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CERLAC Grad Student, Luis Najera publishes new book - The Wolfpack

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

Author Peter Edwards and Luis Najera

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.

To read full review go here.