In 2009, journalist Charles Bowden sat down in a motel room with a man who had personally buried 250 bodies in Juárez, Mexico. He was a former state police officer turned cartel sicario who spent nearly two decades kidnapping, torturing, and killing for an organization he could never fully see or name. Bowden had spent years trying to get to this story. What he walked away with was one of the most chilling first-person accounts of cartel life ever put on paper.

Bowden's writing pulls no punches: the sicario speaks plainly about his craft, his conscience, and the system that made him. The result is a piece that's as much about the machinery of violence as it is about one man's attempt to reconcile what he's done. We don't let him off easy, and neither does Bowden.

⚠️Content Warning: This episode contains graph ...