THE SLENDER HISPANIC male, veiled in a hooded sweatshirt and dark pants with short black cropped hair, stealthily approached the large beige house—a pistol tucked in the small of his back. It was December 12, 2011, in the city of Arcadia, a wealthy suburban Los Angeles bedroom community, nestled against the San Gabriel foothills. The man slipped around the corner of the three-car-garage, to the single side-door. There he pressed his weight into the door and frame, forcing it

THE TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD slipped his U.S. Passport to the female agent at the Orlando International Airport Customs desk. From behind the counter the stern woman carefully compared the data on the screen before her to Jacob Diaz’s travel documents. Her eyes bounced between the handsome baby faced young college student—a Mexican-American with the uncharacteristic features of an Anglo—returning from Acapulco and the monitor. When the agent inquired if the young man had anything

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE ROUND UP, a pop-country dance club located just outside Tampa's city limits. The place was packed with drunken southern belles line dancing to Blake Shelton's Redneck Girl underneath the disco balls and duhalf naked strippers in Stetsons, seductively slow riding the mechanical bull. My high school buddies and I had been drinking rum and Coke and snorting oxys most of the night. I was 17-years-old and more than buzzed, dancing with a twentysomething, rave