A couple of Texas teens made mounds of cash by becoming cartel hitmen.
“Wolf Boys: Two American Teenagers and Mexico’s Most Dangerous Drug Cartel,” by former Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Slater, tells the story of how the two Americans joined a Mexican cartel and made up to $10,000 per hit. Gabriel Cardona and Rosalio Reta became Los Zetas cartel assassins when they were only 16 and 13, respectively.
Cardona and Reta were valued recruits since they had U.S. citizenship and could easily move through the U.S.-Mexico border. The border town of Laredo, Texas, is where the two now-imprisoned killers came from. Both boys lived in poverty.
Colombian mercenaries trained Cardona on how to become a killer. The assassin boot camp was a far cry from Cardona’s earlier crimes on behalf of the cartel, like jacking cars and smuggling drugs across the border into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
The two convicted killers — who are both in their twenties and will spend the remainder of their lives behind bars — each gave CNN interviews explaining themselves and how they landed in prison. At one point in his interview, Cardona is asked how many people he killed, to which he replied with a laugh and a smile, saying, “I have no idea.” Ultimately, the cartel sicario, the term for hitman in Mexico, estimates that he murdered “between 20 and 30” people.
Reta explained the ways of his former boss, now-imprisoned leader of Los Zetas, Miguel Angel Trevino, saying that, “I’ve known this man and he’s not going to tell you to do something that he won’t do himself.” The younger of the two killers once murdered a target while his three-year-old and wife looked on in their car.
The full story behind these two young men’s descent into a life of a crime will be revealed when “Wolf Boys” is published Sept. 13.
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