The Wolfpack

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

By: Peter Edwards, Luis Najera

Narrated by: Juan Chioran, Luis Najera

Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

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 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 listeners 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.

©2021 Peter Edwards and Luis Najera (P)2021 Penguin Random House Canada

Excellent, tons of action, pretty fast moving

I very much enjoyed this book, especially after reading another book about a Canadian mobster that was eye-wateringly boring and never went anywhere, despite being twice as long. I don’t think you could do anything else to make this book (The Wolfpack) any more enthralling or exciting. I wish it was longer, but you can only do so much with a true story, and adding needless filler just doesn’t cut it. Highly recommended!