Squinting into the hazy sunlight, one of the federales turned and said he thought he recognized the driver from the bars downtown.

How did Constanzo convince people of his powers, and how did the very structure (and corruption) of the police and their internal politics allow such a man to stay at large for so long? At thirty-five, the boyish Benitez had a fearsome reputation, viewed by his enemies and his peers alike as uniquely dangerous — because he rarely could be bought. It follows the lives of some very sick and what I consider insane individuals, illuminating the dangers of life on the boarder between the US and Mexico and the drug and cult involvement of those individuals.Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, it is a riveting true story about an epic court case on the teaching of ‘intelligent design,’ and what happens when science and religion collide. The four Hernandez brothers built their drug business gradually over a decade and they had prospered — until the cleverest brother, Saul, was shot in 1987. At night, others travel the road, silently and invisibly, the headlights on their new pickup trucks doused when they reach a certain spot, a certain dirt turnoff to a moon-silvered ranch. It’s a powerful story, well told, chilling and haunting, and it leaves the reader wiser and far more disturbed. the book covers the early life and up bringing of the cult leader and how he rose to power using magic, and eventually capturing the young blonde spring breaker who was partying in mexico, tortured and killed him along with many many others.

The late afternoon was stifling, the roadside grit rasped under the agents' eyelids and between their teeth. The young, dark-haired man behind the wheel of the new Chevy pickup stared straight ahead — not oblivious, exactly, but simply ignoring the agents.His other works include the bestseller MISSISSIPPI MUD: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia, GARBOLOGY: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash, BURNED, which helped free a woman imprisoned for life because of flawed forensic science, and the PEN Award-winning NO MATTER HOW LOUD I SHOUT: A Year In the Life of Juvenile Court. Whole families entered the drug business, blood ties spawning trust, generation following generation on that serpentine road of contraband and wealth. April Fool's Day of 1989 had been a wearying day of lifting grimy spare tires from wheel wells, of poking through truck beds piled high with manure, of questioning the touristas peering owlishly from behind their sunglasses. In writing this book, I had access to the investigators who made the case, and to Leasure himself as he sat in jail and handicapped his own trial day after day. An excellent study of the Matamoros murders from many angles -- the vicissitudes of the police, the motivations of the killers and their dupes, the interpretations of the families who lost someone to the drug gang.

What Lynne Sposito soon discovered were bizarre connections to the Dixie Mafia, a predatory band of criminals who ran The Strip, Biloxi’s beachfront hub of sex, drugs, and sleaze. It is extremely well written, and I found the book very dark, but I still could not put this book down until the very end.The violence described was enough to show the depravity of a madman, but not so much that it read like some over-the-top gross-out horror flick. You can hear them on the weekend in the town square, belting out the traditional Mexican ballad, in which the chorus concludes, over and over: "Life is worth nothing. True crime by its very nature is concerned with the evil in our world, but Buried Secrets has more than its fair share. Although others have written of the mass killings in Matamoros, Mexico, between 1985 and 1988, Pulitzer Prize winner Humes of the Orange County Register in California offers here the definitive study.