Mule: My Dangerous Life As A Drug Smuggler Turned Dea Informant

by C. A. Heifner, Adam Rocke

Overview

An inside look at the gritty, brutal world of Mexican drug trafficking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762780280
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/2012
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.58(w) x 7.82(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

C. A. Heifner earned his MBA in economics from the University of Texas at El Paso. Feature articles about him have appeared in Bluff, Mob Candy, and the New York Times, among other publications. He is now a motivational speaker.

Table of Contents

Playlist vi

1 In the End 1

2 The Fear 5

3 Devil in Disguise 18

4 Smuggler's Blues 30

5 Hate It or Love It 41

6 Mo' Money, Mo' Problems 50

7 Hotel California 62

8 Changes 74

9 H to the Izzo 85

10 Somewhere I Belong 97

11 Meant to Live 105

12 Blurry 115

13 Extreme Ways 126

14 Beautiful Disaster 137

15 Let's Go Crazy 149

16 Fuck tha Police 160

17 Time Marches On 169

18 Take This Job and Shove It 178

19 If It Ain't Ruff 187

20 Bring Me to Life 198

21 Dammit, Man 207

22 Reeling in the Years 213

23 My Home's in Alabama 222

24 Killing in the Name 230

25 We Don't Need Another Hero 239

26 My Way 249

27 Renegade 257

Epilogue 266

Editorial Reviews

A very real first-hand account of the gritty, brutal world of trafficking. Heifner’s incredible journey will transport you into the pounding heart of the War on Drugs. You won’t want to put this book down.”
—Robert Mazur, former DEA agent and author of The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel

“Mule contains all the dread, angst, and psychological terror of a Hitchcock movie. It’s a must read for people interested in the US–Mexico drug trade.”
—Howard Campbell, professor of anthropology and author of Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez

From the Publisher

Melodramatic account of a marijuana smuggler who switched sides. El Paso–based motivational speaker Heifner asserts that his criminal involvement followed a limited arc. Over several months, he accepted a number of missions from his flashy, vulgar college friend Jake, driving carloads of cannabis across the Mexican border. When arrested, the author received a light sentence of probation and deferred adjudication and a visit from DEA agents, which inspired the none-too-thoughtful Jake to threaten Heifner and his family's lives. This led him to volunteer as a DEA informant in order to keep his family safe. The author works to document Jake's connection to large loads of pot, even while redeeming himself by returning to school and reconciling with his harried wife. Although Heifner endeavors to get inside his paranoid, angst-ridden mindset, the prose is too hasty--much of the narrative reads like a Maxim true-crime article expanded to book length, with artificial dialogue and a constant stream of cliché and overheated language ("I was a wrecking ball, and everyone else was a straw house"). The lack of verisimilitude is also unfortunate. Heifner does not explicitly identify many of the characters or cases (other than an epilogue that mentions the arrest of Jake's partner), and conveniently, Jake disappeared and is presumed dead. Heifner is an unsympathetic protagonist, as he expresses contempt for the incompetent cops and criminals around him, trumpeting his own superior intelligence rather than looking for nuance or irony in his circumstances, and he portrays minor characters in terms verging on sexist or racist caricature. Adds little to our understanding of violent international drug smuggling.

Kirkus Reviews