No Way Back

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My books always seem to start out as simply a story line and then grow into something far more personal. In this one, the transformation came about through the character of Lauritzia Velez, and the divulging of her tragic past. Lauritzia was loosely based on a newspaper editorial I came across about the travails of Edmond Demiraj, an Albanian immigrant who agreed to testify against a ruthless Albanian killer, who then suffered a bloody and terrible revenge enacted against him and his family. Cast aside by the U.S. government and denied asylum, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, where rightly, during the actual writing of this book, the wrong was righted, and Demiraj was finally granted asylum in the United States. I’ve taken some liberties with his personal story and adapting it into Lauritzia’s. But to me it became an anthem of not only the innocent victims of narco-terror, but of the horrors of a worldwide criminal enterprise that is out of control.

Several published works were truly helpful in writing this book, and I name them with appreciation: To Die in Mexico, Dispatches from Inside the Drug War by John Gibler (City Lights Books, 2011); Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family by Charles Bowden (Simon & Schuster, 2003); “The Kingpins” by William Finnegan, published in The New Yorker Magazine, July 2, 2012; and “Narco Americano” by T. J. English, published in Playboy magazine. All the writings graphically portray the tragedies of drug violence in Mexico and our own country’s ambivalent policies that have not curtailed the problem.

I’d also like to thank my dedicated team at William Morrow: Henry Ferris, Lynn Grady, Danielle Barrett, Cole Hager, and Liate Stehlik, along with Julia Wisdom in the U.K., not only for their wisdom in improving what is between the covers, but for their commitment and energies in advancing this, and all my books, to market. And to Roy Grossman for his perception in the early drafts. And to Simon Lipskar and Joe Volpe at Writers House for continuing to make me feel like the most important person in the room.

And to my wife, Lynn, who daily makes me feel like the most important person in the room, though I am usually the only one in it.