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 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.