culture, i think, gets wrong. it's not only about economic opportunity or whether someone calls you a bad name where, it's what character and what comic book could you want to be, especially if you're 15 or 16. which super hero do you want to be? can you be a super hero at all?

and the narrative of i'm a fa failure for a law or making bank with the russian mob, or, you know, i'm a soldier for the zedas and i can take life whenever i want just like my aztec brothers. it sounds insane except that's actually how you live. these are according to the stories that we tell ourselves and those stories for kids who are born and grow up between cultures can just as easily come from outside, quote, unquote, as they can come from inside. that's kind of a thought i had. >> yeah. >> while reading the second part of the book especially and i'm curious what you thought? >> well, laredo is such a marginalized city. it's the 98% hispanic, one of the poorest in america, and the education system down there is a disaster.

so for people like gabriel and bart, the cartel provides this very powerful illusion of belonging and purpose and i think that was a very big part of what sucked them in and what sucks so many kids in. i mean, they're not unusual for kids along the border. there are so many kids down there that want to be there, it's amazing and then there's this very aggressive branding of the cartel world that goes on in music and things like that. that the sort of adds, adds to the pull of it. >> talk a bit about the music because it's a cool-- you know, i've heard some of it. it's a funny form of hip-hop crossed with mexican folk that tells the tales of great gangsters and you see why that

music makes the world come ali alive. >> yeah, so a lot of these songs are called narco coridos, they're commissioned by cartel bosses. they'll approach someone who became famous as a singer in mexico and pay them to write a song and come to a cartel party. the scene in the book, they come to the party and lionize the person, the boss. and in mexico, laredo on the border, have a narco corido written about you. >> something to look forward to. >> that you've made it and interestingly from a criminal perspective, i guess the narco bands are also a way to launder money, they help in the money laundering process. there are many ways you can use music and art to further your crimin

criminal career. music and art are very powerful. reading this book. another thing that's great about this book is i felt-- i guess i read it probably first three months ago when i got-- four months ago when i got a gaga galli and i read it again, and read it again, and this is even more relevant and current and of the moment in the four months that i read it because this is a book that cuts against both sets of pieties that you hear in politics now. set of pieties number one from a certain candidate saying you could build a large wall on the border between america and mexico and thereby, you know, cut off the traffic in narcotics and humans and all kind of other things.

an awesome thing for us to do. and the second set of pieties is why is anyone suggesting that there's any problems south of the border at all? clearly even the implication that there are armed criminal gangs in mexico is -- and after reading this book, i think it would be pretty hard for anyone who likes to mouth either set of platitudes to go on doing that with a clear conscience. >> yeah, well, the wall, a wall even assuming this thing could exist-- >> it would be a really big wall. >> a 2000 mile wall that would be built and paid for by mexico. with the help of the people in laredo. so if you assume this thing could exist, it actually would not achieve what everyone thinks it would achieve because

history has shown that when you sort of, you know, add resources to the interdiction efforts and you know, doubling law enforcement in laredo, for instance, you achieve the opposite of what you think you're achieving. you often get more smuggling because you up the risk of smuggling and therefore up the value of the products that are being smuggled. so smuggling becomes much more attractive. >> could you explain that very basic point in a little more detail? >> yes, so the underworld economy is economy like anything else, with supply and demand and risk and investment. and a lot of the price of it depends on the human cost. what's my risk of winding up in prison or dead if i get into this marketplace? and so-- as that risk goes up, the price of smuggling goes up and therefore-- >> profit margins.

>> the profit margins go up, so more money winds up in the anderson of the bad guys. >> right, it's more alluring for people as it gets richer and richer. and the piety that, you know, across the border we have a society of law abiding people who are-- who all go to church and are very eager always to contribute to the welfare of the united states of america. that's also not entirely true if you look at the kind of horrific, large-scale violence in the cartels. and that's not something we really want in america if we had a choice. >> we want the violence in america?

we don't want the zedas in america. >> yeah, we don't, right? >> no. >> that would be bad. >> that would be bad. according to robert, they're right around the corner. . >> you know, and now just, you know, to flog an old tired horse, where does all of this money can come from? all of this profit? what product is it that produces so much money and so for horrific large killing? >> we really like cocaine and we really like heroin. >> we do. >> and there's an enormous demand for that here and as long as that demand exists, this world that i'm writing about in the book, will never cease to exist because it begins with us. you know. >> so, are you foreswearing the use of all illegal drugs right here, right now? >> in the presence of your one-year-old son? [laughter] >> i think--

i think the present 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'd get rid of the criminal element that way or not. there's other products out there, but the powder is the big one. there's an incredible demand for that here and it's small, it's compact, it's easy to smuggle and extremely profitable. so-- . >> you know, there is something right in that like escobar line of argument, well, you raped and pillaged our society and this is our way of getting something back, a means of cash transfer in the other

direction, this is what makes the money go south, we finally sound something that can levy a small tax on you rich gringoes. >> absolutely, it all starts with us. i mean, could you see cocaine being sold in your local pharmacy? it used to be. it used to be. less than a century ago. it still was, but it was a problem. >> it's a problem, but, i mean, that's part of the guys going into laredo and the roaches and they're made by hoffman laroche and sometimes i think about it as a race between the pharmaceutical drug industry and its products engineered for, you know, social safety and conformity and the illegal drug industry with its filthy

crappy products which, you know, get you really high. >> it's like an arms race. >> yes. >> yeah, i think-- >> they come up with such good legal drugs that no one wants to do illegal drugs anymore. [laughter] >> that's a broader philosophical question. you don't have to deal with that. >> yeah, i don't know, i don't know. >> i think this is the right moment to open the floor to questions from the audience. >> hi. >> can you hear me? all right. i'll talk loud. so when i read about cartels plus journalists, it's not usually a combination that ends well. i wondered if you were nervous during this reporting or because the people you're reporting on were already in jail na it felt like a safer endeavor? >> because my wife is here i'm

going to say that it felt perfectly safe all along and there was never a reason to be scared about anything and that-- conversation that we had, to the extent that we had and maybe we didn't have any. >> you're making your child cry! >> silas wasn't born when i started this. i did go to vera cruz-- most of my research was in laredo, but i went on a trip to mexico for about a week and accompanied by a retired dea agent to vera cruz, a city on the gulf coast and it's a huge drug port. it's a port, the site of all kinds of smuggle and crime and the city is a mess. and i spent two days there only speaking to reporters. they all gathered at this local cafe, which is a bizarre, bizarre scene where essentially there's no reporting in vera cruz.

if you're a reporter you go to one cafe in the morning and the politicians and businessmen are there and tell you what you're going to print. you take a picture of them smiling and da, da, da. >> all right. so, being a journalist in mexico is extremely dangerous. and many are on the payroll. i don't want to say most, but many, especially in a place like vera cruz, monterrey, these cities, most the journalists are on the take somehow. even if it's not from a drug cartel, maybe from a politician who wants you to carry his water and write whatever he says. so. >> was it something in america, we can't imagine, never happens here, we have this amazing first amendment and the press that's really serving its people, but-- but i think i feel really, really lucky as a journal iisjo

especially after this experience, to live in a country where we can write this stuff. to answer your question, it was a lot more comfortable that the people i was writing about, people on the criminal side were either no longer with us or in prison, most of them, forever. this was a historical story. i wasn't writing anything that was going to affect real-time business for everybody. but anyone in the book like this, the exam of roberto sbiano, and italian journalist, i wrote a book 2007 organized crime in his hometown of naples and he's essentially going to be living with law enforcement for the rest of his life because there's a price on his head. but he was from the place that he was writing about and he was

writing about people who were still out there and in power and active and, yeah, it's scary, very scary. >> thank you. can you hear me? the context of my question comes from my eight years running ngo in kenya and africa and refugee camps where kids are recruited every day to be child soldiers, that's the only, similarly, way to make a living. way to save your life, way to have aspirations. but when you spoke about policy, 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 aspirations and a future. when you spoke about policy, you sort of spoke about it like that wasn't the answer. i'm curious-- >> i think i am i agree with you. >> i'm curious what you see as the answer. >> i'm a person that-- i was sort of looking at you and now looking at you, to me it's the only answer and curious-- ments when i was referring to policy not being the place to start, i was talking about drug policy. a lot of people talked about how do we fix this problem and make the cartels disappear? often the answer is legalization, or build a wall. and so that, that's what i was referring to, but i think that policies that help bring marginalized communities to the mainstream. provide opportunities for families to stay together and the coherent family and--

>> changed my life destroying the family-- >> no, i think that's the place to start opportunity. it becomes lost. it's very convenient to talk about it as a drug policy issue or a wall. and we tend to sort of box these huge issues into something neat like that, when it's not neat at all. so-- >> you mentioned the book gamora. what world do you see-- what parallels do you see between that world and wolf boys? >> the underworld is obvious, his world is different than my book.

there's a section of the book that deals with the foot soldiers. it's an amazing theme. he goes into a pizzeria in naples where a lot of these 16-year-old hitmen and such hang out after their shiftsment they come in with their bullet-proof jackets still on and they take a lot of the mda to stay up at night and when he-- mbna is actually-- >> and you know, i don't speak from experience, david tells me all of this stuff, but apparently, apparently when you're coming off this you get really hungry so these boys-- they're boys, so they're naturally very hungry and just probably spent their night doing horrific things and taking ecstacy and they come into the pizzeria and wolfing

down slices and drinking down buckets of soda. >> you're making me hungry. >> so that was a part of his book that was most resonant, i felt, to the project that i was doing. >> so your book has already been banned, i heard? >> yeah, it was banned by the-- we didn't discuss it. it was banned by the-- >> i heard it from you. >> it was banned by the texas prison system actually before it was published so the people whom it's about are unable, at least for the time being to read it, yeah. >> the texas state prison system bans a lot of books and they can cite pretty much any reason they want. they have six official grounds for banning and the grounds for

banning wolf boys is that it contains information about a criminal scheme and avoiding detection and he cited a sentence on page 124, it's amazing they got into far into the book to find something, but i talk about one of the smugglers and how he out fitted his vehicles and made them optimal for smuggling. it's something that everyone in the smuggling world knows, but that's what they-- >> where you knock on it, it won't seem hallow? >> that detail stuck in my head, too. >> and maybe it should be banned for people like you and criminals. so, yeah, it's banned and there's an appeal process apparently, but we'll see what happens. banned book week is next week, so-- there you have it. >> hey. >> dan, a question for you.

you mentioned in your book that you bought an eight ball. did you happen to give that address to sergeant garcia so that-- >> yeah. >> have a couple of cops and we have nypd here, and we have laredo pd. and you know, sometimes you've got to hang out if you're going to get the good stuff, but, yeah, so in the last chapter of the book where i go-- where i finally sort of bring myself in and talk about the reporting process and i get-- it's not really, historian itself. but there was a night when i was hanging out with gabriel's brother luis 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

laredo and we bought some sort of these shirts, these kind of narco shirts. yeah. it started with that, which felt pretty harmless. and then we were going to go to this-- we did go to this club and on the way to the club, he's like, okay, we're going to stop by this house and get an eight ball of cocaine which we did that and went back to the hotel and it's one of the combination of the cocaine and a couple of heineken opened luis up and we had a good conversation about life in laredo and i felt maybe it was sort of the-- i felt i couldn't print this book unless i put this in. it's part of the process and it's in there. >> and for anyone watching in washington, to understand this

is exactly what happens when i wrote that piece about the national security council, the same thing. >> any other questions? yes. >> so you talked about the good, the bad, the evil. the good are here tonight. what was it like going back and forth between weaving the story, trying to find the truth somewhere? >> it was-- it was one of those things that you feel your way through as a reporter. there's no formula for it. i think you know, you kind of rely on your judgment. as far as just the relational aspect. i get a lot of flak from the criminals saying things about my supposed sexual

relationships with detective garcia. [laughter] >> i won't go any further than that. so a lot of talk of-- >> nothing wrong with that either. >> with me providing certain services. so, yeah, it was just that, but the criminals knew the reality of the project and it was always striking to me and sort of funny there isn't more animosity in laredo between the criminals and cops and almost like it's accepted on both sides. i learned more about that actually when i went to gabriel's high school and spoke to the principal and we had a long conversation and he told me i really oversee two different populations of people here, i oversee people who know the drug business and i oversee the people who chase them and that's about it.

and so this is a high school principal, one of the most optimistic people in the city. so, i think there is an acceptance and robert feels otherwise. the funny thing about the cops in laredo, they always want to tell you how much the criminals love them. they always want to tell you i treated that guy well and he came at me and bought me a beer seven years later. everyone has the one story that everyone has was the time the guy they put away pick up their dinner tab or something. [laughter] >> except for robert, robert never told me that. picked up the dinner tab and then paid for their house. [laughter] >>