Trevino freely admitted to more than 800 murders, including one where he killed a man — and then forced the victim’s brother to dine on his slain sibling’s brains.
He and his well-trained, black-clad soldiers were engaged in a corpse-strewn battle with the Sinaloa Cartel for control of Laredo.
Dan Slater  tells the story of young hitman,  Reta. On a dusty, remote ranch across the Rio Grande from this Texas border town, an intimidating drug lord stood over 13-year-old Rosalio Reta and handed him a gun.
Reta didn’t know who the man was, but it was clear he instilled fear and commanded respect among everyone standing around watching the dramatic scene unfold.
The American teen had never before met anyone who carried a pistol adorned with such an unforgettable decoration: the number “40” encrusted in diamonds on the handle.
The cartel leader looked at Reta and ordered him to shoot and kill a man tied up on the ground. If he refused to murder the stranger, Reta recalls, the drug lord would have killed him.
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Rosalio Reta’s career as a teen drug cartel assassin had begun.
“I knew that my life had just changed forever,” Reta told CNN this week, 11 years later. “That’s a day that I’m never going to be able to forget. After that, I didn’t have no life.”
Reta’s boyhood friend Gabriel Cardona says he started his life as a criminal by stealing cars and selling them across the border in Mexico. He graduated to smuggling drugs and weapons across the Rio Grande. Cardona says it wasn’t long before he also became a drug cartel assassin. He was only 16.
Reta and Cardona agreed to give CNN rare interviews from the Texas prisons where both men are serving life sentences for murder. They offered a first-hand glimpse inside the sinister world of drug cartels, a world that plagues innocent people on both sides of the border.
17-year-old Gabriel Cardona , a poor kid from Laredo, was inducted along with 70 other Zetas recruits at a Mexican training camp in 2004. He was particularly valued as an American citizen who could cross the border with impunity.Colombian mercenaries taught the recruits combat skills — but the real test for the newbies was ahead: hands-on murder.
By this point, most recruits opted for non-combat duty. Cardona was one of the fewer than 20 still in training to become a sicario — an assassin.

He was given a choice of weapon, shovel, sledge-hammer or machete, along with a live Sinaloan captive. The weapon was used only to bring down the enemy.
Killing was done with your bare hands. It became addictive to some.
The teen assassins, dubbed the Wolf Boys by the author, earned $500 a week. The money came with commissions that reached as high as $10,000 if the target was high value.Cardona’s future became clear when he and a second American teen were assigned two $5,000 commission jobs in Laredo. The first target was a Mexican cop, Bruno Orozco, who’d defected from the Zetas to join a Sinaloan boss, Chuy Resendez, in Laredo.
The teens murdered Orozco by the side of a busy road in broad daylight. Most of the hastily assembled crew escaped, but Cardona landed up in the Laredo police station for questioning by Detective Robert Garcia.

Garcia had quit the DEA, thinking homicide in his hometown would free him from chasing narco-villains. But the body count on the streets of Laredo was soon to rise, in part due to the teen sitting across from him.
Cardona, after spinning a tale to explain his presence at the murder scene, was remarkable chatty about being a Zeta soldier. Yet he was soon free on bond.
Back in Nuevo Laredo, Cardona learned he was considered the most trusted sicario for difficult jobs. He was on a path to become commander of his own plaza in a Mexican city, with an annual income of $1 million.

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Cardona was now a comandante de mando in Laredo, free to recruit his own killing crew. He brought in his childhood pal, Rosito (Bart) Reta, who seemed to love the brutal work.
On orders to whack a heavyweight smuggler in Laredo, Reta reached into the car and blew the target’s brains out. The man’s wife caught shrapnel while their 3-year-old sat watching.

Cardona was unaware that Reta had joined the Zetas at 13, and was practically raised by the fearsome Trevino.
Reta earned the highest scores at camp, and Trevino deployed him throughout Mexico — where the boy soldier left no trace but a corpse.
Back in Nuevo Laredo, Cardona became edgy about Reta. His pal would call from the road, happily sharing details from a killing spree. Reta made so much in commissions that after winning a $70,000 Mercedes at one of the cartel’s parties, he tossed the keys to Cardona.In Laredo, panic was growing over the city’s disappearing young men. Since 2004, the FBI recorded 100 cases of American citizens going missing in Nuevo Laredo. And those were only the reported cases.
Cardona could account for at least two of the missing. On orders, he’d kidnapped two Sinaloa-affiliated American teenagers from a night club. He beat them to death.Garcia had meanwhile stepped up his investigation into Cardona. Then Reta started calling him, threatening the detective, his wife and kids. An Arizona cop delivered word that an informant reported there was a $500,000 bounty on the head of the Laredo homicide detective.
In April 2006, Cardona’s moment came when Forty ordered him to assemble the crew, the vehicles and the guns. The teen assassins were to descend on Laredo to “chase and slaughter” Forty’s Top 40 targets.
In Laredo, U.S. Attorney Angel Moreno and Garcia went into overdrive after getting wind of the impending massacre from an informant tasked with arranging a safe house.
The priority was wiretapping the house to learn the names on the list. Before a judge signed the papers, the hit squad found another squat. The panicked informant was suddenly out of touch.

In that time, the killers ticked Sinaloa boss Resendez off the list. Rising from the flatbed of a pickup truck, they splayed 90 rounds into his Dodge Ram on Highway 93.
The informer reconnected with the team, and they moved into the wired safe house. Oddly, no one grew suspicious even after the sudden appearance of cop cars interceded in an assassination as it was happening.
Cardona became aware he was being followed, although he seemed unconcerned. In a chat with a whiny girlfriend, he admitted his part in the Resendez hit — while investigators listened.
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The next day, Cardona told the informer the orders had come down. The target was someone named Checo, a Sinaloan smuggler, with details to come.
And then the stun grenade landed in the safe house, and the bust happened.
Meeing Gabriel Cardona behind bars presents a deceptive facade, it’s hard to imagine he could have been a lethal assassin. But then there are those eyes tattooed on his eyelids.
Cardona a notoriously effective killer for the Zetas, smiled when asked how many people he remembers killing for the Zetas.
“I have no idea,” Cardona said. “It’s a violent world.”
After some prodding, Cardona estimates he probably killed close to 30 people in less than two years.
Cardona and Reta say they were paid thousands of dollars a week just to be available — ready at all times to answer the call to kill.