Very fast paced book about a man who starts cooperation with Cali narco cartel in order to defeat Escobar only to be pulled ever deeper into crime life.

When he becomes aware that he no longer can leave the cartel alive he decides it is time to survive - and as a consequence decides to bring the cartel down.

Story is very fast paced and if it weren't for all the actual deaths and atrocities it would make a fantastic fiction thriller.

Recommended to everyone interested in criminal organizations and thrillers. ( )

Jorge Salcedo has big brass balls. Salcedo became the head of security for the Cali cocaine cartel and gradually was drawn deeper and deeper into the dark, violent side of the cartel. His only possible escape was to bargain with the DEA and betray his cartel bosses. William C. Rempel does a remarkable job in telling this story. He doesn't make Salcedo out to be a hero, but a person who bargained with the devil and lost. I highly recommend this book to anyone wishing to understand the turmoil in Columbia over the past several decades due to the drug trade.

Thanks to Good Reads First Reads program for an early chance to read this book. ( )

This should have been a fast-paced popular history book on the Cali Cartel side of the Colombian drug wars and I suppose it must have been, although it wasn't fast-paced enough to keep my attention. It's decent narrative, but it sort of plods along and definitely suffers from being nowhere near as good as News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's probably not fair to compare the two, but I've decided that for me, News of a Kidnapping is the definitive word on the predations and destructiveness of the Colombian drug war. Just not the book for me. ( )

“At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Car­tel” by William C. Rem­pel is a non-fiction nar­ra­tive of the Cali drug car­tel in the 1990’s. The book is writ­ten in an inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism style.

Jorge Sal­cedo was an insider of the Cali car­tel. He per­son­ally saw to the safety of the heads of the fam­ily and became their elec­tronic secu­rity expert. Mr. Sal­cedo thinks of him­self as noble, he joined the car­tel to fight against the noto­ri­ous and bru­tal Pablo Esco­bar, head of the Medellin cartel.

Mr. Sal­cedo avoided deal­ing directly with cocaine and vio­lence, keep­ing his hand clean. How­ever the lifestyle slowly entrapped him with no way out. As the US admin­is­tra­tion began to get involved, the wide­spread cor­rup­tion which included the high ech­e­lons of gov­ern­ment, army, police and judi­ciary began to break and Mr. Sal­cedo was able to con­tact the DEA and help bring down the heads of the cartel.

“At the Devil's Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Car­tel” by William C. Rem­pel is a first rate book with a nar­row focus on the cen­tral char­ac­ter, Jorge Sal­cedo. Mr. Salcedo’s story and view­point are an amaz­ing insight into the world of the heads of the Cali car­tel family.

The author, Willam C. Rem­pel, is a respected reporter for the LA Times, he inter­viewed Mr. Sal­cedo over a num­ber of years, mostly by phone due to Mr. Salcedo’s sta­tus in the Fed­eral Wit­ness Pro­tec­tion Pro­gram. Mr. Rem­pel did cross­check the infor­ma­tion from court records and tes­ti­mony from other key fig­ures in this com­plex story.

The book has the all the strength of an inves­tiga­tive arti­cle with­out going into too much detail unless appro­pri­ate. It would have been easy for the author to divert from the story to the com­ment on the inter­na­tional drug trade, for exam­ple, but he didn’t and so the nar­ra­tive kept flow­ing smoothly and with­out interruptions.

While in some places the book does try to be lyri­cal, poetic or what­not using prose or adjec­tive, it mostly stays focused, easy to read and best of all, backed by solid data. The heart of the story lies in the tes­ti­mony, hon­esty and believ­abil­ity of Mr. Salcedo’s account. The eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony is not embell­ished or dra­ma­tized – it is sim­ply told as is.

The author found the rare bal­ance of writ­ing an inter­est­ing book and yet pep­per­ing it with ordi­nary details such as daily con­ver­sa­tions, ground lay­out and more. It is a dif­fi­cult task and I was amazed that the book held my inter­est throughout.

The book pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing insight into the world of drug trad­ing and the car­tels. A world where cor­rup­tion and vio­lence are not only the norms, but the pil­lars that hold it aloft.

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I just finished reading this book, and I want to quickly write, while it's still fresh in my mind, a short review. I'm not sure if this would be called 'True Crime' (if so, it's big crime), a memoir, or the telling of a historical moment in recent Colombian history. The book's editor calls it a 'nonfiction thriller'. It would be an understatement to say it held my interest. By the end of the book, I was hardly able to breathe, let alone put it down.

It's the tale of a man's involvement with the Cali Cartel in the early to mid-1990s. In 1989, Jorge Salcedo was invited to work on security for the Rodriguez Orejuela family to protect the women and children against violent threats from Pablo Escobar. The men of this family were among the main godfathers of the Cali Cartel which was in direct competition with Escobar over the international drug trade. Since Salcedo hated Escobar, and he believed that he was being hired to do something that did not involve himself in their illegal trade and violence, he agreed. As time went on, he found himself more and more entangled and trapped in their illegal and violent operations. He began looking for a way out and realized that they weren't going to just let him quit. In the end, he was able to help nab the heads of the cartel with the help of the U.S.'s DEA agents which allowed him and his family to escape to the U.S. where they continue to live with a new identity. His story is told by William Rempel, an investigative journalist from the Los Angeles Times.

I was blown away by the power that the cartel had, the amount of money that they made, and how far-reaching their syndicate went, reaching from Colombia into other South and Central American countries into the United States. The size of their operations made the book almost read like fiction, unbelievable that they would have a dump truck of money (literally!), or that they seemed able to bribe just about everyone from the military to the police to the government. They even successfully wiretapped the CIA. Enormous power.

I don't usually read this type of book and had requested it through the Early Reviewers list because I was interested in Colombia. My niece is living there and I wanted to know more about it. I found it so interesting that I am now going to start Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book 'News of a Kidnapping', the story of the kidnapping of ten people by Pablo Escobar. One book connects to another... This book gets a well-deserved rating of four stars. ( )