Author(s): Peter Edwards; Luis Najera

True Crime

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, 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-ridden 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, a loosely collected band of mostly 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 in the east while fighting off the new generation of organized crime on Canada's west coast, the Wolfpack sought advantage. And they found it in a steady supply of cocaine from one of the most deadly and far-reaching of criminal organizations on the planet. This is the roiling landscape of The Wolfpack, a brilliant examination of a time of criminal disruption and rapid adaption, when one gang's unchecked ambition unwittingly gave away the most hotly contested corner of the Canadian underworld without a fight. Book jacket.