1 out of 4 stars
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As his friends from Mexico said, “Gringo stupido” sums it up.
Gringo” My Life on the Edge as an International Fugitive has 340 pages. This is the first book by this author.
Gringo: My Life on the Edge as an International Fugitive is the memoirs of Dan “Tito” Davis, and his life on the run from the DEA, and Federales. Dan started selling drugs in college, and the money was great, but not good enough. He had to get more product to sell to more contacts. He got caught by DEA, but he didn’t get as much time as the DEA would have liked, and they were not happy. He got sent to a prison on the west coast. When he got out of prison he started selling marijuana, which was just a repeat for the life before prison, but a different drug. His best friend was partners with a meth cook, but when he got caught he told the DEA officials that the meth was Dan’s. Dan wasn’t dealing meth, but he was a big marijuana distributor. Dan, being told that he could get thirty years in prison, left the United States for Mexico, where his friends there called him “Gringo stupido”. He was on the run for thirteen years.
The places Dan, the author, described, at times were horrid. The author didn’t give as much detail as I thought was needed to get a good feel for the places or the people. The one place that sounded nice was El Yaque in Venezuela, but still, it needed a little more description of the area the buildings and the people there. Dan did give details about his life on the run, but it seemed like he was always playing the victim.
I didn’t like the fact that Dan, later called Tito, by his wife, seemed to discard women like old shirts. Except for the first wife who divorced him, he seemed to take advantage of the women he met then he forgot about them, including his mother.
I was upset with his thoughtless attitude. After getting out of prison the first time, he couldn’t find a job. His mom came to his rescue. She talked to a developer and within days mother and son had a small ice cream parlor. They expanded and started selling pizza. They worked seven days a week from seven in the morning until midnight. The was seasonal and when the snow started he left for Las Vegas. I speculated what happened to his mom and the coffee shop, which he never addressed.
This book needs editing as it has many errors. Some of the errors I found were the paragraph headings for the first sentence in each chapter were off. The start of a sentence would just end to be picked up in the next paragraph. There was one place in the book where the sentence was repeated, but then the next part of the sentence didn’t make sense, it was as if the part repeated was supposed to have been something else.
My rating for Gringo: My Life on the Edge as an International Fugitive is 1 out of 4 stars. I feel like there were just too many things wrong with the book to give it a three or a four rating. I didn’t think there was enough substance in the places he visited to get a good feel for the book or the other characters in the book, so I couldn’t give him a rating of two. I did think El Yaque was interesting, though it needed more details, so that led me to give it a rating of 1.
This book would not be appropriate for young adult readers because of the drugs and violence. People who like memoirs may enjoy this book.
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Gringo
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I can just imagine the frustration! 
