Ioan Grillo

In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil’s biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a crystal meth maker is venerated as a saint while imposing Old Testament justice on his...

"An eye-opening and riveting account of how guns make it into the black market and into the hands of criminals and drug lords." --Adam Winkler From the author of El Narco and winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, a searing investigation into the enormous black market for firearms, essential to cartels and gangs in the drug trade and contributing...

'War' is no exaggeration in discussing the bloodshed that has terrorised Mexico in the past decades. As rival cartels battle for control of a billion-dollar drug trade, the body count—23,000 dead in five years—and sheer horror beggar the imagination of journalistic witnesses. Cartel gunmen have shot up schools and rehabilitation centres, and murdered the entire families of those who defy...