The Wolfpack, Peter Edwards
The Wolfpack, Peter Edwards
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The Wolfpack
The Millennial Mobsters Who Brought Chaos and the Cartels to the Canadian Underworld

Author: Peter Edwards, Luis Najera

Narrator: Juan Chioran, Luis Najera

Unabridged: 7 hr 6 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/26/2021


Synopsis

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 bustling 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 laneway. Throughout the 2010s, these and other disparate acts of violence entered the public awareness like isolated 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.

About The Author

PETER EDWARDS is the organized-crime beat reporter for the Toronto Star and the bestselling author of seventeen non-fiction books and one young adult novel. His works have been published in four languages. Edwards is a member of Top Left Entertainment, a production development company, and an executive producer for the Citytv series Bad Blood, created by New Metric Media and aired on Netflix. His book One Dead Indian: The Premier, the Police and the Ipperwash Crisis was made into the Gemini Award–winning movie One Dead Indian by Sienna Films that aired on CTV. Edwards was awarded an eagle feather from the Union of Ontario Indians and a gold medal from the Centre for Human Rights. His book Delusion (published in Europe as The Infiltrator) is on the CIA’s recommended reading list for staff and agents.LUIS HORACIO NÁJERA is an acclaimed journalist and crime analyst from Mexico who has lived in exile in Canada since 2008. Nájera was a reporter for Grupo Reforma based in Ciudad Juárez, a notorious gateway to the lucrative North American drug market and widely deemed from 2008 to 2012 the most dangerous place on Earth. He was the PEN Canada-George Brown Writer in Residence in Toronto, and recipient of the 2010 CJFE International Press Freedom Award and one of the 2011 Human Rights Watch Hellman/Hammet Awards. He is a member of Massey College and former fellow at the Citizen Lab/Canada Centre for Global Security Studies. He received a Master's of Global Affairs from the University of Toronto.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Wendy

There is no one more suitable to tell this story than highly acclaimed award-winning author and Toronto Star's organized crime reporter Peter Edwards alongside award-winning Mexican journalist Luis Najera. During the 2010's, a decade of anarchy, a group of gangsters (The Wolfpack) strive to quicken t......more

Goodreads review by George

The Wolfpack is a chaotic journey through a confusing maze of gangs, cartels, consortiums, hoodlums, drug dealers, and assorted hangers-on and wanna-bes. As a book, it lacks focus or even a time line; jumping around and back and forth, and introducing many more names than any one reader can hope to......more

Goodreads review by CM

This is not a book I woukd usually pick up but I was just so curious when I used to live in the area. It's hard to believe this stuff is even real. Quite terrifying really. The first half of the book was more interesting when it went into more detail on each person and it had more personal bits adde......more

This is a journalistic narrative of the spectacularly fast rise and collapse of a Canadian criminal enterprise, bearing out all my theories about these things. Stymied in their exclusion from the big money and compartmentalized in ethnic and regional networks, a group of younger, more risk-taking ju......more

Goodreads review by Timothy

Perhaps it’s an interesting read on how organized crime operates - the connection of how Mexican cartels operate or don’t operate in conjunction with Canadian biker gangs and mafiosi. It’s a scary picture of crime, intimidation and murder. However, the book is not well written, tediously filled with......more


Quotes

“Filling in the backstory behind many crimes in Canada over the past two decades, it’s a fascinating look at how criminal organizations work now.” —Toronto Star

"Both [Peter Edwards and Luis Nájera] are brave men who expose the villainy of some of the deadliest people on Earth.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“The Wolfpack is a must-read for any true-crime aficionados looking for insight into the organized criminal underworld of the 2020s.” —CBC.ca Books

"An important book since so little has been written about organized crime in Canada, and frankly because it is a readable and interesting tale of criminal incompetence and police surveillance." —Small Wars Journal