Down by the river: drugs, money, murder, and family - charles bowden

An extraordinary new book of investigative reporting seven years in the making.

Down by the River chronicles the bewildering and brutal events surrounding a still-unsolved 1995 murder in El Paso, Texas.

Lionel Bruno Jordan was murdered on January 20, 1995, in an El Paso parking lot, but he keeps coming back as the key to a multibillion-dollar drug industry, two corrupt governments -- one called the United States and the other Mexico -- and a self-styled War on Drugs that is a fraud.

Beneath all the policy statements and bluster of politicians is a real world of lies, pain, and big money.

Down by the River is the true narrative of how a murder led one American family into this world and how it all but destroyed them.

It is the story of how one Mexican drug leader outfought and outthought the U.

government, of how major financial institutions were fattened on the drug industry, and how the governments of the U.

and Mexico buried everything that happened.

All this happens down by the river, where the public fictions finally end and the facts read like fiction.

This is a remarkable American story about drugs, money, murder, and family.