Former Portlander Pens Extraordinary Tale Of Cuban Baseball Phenom

By now, most sports fans are familiar with Yasiel Puig, the prodigiously talented Cuban defector whose electrifying skills pumped life into the moribund Los Angeles Dodgers last year.

But the story that Jesse Katz tells in the current edition of Los Angeles magazine—it's full of shakedowns, Mexican mobsters, crooked human traffickers and a bullet-riddled corpse—is straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel.

Local talent alert: Katz, the son of former Oregon House Speaker and three-term Portland Mayor Vera Katz, grew up in Portland. He was Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Los Angeles Times before leaving to write magazine articles and books.

Katz dug up a ton of new information about the bargain Puig struck to win his freedom.

Here's a taste of what he found:

WWeek 2015