How a fat computer geek became the Jeff Bezos of the dark web

By Eric Spitznagel
https://nypost.com/2019/02/16/how-a-fat-computer-geek-became-the-jeff-bezos-of-the-dark-web/
February 16, 2019

In September of 2009, crime boss Paul Le Roux summoned an operative for a face-to-face meeting, forcing him to make an 18-hour trip through four airports before landing in Hong Kong, arriving exhausted and dehydrated.

The operative — codenamed “Jack” — met LeRoux at a hotel restaurant, where a huge breakfast buffet was waiting. Even so, Le Roux “wasn’t about to spend 30 dollars on food for an underling,” Jack recalls.

After discussing his plots, Le Roux sent Jack directly back to the airport, lightheaded with hunger and without so much as a shower, to return to Somalia that night.

“Anger pumped enough adrenaline into [Jack’s] system to give him an idea,” writes crime reporter Elaine Shannon in her new book, “Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire” (William Morrow), out Tuesday.

Just months later, Jack made a call to the CIA, offering to help bring the so-called “Jeff Bezos of transnational organized crime” to justice. And all because his boss didn’t buy him brunch.

It wasn’t supposed to end this way for Le Roux. Born in Zimbabwe in 1972 and given up for adoption by his birth parents — a rejection that haunted him for most of his life — he’d transformed himself from a programming genius who developed encryption software like E4M in the late ’90s, to the founder of RX Limited, the Internet’s first black market for pharmaceuticals. By the late-2000s, he was a self-made vice entrepreneur, raking in $250 million a year selling drugs, weapons and murder-for-hire on the dark web.

He was the new generation of crime lords, more Internet-savvy (and less concerned with image) than predecessors like Pablo Escobar and “El Chapo” Guzmán. He was the first “to operate in the realm of pure cyberspace,” writes Shannon. “He browsed among clients, suppliers, fixers and networkers, meeting them wherever fiber-optic cables and satellite links take him.”

Like Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Le Roux wanted to build an “online superstore that aspired to sell anything anybody might want,” whether it was missile technology, pills or North Korean crystal meth. For almost a decade, from 2004 until his arrest in 2012, his empire of drugs, guns and murder employed a private army of mercenaries and spanned four continents.

“Sometimes Le Roux acted as if he had supernatural powers,” Shannon writes. “Whenever he made a new business connection or scored a deal, even the purchase of a few barrels of chemicals, he chuckled and exclaimed to anybody who was around, ‘Magic!’”

But looks could be deceiving. He had “piercing eyes, an authoritative manner and an imperturbable smile,” according to Shannon. Lou Milione, a DEA agent who tracked Le Roux for years, told The Post that he could be “surprisingly charming. He was able to manipulate people without them ever realizing they were being manipulated.”

But the flip side of that charm was his anger. “Le Roux lacked certain social skills,” Shannon told The Post. “If he had a disagreement with somebody in his inner circle, his solution was, ‘Kill him! Kill his whole family!’ ”

His first taste of murder happened when he decided to whack his head of security, David Smith, in 2010. After luring him to a safe house in the Philippines, Le Roux instructed him to dig a hole — ostensibly to bury a safe filled with $2 million — and then shot Smith repeatedly with an MP5 machine gun.

“He learned something about himself,” Shannon writes. “He liked shooting. He liked killing. He took pleasure in thinking about Smith lying in the hole, bleeding out, with feral dogs circling what was left of him.”

As brilliant and threatening as Le Roux could be, he was also capable of bafflingly poor decisions. In a phone call bugged by DEA agents, Le Roux tried speaking in code to an employee about plans to hire a master meth chemist, calling him a “cook.”

But when his meaning wasn’t understood — “You mean a real cook, yeah?” the befuddled manager asked — Le Roux exploded.

“I am talking for meth, dude!” he screamed, abandoning all subtlety. “Are you retarded?”

The reason he evaded capture for over a decade, despite the occasional rookie mistakes, was his ability to remain in the shadows. Unlike the Colombian and Mexican cartel bosses who “used their jewel-encrusted guns and girls, private zoos, torture chambers and over-the-top muscle cars to brand themselves winners,” Le Roux “lived austerely and reclusively, indifferent to most creature comforts,” Shannon writes. He had several sparsely furnished residences, everywhere from the Philippines to Hong Kong, with at least one home containing only boxes filled with hundred-dollar bills rather than furniture. He lived “in a constant state of readiness to vanish,” Shannon writes.

“Le Roux was a ghost,” Milione said. “He never got close to anyone, and he treated all of his associates as disposable. It wasn’t like with the Mafia, where there’s a foundation of loyalty. Le Roux was loyal to nobody.”

That lack of loyalty extended to his family. He was twice divorced, with at least 11 children by wives, girlfriends and mistresses across several countries. At the time of his arrest, he was living in Manila with his Filipino girlfriend, Cindy Cayanan, with whom he has a daughter. When he was arrested, she was convinced that Le Roux faked the whole thing and had really disappeared “to freestyle through brothels someplace.” (She wasn’t charged in connection with Le Roux’s crimes and continues to live in their Manila home.)

But he also craved attention. He “wanted superstardom in the dark world,” Shannon writes. Le Roux used “Hitler” as his laptop password, and once bragged about buying a paradise isle because “every villain needs his own island.”

“He didn’t care about money,” Shannon said. “Money was just a way of keeping score. What made him feel alive was his projects. It was always about ‘What world can I conquer next?’ ”

His big dream, as the DEA soon learned — after “Jack” agreed to go undercover and set a trap for Le Roux — was to forge a relationship with a Colombian cartel. Jack convinced his boss that he’d made contact with Colombians hoping to get into the meth business, but they wanted to meet Le Roux first. Going against his better instincts — Le Roux typically sent associates to represent him — he agreed, not wanting to offend them. Jack’s trick “worked like a charm,” Shannon writes.

In late 2012, when Le Roux arrived at a Liberian hotel room to meet who he thought was a Colombian cartel representative — it was actually an undercover DEA agent — he was secretly recorded not just conspiring to commit drug trafficking but also admitting to a staggering array of other crimes, from selling arms to Iran to murdering his lieutenant Smith.

“You know what really pissed me off?” Le Roux said of his deceased employee, whom he confessed to personally assassinating. “His yacht was bigger than my yacht.”

DEA agents Tom Cindric and Eric Stouch arrested Le Roux in his hotel room shortly afterward, but the boss did not go quietly. Le Roux used his full girth to his advantage, becoming dead weight that the agents struggled to contain and handcuff. He continued resisting until he was loaded on a plane, shackled, bound for New York. And then his entire demeanor changed.

“Well played, gentlemen,” he said, smiling at the arresting agents like a Bond supervillain. “But if you’re looking at me, you’re obviously looking for bigger things.”

Le Roux negotiated with the DEA for immunity. In exchange for a limited sentence, he offered to help entrap his co-conspirators. Which was easy, given Le Roux’s reputation for keeping a low profile. All he had to do was make a call or send an email and his vast worldwide web of drug dealers and hired assassins would have no reason to suspect that the orders were coming from inside a jail cell. Nobody expected to meet Le Roux in person — that just wasn’t his way.

Le Roux’s tips have led to several convictions, including a high-profile case last April in which his security chief Joseph Hunter (who took over the job after Smith’s murder) and two other henchmen were found guilty in Manhattan federal court for conspiring to kill a federal drug agent, importing narcotics and murdering a woman in the Philippines for money.

Le Roux, now 46 years old, has yet to be formally sentenced. Even his arrest was kept a secret for several years. He only recently appeared in court, during Hunter’s trial last year, where he confessed to five murders, selling missile technology to Iran and trafficking meth out of North Korea with intent to sell in New York. He won’t be charged with murder — “the US has limited jurisdiction over murders abroad,” Shannon explains — but the crimes he has admitted to could bring a minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum of life.

But he won’t stand trial until all the criminals he helped round up exhaust their appeals. And until his sentencing, the DEA claims that Le Roux is being kept in federal custody, although a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokesperson says Le Roux was released from a Brooklyn detention center in 2013. The DEA declined to share specifics on his current whereabouts.

“As far as I know, Le Roux is not being used to trap more criminals at this time,” Shannon says. “Some agents believe he would be a useful consultant because he has a special talent for finding niches to make money in the criminal underground. But the consensus is he is best consulted from behind bars.”

And who better to consult on how to capture the next Le Roux than Le Roux himself? “All the guys who investigated this case believe there are other Le Rouxs out there,” Shannon says. “They might be just as brilliant, but they could be more dangerous because they’re better at interpersonal relationships.”

In other words, unlike Le Roux, “they’ll pay for brunch.”

‘The Border’ Is a Stunning and Timely Conclusion to Don Winslow’s Drug-War Trilogy

By Janet Maslin
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/books/review-border-don-winslow.html
February 17, 2019

Of all the blows delivered by Don Winslow’s Cartel trilogy, none may be as devastating as the timing of “The Border,” its stunner of a conclusion. Though Winslow cannot have engineered all of this 14 years ago when he started this series, his sweeping new novel concerns subjects that put it right on the culture’s front burner: the Mexican-American border, the handling of migrant children, the opioid crisis and some barely fictionalized claims about how foreign money has bought influence at the highest level of the U.S. government.

The book’s title, “The Border,” refers to both physical and moral barriers. Winslow is well aware that both that and its cover image, which depicts a razor-wire-topped wall spreading across a desert landscape, are politically loaded. “Loaded phrases, like loaded guns, are more interesting, aren’t they?” Winslow said to Entertainment Weekly in September. As for the book’s depiction of fiercely partisan American politics, including its treatment of characters who are unmistakable versions of the current president and his son-in-law: “I know this book is going to make some people angry. I can live with that.”

Even though the first installment of this trilogy was named “The Power of the Dog,” after a biblical intimation of evil (“Deliver my soul from the sword; my love from the power of the dog,” Psalms 22:20), it only hinted at the magnitude and ferocity of what was to come. That opening novel now looks like the series’ relatively innocent prologue — and it is as blade-sharp, violent, pulse-quickening and reportorially shocking as the pinnacle of some lesser series might be.

“The Power of the Dog” is, in brief, about the first decades that bind the destinies of Art Keller, a Vietnam veteran and later D.E.A. agent, and Adán Barrera, a young Mexican who will go on to achieve the most dizzying heights of power. The book begins in a burning Mexican poppy field in 1975 (“Only in hell, Art Keller thinks, do flowers bloom fire”) and leaves Keller among more poppies in 2004. Many unspeakable acts happen in between, melding the personal with the political (Iran-contra). It is all rendered unputdownable by Winslow’s unrivaled skill at his game.

The second book, “The Cartel” (2015), remains the heart of this series, and not only because of its central chronological position. It cements the ambition and the “Godfather” caliber of this whole multigenerational undertaking, and finds the major figures at their most fully formed. Some of it takes place, as we now learn with hindsight, in what were practically idyllic times for the Sinaloa cartel, a real-life cartel run by the fictional Barrera, regardless of his situation vis-à-vis imprisonment. Inside or out, he called the shots — and shots were the most merciful form of punishment meted out to this group’s vicious enemies. As the Sinaloa operation devolved into monstrous war with rivals, counting journalists among its many casualties, mere brutality became a distant memory.

A surprising array of characters from the earlier books reappears in “The Border.” One of them is a young boy who, in “The Cartel,” was seen kicking around a very bizarre soccer ball (an image readers of that book will never forget, no matter how hard they try). Keller and his new wife, Marisol Cisneros, the onetime mayor of Juarez, decide to try to help him.

It is 2012 when “The Border” starts, smoke still rising from the colossal battle that dethroned Barrera for good. A major plot point is the internecine horror that descends after the kingpin’s demise. The fight for succession lasts through the entire length of the novel.

Winslow means to journey deep into a new kind of hell this time, and to suggest that his readers recognize the sensation. This is a book for dark, rudderless times, an immersion into fear and chaos. It conjures more lawlessness, dishonesty, conniving, brutality and power mania than both of the earlier books put together.

Because of that chaos, it might have benefited from an indexed cast of characters. But Winslow can’t provide one. For one thing, it would be a spoiler. You just have to watch these miscreants as they drop. The Barrera heirs, would-be successors and arriviste rivals — a whole indulgent younger generation named Los Hijos, characterized by wretched excess and suicidal stupidity — make for countless shifting allegiances, fake names, dispensable henchmen and other complications.

Along with the battle to succeed Barrera, the plot involves Keller’s becoming head of the D.E.A. despite his strong distrust of the federal government and its approach to solving America’s drug problems. In order to do that, Keller sets himself up as a kind of independent investigator, which has a current resonance, too. The book makes Winslow’s clear case for why everything we’re told about Mexican drug imports is wrong: why New York is so vital to the country’s illegal-drug distribution, and even production; how Wall Street money and drug money are intertwined; and how money laundering intersects with businesses like real estate.

Enter Jason Lerner, a very Jared Kushner-like character, and his father-in-law, John Dennison. Dennison has Donald Trump’s history, speaks Trump’s own words and has a name that combines two sobriquets (John Barron and David Dennison) that Trump once used while pretending to be his own spokesman.

Winslow describes sting operations with immersive, heart-grabbing intensity. You don’t read these books; you live in them. You come to learn all about what it means for a good cop to go undercover as a bad one; for a black ex-con to be coaxed into the world of high-stakes New York drug dealing because he can reach a market Mexicans can’t; for a Staten Island addict to fall helpless prey to the drug trade’s latest bright idea (a near-lethal burst of fentanyl added to the usual heroin). Each story is personal. But each has huge ramifications in Winslow’s larger scheme.

The single most wrenching subplot involves a 10-year-old Guatemalan boy whose life is all but over, thanks to a system of graft that makes prostitutes out of women and thugs out of men. The boy is not described cheerlessly; Winslow doesn’t write in that register. The child is amazingly hardy. But the book shows the single day, the single stroke of fate, that may determine his entire future if the systemic corruption that pervades “The Border” has its way.

About making prostitutes out of women: Let’s just say that Winslow didn’t invent the horrors of the drug world, and assume he’s presenting a version of what he’s seen and heard about them. The words used around gender and race in this book are frequently ugly, and in these times that calls for a warning.

Last and never least with Winslow: the matter of languages. He is fluent in many of them, and “The Border” once again shows off those talents. There’s slang, of course. Why have a snitch sing when he can be “doing his best Freddie Mercury imitation for D.E.A. right now”? There is cop. There is politician, hit man, high roller. There is psycho — always a favorite, and always handy in the circles in which these books have traveled. “We’re soul mates,” one character says to another. “In the sense that neither of us has one.”

The border ends with another idea about the soul. “There is no wall that divides the human soul between its best impulses and its worst.” Two classic trilogies, “The Godfather” and now this one, are built upon it.

'The Border' is Don Winslow's final chapter in a chilling, timely and seminal drug war trilogy

By Jeffrey Fleishman
https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-don-winslow-the-border-trilogy-20190221-story.html
February 21, 2019


Novelist Don Winslow stands on a hilltop in San Diego County overlooking a portion of the Borrego Valley where people and drugs coming from Mexico sometimes intersect on the desert floor below him. (Mark Boster / For The Times)

A car stops on a hilltop. A man gets out. He walks a few paces and stands at the ridge. The desert valley stretches to Scissors Crossing, where tiny armies of migrants and drug mules once slipped through box canyons in summer swelter and winter frost. They don’t come so much anymore, but when the man sees them he thinks of night whispers and lost things.

He scans south toward Mexico and then to the Santa Ana Mountains. Clouds clamp the horizon; snow glints in the distant north. The meth labs are pretty much gone, the tweakers too. But drugs, like seasons, run in cycles. The land is what grabs you, though, the way it scrunches and wrinkles and spreads out ancient and flat. Full of stories and violent souls that slither through the books of Don Winslow, a parish kid from Rhode Island who never took to the stink of the fish factory and became one of the country’s best crime novelists.

Winslow steps away from the ridge and slides into his Mustang. He starts the engine; jazz plays soft in the speakers. He checks the rear view, taps the gas. It’s a time of saying goodbye to made-up men and women.

The last book in his trilogy on America’s drug wars — a seminal work that spirals from cartel towns to the White House — will be published Feb. 26. “The Border” is intricate, mean and swift, a sprawling canvass of characters including narco kingpins, a Guatemalan stowaway, a Staten Island heroin addict, a kinky hit woman, a barely veiled Donald Trump and DEA agent Art Keller, who over the arc of the trilogy has been noble and merciless, a conflicted wanderer who makes America face the transgressions committed in its name.

“With the exception of my wife and son I’ve spent more time with Keller than any other person in my life,” says Winslow, a onetime private investigator who specialized in arson cases. “Keller and me. Five-thirty a.m. every morning. He’s kind of a sad guy I think. I don’t know if I like him or not. He’s gone. I’m not mourning him but it’s a little weird. Keller and I have a lot in common. We both come from that Catholic thing. That guilt-driven moral absolutism.”

Winslow is 5 foot 6 and weighs “a buck thirty.” He has the smooth, inviting voice of a confessor, a man who listens for revealing cracks in things. He runs on exactitude and resilience; 12-hour writing days, a punching bag in his office and a view of a roadside sign that reads: “1 cord oak $300.” He roams a 30-acre ranch and is attuned to the odd fact: the lady who makes pies in the Gold Rush town of Julian, he says, will not hire left-handed helpers because they can’t get the crust indentations right. Seriously.

Granular detail and sharp dialogue have made his drug war trilogy propulsive and compelling. Comprising “The Power of the Dog” (2005), “The Cartel” (2015) and “The Border,” the books, spanning nearly 2,000 pages, are fiction bolted to real life. They pierce and illuminate our times and draw on Winslow’s research into government policies, criminal investigations, autopsies, murder videos, newspaper stories, pharmaceutical companies, diaries of addicts, the potency of fentanyl and how 1930s gangster Bugsy Siegel opened the drug conduit from Mexico.

The stories unravel broken lives caught in a mesmerizing mosaic fueled by addiction and haunted by bloodshed. The trilogy traces how the drug trade streaked from provincial to global, defying and outflanking Mexican authorities and a string of U.S. presidents who, despite tougher laws, bigger jails and militarized police forces, could not curb the seething cunning of cartels and America’s perpetual need for a fix from the poppy fields. That led to a brutality that killed at least 100,000 Mexicans and built empires for drug lords like El Chapo, who was convicted this month in New York.

In a review of “The Cartel,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times of the book’s “gasp-inducing knowledge of true crime’s brutal extremes, and for its unflinching awareness of what Mr. Winslow calls ‘evil beyond the possibility of redemption.’ Even tougher than the outright violence is the slow destruction of idealists ... who think they can escape the long shadow of this ugliness, and who one after another are proved horribly wrong.”

The border — he lives about 40 miles north of Mexico in San Diego County — is personal to Winslow. Trump’s calls for a border wall, he says, won’t stop major traffickers. “It’s so foolish. It makes me crazy,” says the author who over Twitter last week challenged Trump to a debate: “Any show. Any anchor. Any time,” he tweeted. “I’d pay $10,000 to see that!” author Stephen King added over Twitter.

“Ninety-five percent of illicit drugs come through 52 legal points of entry. Build a wall, but it will always have gates and the trucks will go through them, one every 15 seconds,” Winslow says. “What the wall could potentially do is force the little guys to go to the cartels and enrich the cartels.”

A traveler and military historian, Winslow, who has written 19 books, spent five years leading photographic safaris in Africa (He speaks Swahili). His days as a private investigator taught him about human nature and how “memory is constructed more on present needs than past reality.” He found a voice in the twisted tales of men and women facing corruption from within and without. They spin as if morality parables, dodging bullets, wisecracks, unmarked graves and killers like Belinda in “The Border” who craves sex as much as she enjoys pouring acid on a betrayer’s feet and hanging him from a yacht’s mast.

“The central question of crime fiction is how do you live decently in an indecent world,” he says. “I’ve had the great joy of reading people who are really great at it. From the poetry of Raymond Chandler to the realism of James Ellroy to what Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane do. They show us humanity in extremis.”

Before novels, when he was a boy in Rhode Island, where he won only one of 73 hockey fights, he read stories about the New England mob wars. Newspapers ruled then, stacked on corners, intriguing, snapping open in morning light. He discovered New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, whose grit and sparse vernacular brought grifters and working stiffs to life. The son of a librarian and a sailor, Winslow had an inkling he might become a writer, notably after his father hauled him to a fish factory and told him that was his fate if he didn’t study. He started paying attention to what to words could do.“

Bruce Springsteen I think is the poet of the American era,” he says, a sliver of reverence seeping in. “There’s a lyric that ends ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ that I think is the crime fiction writer’s creed. ‘Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop. I’ll be on that hill with everything I got. With our lives on the line where dreams are found and lost. I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost. For wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town.’ That’s the crime novel. Bam.”

Winslow’s stories are sweeping and cinematic. Oliver Stone turned his “Savages,” the misadventures of two Laguna Beach marijuana growerswho collide with drug lords, into a movie. Ridley Scott is developing “The Cartel.” Winslow’s visual sense was instilled when he was a boy buying $26 train tickets from Providence to New York to watch movies on Broadway. “The French Connection” — Gene Hackman as Detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle caught in the grip of the international heroin trade — left a mark.

“I don’t think there’s any other genre that is so intertwined as the crime genre with film and novel. You can’t separate them,” Winslow says. “They have been informed by each other from the time they started rolling the camera. Noir particularly. Look, I never sat in my office as a PI where a trumpet started and a long-legged blond walked into the room. It was my wife and I was home with a jazz record on, but that soundtrack of noir informs me when I sit down to write.”

You can hear it in this passage from “The Border”: “Drunken, undisciplined, underperforming, wonderful Pablo, dizzy with love for his child, for (hopelessly) his ex-wife, for his beloved, shattered city. Pablo wasn’t so much a Mexican as he was a Juarense; his world began and ended within the limits of the border town, on the edge of both Mexico and the United States, its location simultaneously its reason for being and the reason for its destruction.”

So many crime fiction novels, TV series and films portray Latinos as scrambling across borders or trafficking drugs. They are caricatures easily demonized in our politically divisive era. Winslow’s depictions of such nether worlds are woven with deeper portraits, including journalists in “The Cartel” who lead the reader into the art, music and nightlife of Mexico, and Keller’s wife, Marisol Cisneros, in “The Border,” a doctor with a steely moral compass.

It’s lunchtime. Winslow stops at his favorite place for tacos. A woman calls him “the nicest man in the world.” A guy in a cowboy hat talks to him about baseball, and another hurries by disheveled and out of sorts. Winslow asks how he is. The man shakes his head and turns away. Winslow finishes lunch and walks to Orchard Lane, mentioning that sometimes a migrant, skimming the edge of town like a breeze, will freeze to death in the twilight.

He gets into his car. The road ascends and curves, looping skyward. There are cougars up here, he says. Memories too. Like the 2003 wildfires that left people shoeless and wandering fields, and then, as if a healing vision, Buddhist nuns appearing out of the gray mist with coats and blankets. He has dreams about those days. Black soil, trees slanted like battered totems from a war. That’s what happens when you live in a place for 22 years; the land takes part of you and you take part of it. A writer becomes his geography.

“You know,” he says, “after the fires children were afraid of clouds because they thought it was smoke.”

The car crests the hill. Stops. A gust kicks and dies. The sky is metal and splintered with winter light. He gets out stands on the ridge, pointing here and there, close and far away, to the things he’s seen, hidden people scurrying over unknown terrain, carrying things, stripped of things; drug mules winding to points north and east to feed a nation’s vast addiction. You can see where “The Border” trilogy came from, rising and twisting like a vicious hymn from the earth.

“I’m done writing about it, but I’ll never make peace with it,” he says.

It’s quiet, the air cold.

“You ready?” someone asks.

“Yeah,” he says.

He gets in the car. The rain has held off, but a storm is coming.

With 'The Border,' Don Winslow closes modern literature's most important crime saga

By Robert Anglen
https://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/books/2019/02/21/don-winslow-launches-book-tour-the-border-scottsdale/2906670002/
February 21, 2019



We are the cartel.

This simple, angry declaration forms the connective tissue of Don Winslow's searing trilogy chronicling decades in the drug-war.

America's voracious appetite for drugs is the rocket fuel powering an economic engine of misery, violence and death. You may not snort, shoot or smoke, but you're complicit in the industrialized-addiction market of prisons, pharmaceuticals, finance and politics. 

It's the point Winslow drives home with a sledgehammer of rage in "The Border,"  the eerily prescient and scathing climax to what is quite simply the most important crime saga in modern literature.  

"The Border" officially hits shelves Tuesday, Feb. 26. But Winslow will launch his national book tour from Scottsdale on Monday, with a signing and discussion at the Poisoned Pen bookstore.

Unforgettable scenes

If Dostoevsky slung dope, he might have written the fierce morality tale that Winslow began with "The Power of the Dog" in 2005 and followed with "The Cartel" in 2015 (a sequel he swore he would never write).

Winslow's fiction has always been contemporaneous, immediate. Truth compacted into narrative by way of meticulous research.

The massacre of 19 women and children in a Baja beach town that served as the jumping off point for "The Power of the Dog" was based on actual events. As were the decapitations, dismemberments, gang rapes, tortures, executions, overdoses and two unforgettable scenes — one involving a bridge, the other a soccer ball — that followed.

Winslow synthesizes news reports into cohesive storylines. Not for exploitation, but for explanation. He wants to make sense out of horror. Give it context. 

And he does it without forgetting the blood price real people have paid — journalists, law enforcement officers, ranchers, politicians, users. As he did in "The Cartel," Winslow opens "The Border" with a list of the dead; journalists murdered for telling the truth of the drug war. 

But never before has Winslow served as a kind of cultural soothsayer the way he does in "The Border." And that is saying something. This is the guy who wrote a fictional account about the head of the Sinaloa cartel "escaping" (buying his way out) from a Mexican prison a month before drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman did it in real life. 

This time it feels as if Winslow is breaking news, scenes seemingly play out in real time: Partisan politics that have turned the Mexican-American border into a wedge issue; the migrant caravan; the separation of children from their parents; the cartel's transition to heroin from coke; a president who commands by Twitter (so closely modeled on Donald Trump that they share the same tweets).

"The Border" offers dozens of story arcs. We follow an undercover cop in New York City, an inmate forging new allegiances among prison gangs, the up-and-coming kingpins who play tough in emulation of their fathers with terrible results and the Wall Street hedge fund manager coerced into flipping.

Harrowing, but with hope

But the most haunting and beautifully rendered scenes take us deep into Guatemala City slums, where a 10-year-old boy ekes out a living fighting other denizens for trash treasures at the dump. When the deadly street gangs tap him for servitude (at the threat of his mother's rape), the boy escapes on La Bestia,the migrant train that carves its way through Central America and into Mexico. It's a harrowing journey, but not without hope.

The book's primary set piece is once more taken from real-life events, the disappearance of 43 students during a 2014 protest at a teaching college in the Mexican state of Guerrero. Officially, the students are missing, their remains never found.

Winslow borrows accounts from investigative journalists who say the students were murdered by federal and state police after they commandeered a bus that was being used to transport $2 million dollars worth of heroin for the cartel: Their bodies were incinerated, pieces scattered in a river.

"The Border" spans five years beginning in 2012. It opens where "The Cartel" left off, with defrocked DEA agent Art Keller walking out of a Guatemalan jungle and away from a massacre he helped orchestrate (again).

It's a devil's bargain. To end the sectarian violence that made Mexico into an abattoir (100,000 dead), Keller devised a scheme to take out the heads of the warring cartels. In so doing, he created a vacuum of power that the next generation of cartel leaders will fight to fill. And fight they do.

Keller is nobody's fool. He accepts what he's done and wants nothing more than to retreat to a Mexican town near ravaged Juarez and live out his days with Marisol Cisneros, a former politician who was brutalized for opposing the drug lords.

But the drug-war isn't done with Keller. The cartels are taking notice of America's new love affair with opiates and have decided to undercut the pharmaceutical market with cheaper, more powerful drugs: heroin with a fentanyl twist. Almost overnight, cartels abandon marijuana and cocaine and shift focus to poppy fields.

A politician offers Keller a chance to assuage his guilt, an assignment not on the front lines of the drug war but as a general heading the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Jump to Washington DC.

Keller takes his brief seriously. He puts in motion a two-pronged plan to trace the heroin pipeline from street dealers in New York City to suppliers in Mexico while simultaneously targeting the banks and investment firms laundering drug money. Drugs come north, money goes south.

That puts him on a collision course with TV-reality star turned presidential candidate John Dennison and his son, real estate investor Jason Lerner. While Dennison vilifies Mexicans as "bad hombres" (yes, that verbiage makes it into the book), Lerner desperately tries to salvage a highly leveraged New York City plaza development.

Dennision stokes his base with rhetoric while Lerner turns to Mexican lenders to create a syndicate of investors and launder a hundred million dollars for the cartel. 

It's impossible to ignore the parallels to Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And agree with it or not, it makes for heady political fiction, for which Winslow is fearlessly unapologetic.

Political fire

Winslow in the past year has waged a one-man Twitter war against Trump over his border policies, with near daily Tweets criticizing the administration. Winslow's position after 20 years researching and writing about the drug war: The Wall is a stunt that won't stop the flow of drugs into America. Walls have gates, he says.

"The Border" could easily have been called "The Wall." It is to Winslow's credit that he opted for something less divisive, interpretative. Walls are fixed in place, solid barriers. Borders are ephemeral, laws scratched in sand, moral boundaries we choose to cross. 

Each of the books in Winslow's drug-war saga has a different focus. "The Power of the Dog" was about interdiction. It offered a front-line perspective, from the burning of poppy fields in the 1970s to the early days of the cartels and the crack epidemic that made kingpins out of cocaine cowboys.

"The Cartel" documented the toll of the drug wars. More than anything, it was about consequences of failed policies. Visceral and terrifying, it offered an experience through the eyes of victims on both sides of the border. 

"The Border" puts politics front and center. As equally unforgiving as its predecessors, it puts the onus square on the shoulders of the American public and asks you to consider some hard truths about addiction.

Part two of the book opens with a chapter called "The Acela," which should be considered essential reading, if not required reading, for every American. It's here that Winslow diagrams the intersection of drugs and money and lays it out with a simple equation. 

Keller is on a train blowing through a landscape of urban decay; closed mills, abandoned buildings, graffiti-tagged billboards.

"It's tempting to think the root causes of the heroin epidemic are in Mexico...but the real source is right here and in scores of smaller cities and towns."Opiates are a response to pain.

"Physical pain, emotional, economic pain.

"He's looking at all three.

"The Heroin Trifecta."

Don Winslow 

What: Join Arizona Republic reporter Robert Anglen with author Don Winslow, who will discuss and sign his new book, 'The Border' 

When: 7 p.m. Monday, Feb.. 25. 

Where: The Poisoned Pen Bookstore, 4014 N. Goldwater Blvd, Scottsdale

Admission: Free, $28.99 for the book

Details: 480-947-2974, poisonedpenevents.com.

RELATED: An interview with Don Winslow

Today's Tune: Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers 2006-09-21 - Gainesville, FL

Pope Francis Declares War On Sex Abuse

By ROD DREHER

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pope-francis-war-sex-abuse-catholicism/

February 24, 2019

Pope Francis celebrates Mass at the Vatican, Sunday, Feb. 24, 2019. Pope Francis celebrated a final Mass to conclude his extraordinary summit of Catholic leaders summoned to Rome for a tutorial on preventing clergy sexual abuse and protecting children from predator priests. The Mass was celebrated Sunday in the Sala Regia, one of the grand, frescoed reception rooms of the Apostolic Palace. (Giuseppe Lami/Pool Photo via AP)

There he goes again:

Pope Francis ended a landmark Vatican meeting on clerical sexual abuse with an appeal “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors,” which he compared to human sacrifice, but his speech did not offer concrete policy remedies demanded by many of the faithful.

In the speech at the end of a Mass in the Apostolic Palace’s frescoed Sala Reggia hall, Francis argued that “even a single case of abuse” in the Roman Catholic Church — which he said was the work of the devil — must be met “with the utmost seriousness.” He said that eradicating the scourge required more than legal processes and “disciplinary measures.”

“To combat this evil that strikes at the very heart of our mission,” the pope said, the church needed to protect children “from ravenous wolves.”

Right. You been following the new scandal with Francis protege Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta of Argentina? Francis knew that this guy was a sex maniac, but brought him to Rome anyway. The other day, an Argentine newspaper published photos proving that the matter went all the way to Rome — in other words, that the Pope knew that he was dealing with a bishop who, among other things, molested seminarians under his authority.

True, Francis in his Rome speech today focused on the sexual abuse of minors. And, according to reporting in National Catholic Register, the guidelines the pontiff offered in his speech are sensible. They are:

Building upon the World Health Organization’s “Seven Strategies for Ending Violence against Children,” the pope presented eight guidelines to aid the Church in “developing her legislation” on the issues.

The eight guidelines can be summarized as follows:

1. A “change of mentality” to focus on protecting children rather than “protecting the institution.”
2. A recognition of the “impeccable seriousness” of these “sins and crimes of consecrated persons.”
3. A genuine purification beginning with “self-accusation.”
4. Positive formation of candidates for the priesthood in the virtue of chastity.
5. Strengthening and reviewing of guidelines by episcopal conferences, reaffirming the need for “rules.”
6. The accompaniment of those who have been abused with an emphasis on listening.
7. Ensure that seminarians and clergy are not enslaved to an addiction to pornography.
8. Combat sexual tourism around the world.

Fine. But as we know from the McCarrick story, seminarians are at the complete mercy of their bishop. Who gains by Francis focusing narrowly and exclusively on priests who prey on minors, and only on minors?

Just before this meeting, the Catholic journalist Phil Lawler wrote about how it was going to be primarily a public relations exercise, and identified the aspects of the scandal that Francis and his Rome meeting would avoid talking about:

• homosexual influence within the clergy;

• why the Vatican has eased penalties on abusive priests;

• why the Pope himself has promoted bishops accused of covering up—and in some cases actively engaging in—sexual abuse;

• canonical structures to hold bishops accountable for negligence;

• how Theodore McCarrick rose to ecclesiastical influence, and who protected him.

We are seventeen years past the Boston scandal revelations, which brought this crisis to public view. There have been many good words spoken by popes. Here’s Pope John Paul II, from his address to the US cardinals on April 23, 2002, with the abuse scandal mushrooming in the US:

The abuse which has caused this crisis is by every standard wrong and rightly considered a crime by society; it is also an appalling sin in the eyes of God. To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern…

It must be absolutely clear to the Catholic faithful, and to the wider community, that Bishops and superiors are concerned, above all else, with the spiritual good of souls. People need to know that there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young. They must know that Bishops and priests are totally committed to the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality, a truth as essential to the renewal of the priesthood and the episcopate as it is to the renewal of marriage and family life.

At this point, though, do people take words from popes seriously? I’m not asking in a trolling way. How are people to believe that the pope is really serious this time about cracking down on clerical sex abuse when he behaves the way he has done in the Zanchetta affair. It suggests pretty clearly that the abuse Francis cares about is abuse of minors. If bishops want to force themselves on seminarians, well, that’s not such a big deal, is it? Just to make clear you understand what the Zanchetta affair involves, the Associated Press reports today:

The Associated Press has reported that the Vatican knew as early as 2015 about Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta’s inappropriate behavior with seminarians. Yet he was allowed to stay on as bishop of the northern Argentine diocese of Oran on until 2017, when he resigned suddenly, only to be given a top job at the Vatican by Francis, his confessor.

New documents published by the Tribune of Salta newspaper show that the original 2015 complaint reported that Zanchetta had gay porn on his cellphone involving “young people” having sex, as well as naked images of Zanchetta masturbating that he sent to others.

The age of the “young people” isn’t clear. But Francis told his summit Sunday that Vatican legislation criminalizing possession of child porn involving children under age 14 should change to include older victims.

“We now consider that this age limit should be raised in order to expand the protections of minors and to bring out the gravity of these deeds,” Francis said.

It wasn’t clear if Francis was referring to the Zanchetta case, which is now under investigation by both the Vatican and Argentine judicial authorities after alleged victims came forward accusing Zanchetta of sexual abuse.

The Vatican has insisted that Zanchetta was only facing “governance” problems at the time of his 2017 resignation and appointment at the Vatican, and that the first sexual abuse allegation was made in late 2018.

The documents, however, make clear that the Vatican was aware of inappropriate sexual behavior by Zanchetta two years before he resigned.

For those keeping score, I am getting close to the end of Frederic Martel’s In The Closet Of The Vatican. His reporting on corruption under the pontificate of John Paul II is at times based on more solid ground than what I’ve read previously in this book, but the whole thing is still deeply compromised by Martel’s stunning lack of journalistic professionalism. A small note: I know almost nothing about Spain, but I found three errors of fact in his chapter on the Spanish church. He keeps reminding us in his narrative about how many researchers he had on this book. Either he’s lying about that, or they did a very poor job, or the publisher rushed it to publication.

I’ll write more about the book when I complete it, but here is a harsh critique of it from the Catholic left; I am not a fan of Michael Sean Winters’s commentaries, but in this case, he’s right about how bad this book is. I predicted — wrongly, as it turns out — that In The Closet Of The Vatican would overshadow coverage of the Rome meeting. Had it been a more credible book, it would have. But it didn’t for the same reasons that The New York Times is not the same thing as the National Enquirer.

Anyway, I recognize that I’m very, very jaded about this topic, but I don’t understand how Catholics can take their leadership seriously on this issue anymore. If you are a Catholic who does believe that the pope and the bishops can be trusted now to get it right, I invite you to explain why. To be perfectly clear: I’m not taunting at all; I honestly want to know.

The loss of credibility of the hierarchy is one reason why I believe faithful Catholics have got to take some form of the Benedict Option. That’s what the young Catholic of the self-described “Resistance” in Spain are doing. They do not repudiate the institutional Church — if they did, they would cease to be Catholics — but they no longer expect anything from them. Instead, they are taking responsibility for educating and forming themselves as faithful orthodox Catholics, and building community. From that post:

“We used to be the defender of all this,” Ramon said. “The church is mediocre. The church was the first to betray the true Spanish spirit. … The Church has been unfaithful to its mission many times. Who abandoned the Cristeros? The Church. We know the Church is made of men, and they betray Christ constantly. We are men, and we betray Christ constantly. We have a lot of history of the betrayal of clerics. We don’t care now.”

We don’t care now. Those words struck me like a gong. These young men struck me as pious and sincere Catholics who, because of their piety and sincerity, don’t really care what their bishops think of them.

In his speech in Rome today, Francis called for an “all-out battle” against sexual abuse of minors, but the metaphor rings hollow for these young Spanish Catholics I talked to last month. More:

Ramon told me that “the deeper battle is the one people can’t see.” The battle for authority, he says, is lost. Though all the young men I spoke with are strongly Catholic, they have given up expecting their bishops to do anything about the crisis. They feel like spiritual orphans.

“We have no shepherds right now,” he said. “What would a soldier do if he can’t see the captain? He would be a guerrilla. He would assemble all those who fight for the flag, even if they’re under different uniforms. [For us, it’s] the Cross, and Spain, and Tradition.”

UPDATE: Ramon e-mails to emphasize that he and his friends are faithful Catholics who believe the Church is holy. It’s only that they have no faith in the competence of the current generation of hierarchical leadership. That is not the same thing as disbelieving in the authority of the hierarchy itself. As Catholics, they accept the legitimacy of the hierarchy … but think the current hierarchy is a mess.

It seems to me that this, and some version of the Benedict Option, is the only reasonable conclusion left to Catholics who still believe in Catholicism, and want to see it prevail through this great crisis, of which the sexual corruption of the clergy is only one manifestation. Tell me what you think. Catholic readers, did the Rome meeting, and the pope’s closing speech, make you more confident that the institutional Church is going to get itself sorted out?