My name is Robert Mazur. I'm back to tell the whole story of how I went undercover laundering tens of millions
of dollars for drug cartels. And this is how crime works. Money laundering enables cartels to produce the most lethal thing that they produce around the
world, and that's corruption. It enables them to be
able to control countries, presidents of countries. Operation C-Chase was a
multiagency task force to prosecute the biggest money launderers of the Medellín cartel. Most of the people
I dealt with were high-level drug traffickers who had hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm doing this interview in silhouette because two agencies and an
intelligence agency informed me that the Medellín cartel
issued a contract on my life. I worked long-term undercover
in Operation C-Chase from 1986 to 1988, infiltrating
the Medellín cartel as one of their money launderers. Went through psychological profiling, went through the undercover schools, was blessed with tremendous training from forme
r long-term undercover agents, including a man who's now a friend of mine by the name of Joe Pistone, who in the book and the movie
Donnie Brasco is based upon. After getting that training, I spent a year and a half putting together what I think is one of the
more sophisticated fronts used in undercover. I built the persona of Robert Musella. I dressed the part,
certainly had the lifestyle. Drove a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Jaguar. I was embedded in real businesses. Had an air-charter service
with
a private jet. We had a jewelry chain with 30
locations on the East Coast. A lot of cash goes through
the Diamond District every single day. So if you've got those
kinds of businesses, you have a very good excuse
for where the cash came from. I was embedded in an investment company, a mortgage-brokerage business, and even a brokerage firm with a seat on the New
York Stock Exchange. And then I and my partner
began a two-year infiltration of the Medellín cartel and the banks that were supporting t
hem. There are different ways of
creating false identities. Some can be based upon actual deaths, and some can be based upon other ways. Every single undercover identity I had started with the first name Robert, because I'm just a simple-minded guy, that if you say Robert, I'm looking. I'm looking to see if you called me. So "Javier" would not work for me. And then the last name has to be Italian American. I take very strongly, I
guess, the appearance from — my family is 100% Italian on one side
and 100% Polish on the other side. Actually, the way the
name Musella came to me, I had been working on a prior case. I was a courier for a fake cocaine group. My job was to carry suitcases
of cash into a casino that was laundering drug money and to deal with the owner
and the manager of the casino that were laundering. And they were working with a
drug-trafficking organization that we also infiltrated. When we took the case down,
we did search warrants, and one of the things we found was a fol
der with 250 false identities that had been put together. Some in earlier stages, some in later. I looked through there for one that would be close to my birth. There was Robert Musella. One of the keys to doing undercover work is to build your undercover persona to have as many traits
as you do in common. Robert Musella was from Staten Island. I'm from Staten Island. Robert Musella was a businessman. I have a business background. I didn't fake accents, fake anything. I was always just me. The f
irst person I met that was working within
the Medellín cartel was a gentleman by the
name of Gonzalo Mora, a small-time money launderer who had an import-export business, but the capacity he had to
launder was probably limited to about $50,000 a week at best. We had my partner, Emir, deal with him and simply say, "Listen, my
boss handles a lot of this, but he never wants to meet you. He wants to stay in the shadows. But if you could ever convince him to come out of the shadows,
the rivers would
open, and you'd be able to launder
untold amounts of money." By the end of that six months, Gonzalo Mora was banging
on the door to meet me. You know, it's always
best to play hard to get. I also knew these people
have a sixth sense. If you're afraid of a dog, they know that. You're the first one they bite. I didn't want to get bit. So I knew that I would be working against myself and undermining my cause if I showed any fear whatsoever. The thing I had in my advantage was, like anybody involved
in crime,
he was motivated by greed. And I told him eventually, "Listen, I have to get these people to understand that they need to let me
invest some of their money. Your only responsibility
is to introduce me to them. If I succeed, we'll even
do business bigger." He felt compelled to
make the introductions, and then I started to climb up the ladder to meet bigger and bigger
people within the cartels. We fully expected to
prosecute the intermediaries, the bankers, dirty lawyers, the couriers w
ith the beneficial owners and to be able to prosecute them for not just money laundering,
but for drug trafficking. A classic example of that
is my meeting a person by the name of Roberto Alcaino, a major transporter of cocaine in the United States, Spain, and Italy. He and I got along extraordinarily well. If he hadn't been a drug trafficker, we'd probably been friends. In his mind, I think we were. And not only did I wind
up talking with him and working with him, with respect to the
laundering
of his drug money, but also of Fabio Ochoa's money and other people with whom he was working. He explained to me that
they had a lab in Bolivia that was producing thousands of kilograms of cocaine a month. We were able to identify a
40-foot container of seafood, commercially packed anchovies in cans, that he'd sent from Buenos Aires to Camden, New Jersey, where it was to be trucked to
Chelsea in lower Manhattan, put into a warehouse. Agents were able to be there when he showed up in Chelsea at
the warehouse, and he got arrested. That was a seizure of
2,300 pounds of cocaine and the arrest of a very
important transporter who had a contract with the cartel to move thousands and
thousands of kilos a year. I met other people like him, and we had similar success with them. Of course, Pablo Escobar was
the chief executive officer. There were other individuals who were on what I would consider to
be the board of the cartel: the Ochoa family, Rodriguez
Gacha, Carlos Lehder. There were other p
eople on
the high side with Fabio, and he would get 5,000 kilos for US and 2,000 for Europe, and he had the responsibility of getting that there. He also had a relationship where, if they had dope in the United States, he would distribute it for them at a cost of 20% of the shipment. So let's say there was 1,000 kilos. He would get 200 of the kilos. They would get the money from the rest. 200 kilos at that time, that's going for probably $15,000 a kilo. You know, money launderers
like I played t
he role of are basically operating what's called the black-money market. It's an informal banking
system that's made available to people who operate
through the underground. So, as a black-money-market operator, I have a supply of dollars. My supply comes from drug traffickers. Now I have to find people who
have a demand for dollars. People who want to buy dollars are oftentimes importers around the world who otherwise have to go
through their central bank and spend 25% of their money
to officia
lly get dollars. I could sell it to them for 10%. My traffickers, in many
instances, wanted Colombian pesos. So the best people I could
sell those dollars to were Colombian importers. All I have to do is swap. So I had supply clients,
traffickers, and demand clients. But most often the money would
wind up into bank accounts controlled by the cartel in Panama, and from there, they
distributed around the world wherever they wanted to hide it. In some instances, I
know it went to Germany. Millions
of dollars went
into a bank in Germany that they had relationships with. Well, sometimes the money
had to be used to buy planes. Like, there was a guy, his responsibility was
acquiring the aircraft and trucks and things like
that that the cartel needed, so he basically was the buyer
of the cartel's air force. So I dealt with him
because he needed money in order to buy the specific
planes they were looking for, which were Rockwell
1000s and Rockwell 980s. Some money is smuggled
out of the United
States down to Colombia, and
it's used to make payoffs to people in the military or prosecutors or politicians or whoever's
help they need to buy. Oftentimes, especially if
you're physically in Medellín, a lot of the traffickers would,
at least their local money, would be kept literally in a hole that would be dug in
the basement of a house. It's called a caleta. And my two main clients, Gerardo Moncada and Fernando Galeano, they were the two principal
advisors to Pablo Escobar. They ran his smu
ggling routes. They decided apparently to divert some of the drug profits and not pay the war tax that
they had to pay to Pablo, but he found out that there was this caleta with $22 million in it. And after that money was found, Escobar summoned them to
what's called The Cathedral, which was his self-made jail. He had them tortured for two days, then their family members
and their associates that could be found
were brought and killed, and Pablo began the internal cleansing. Those who escaped be
came
part of Los Pepes, the vigilante group that
helped to hunt him down. Most of the money's in 5, 10s, and 20s. That's because people using illegal drugs buy it with 5, 10s, and 20s. That gets collected by people
who have a responsibility here for the cartels to do nothing
other than collect money. They try not to have traffickers and money handlers in the same place. Too much asset to potentially be lost. So, the dollars generally would come to me in suitcases, duffle bags, boxes. New York wa
s a key point. Get a million, $2 million per delivery. I generally had runners who
picked it up and brought it. You don't usually get the guy who really controls the safe on the street. The way it works is we get the information from Gonzalo Mora. So he might give us a phone number in the form of an invoice number. He might say that, you know, "You need to get in touch with Guapo, and he's going to have 250 boxes." It's $250,000. They generally like to
meet in a public area, so it might be at a
McDonald's. They sit down. Not much gets said. Pushes the keys across the table. "It's in the trunk." Emir goes and gets the money. He's probably going to be
there with another undercover. There're going to be
surveillance guys out there who are going to be making
sure nobody does anything where they might be endangering
the undercover agents. Takes custody of the cash. Eventually gets it back to us after everybody's convinced
that they don't have no tail, meaning nobody's following them. And th
en the counting starts. It's usually wrapped in rubber bands in blocks of $5,000 and $10,000, dependent upon denominations. You know, a lot of times what they do if they don't want to deal
with a person like me, they will use an army of couriers. We call them Smurfs. The little blue guys,
Smurfs, running all over. We kind of dubbed them Smurfs because, let's say there's 10 of them. Their job every day is to go to meet with their money contact. And that guy may have
$500,000 in the trunk, and eac
h of them gets $50,000 and a map that tells them
where it is locally they can go to use cash to buy MoneyGrams, cashier's checks, money
orders, traveler's checks. They'll buy a money order for $987.25 to try to make it look
like it's for a payment. Leave the payee blank. They generally don't want
to buy anything over $3,000. So at the end of the day,
$500,000 that filled the trunk was now a stack maybe 8 inches high of money orders, traveler's checks. There were times when
those were offered to
me to then take it from there and launder it. That was safety for them because we were not having direct contact with their main money people. We were just getting a FedEx box with $500,000 in money orders. You know, a lot of people
say, "Wow, isn't it tempting? You've got all these millions
and millions of dollars, and it's in cash." There's unfortunately been
people in just about every agency that has fallen victim into
a slippery slope of greed. My motivation was
information became my heroin.
If I couldn't get the next
big piece of information and I couldn't risk more than I did to get the last piece of information, I felt as though I wasn't
accomplishing my mission. Yeah, I was addicted, but I
was addicted to information. Layering is a process by which
a series of corporations, usually offshore entities, are used to continue to receive what initially started off maybe
as a suitcase full of cash. The way we layered, the money would first be put
into a certificate of deposit in Luxem
bourg in the name
of an offshore entity. That money was used by the
bank as collateral for a loan in a different part of the world. So, let's say the loan was in Paris, and that was to a Gibraltar corporation. And then that Gibraltar corporation would transfer the funds to Panama, and then from there to accounts controlled by the drug traffickers. And so the purpose that
you'd use layering for is to just confuse the route in which the money is being moved. In order for anyone to
trace the money
backward, you have to first pierce
the corporate veil in Panama and bank-secrecy laws, then you have to pierce
the same in France, then you have to pierce
the same in Luxembourg, and by the time you did that, everybody would be to the end
of their natural life anyway. And so the purpose that
you'd use layering for is to just confuse the route in which the money is being moved. I think the biggest deposit was somewhere around $2.1 million. There was a time that I met in Paris with Pablo Escobar's
main lawyer, a guy by the name of Santiago Uribe, and some other people that
worked directly with Pablo. He'd sent Uribe to assess our money-laundering processes, and at the end of that meeting,
we came to an agreement. We would receive in a
relatively short period of time $100 million that they wanted to put into a nest egg in Europe
in case they had to flee. So, when we get back from Europe, we started getting deliveries. A million in the morning, $2 million in the afternoon. I had told the p
eople who
were doing surveillance that they needed to be really careful, and we needed to try to keep
it as light as we could, because they would have
countersurveillance out there. And one of the people who I dealt with, a person who met with Pablo
Escobar often, told me, "Make sure your people look on the street for gringos," white guys,
"who are in their late 20s, early 30s, in good shape, wearing jeans, pullover shirts with collars, solid color, jogging shoes, fanny packs. That's where their
guns are hidden. Those are los feos, the ugly ones." That's informally what people
in the cartel call the Feds. So, I never used to want
to go into an office, but this was getting very important, so I met with the people who were going to do the surveillance, and there was a room full
of gringos with jeans, pullover shirts that
were solid with collars, and they had fanny packs. And I tried to convince
them that that was a uniform that everybody was looking for, but egos are such in law enforcem
ent that sometimes people don't
want to take that advice. So, anyway, the surveillance got burned, and the next thing that
happened is that my partner, Emir Abreu, received a phone
call from Gonzalo Mora. And in the background
was a screaming voice of Gerardo Moncada, who was screaming that Musella, I, had to be a DEA undercover agent, because they saw all the Feds there, and all deals from here on were off. And I had to talk myself out of that. I guess the point is that there are a lot of
diffe
rent moving parts to these undercover operations, and it's pretty easy for any
one of us to do something that might potentially endanger
somebody else on the team. When I was accused of being a DEA agent, my tact was, "Listen, I
understand your concern, but the information you
have is critical for me, because somebody has a problem. It's either on your side or
my side that there's a leak. I don't care that we've got another $97 million that
we're going to pick up. I'm not taking another
nickel f
rom you in New York, not until we figure out
what this problem is. And I promise you, if you help me identify and it's on my side, nobody will ever know about that problem maker ever again." And I have to act like a bad guy. I can't go in there and I can't go, "Well, you might be a DEA agent." You can't do that. But you
have to think like a bad guy. Actually, one of my informants
who was with the mob said, talking about when some
undercover agent was trying to infiltrate and convince
him he was
a bad guy, and he said, "The guy opens the door, and he leans on the top
of the door when it's open in a form." And he goes, "You know, I've been stopped by cops,
like, a million times, and that's their pose. And I immediately stopped
dealing with that guy, because I thought that he was a cop." So, yeah. And, you know, there's words that cops use all the time that you just want to not use. And they're "alleged" or, you know, all types
of different words that, if you're sitting around
in a police
station or in your office, you
hear them all the time. You basically have to have two brains operating at the same time. And as I'm there acting and thinking like Musella, there's a small voice in
my head that's coaching me about where I need to
take the conversation in order to make it
meaningful and evidentiary. Beyond that, I wouldn't let my Mazur brain get involved at all,
because I had to be natural. I had a home actually in Key
Biscayne. That was wired. I had a home about 25
miles outside
of Tampa. That was wired for video, audio. I had a briefcase recorder. I had several. And one of which malfunctioned, which created quite a potential problem. I had been suspected by
Moncada to be a DEA agent, and to talk my way out of
that, I asked for a meeting with one of Moncada's trusted people who I got along with well. So I'm in the room with this guy, and he says, "Well, where
is the bank records? You were supposed to bring
some stuff from Switzerland." And I said, "Oh, it's in my
brief
case, it's outside." I went and got it, brought
it in, threw it on the bed. I opened it up, the Velcro let loose, the recorder fell into the briefcase with a nest of wires, and
he was on the other side, and I'm trying to act as normal as I can as I'm reaching around and putting the Velcro
back together again. And he's getting
impatient for the records, and he gets up and comes around just as I finish putting it back in. And I'm not sure what would've happened if he'd have seen the recorder. It's
that old theory of a dog sensing that you're afraid. Just
can't let it out there. And I got lucky. All of the traffickers
said to me, you know, "I love your money-laundering system, but the end payout is US-dollar checks from accounts that are
in the United States. We want you to open up
US-dollar accounts in Panama." Panama uses the US dollar more than it does its own currency. They know that secrecy is big in Panama by corporations, by banks. It's harder for DEA to get the information concern
ing the accounts, but what they told me also was, "Listen, we want your accounts in Panama because we own Gen. Manuel Noriega, and he will not touch any of your accounts because you're with us." So now I have to open
up an account in Panama. I happened to be driving
past a branch in Tampa of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International, the seventh-largest privately
held bank in the world. It was a big gold sign. I would've never walked in
there if it wasn't for that. So I called. I said I want
ed a meeting with someone from the
private-client division, that I had a need for accounts in Panama because my customers
were in Latin America, and would they be able to help me? And they said, "Well,
we'll give you a meeting if you can give us a résumé." I had a fully verifiable résumé, and I had bank accounts with
millions of dollars in it, all of which the bank in particular wanted to see before they opened up to me and explained to me how
they laundered money for many people in organized cr
ime. And I said to them, "All of my clients are
from Medellín, Colombia. They operate businesses here in the States that are very sensitive, and it's my job to very
cautiously help them to move capital across borders." So he goes, "Well, that's
the black-money market. We have plenty of customers
who deal in that business." He said, "You know, yeah,
Panama is where you want to be. There's a lot of hands in
which these checks go through, and sometimes mistakes can be made." And in fact, that's the
way I got really inside the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International. That got me into the inner
circle of dirty officers in BCCI, and then I went on to meet
more than a dozen of them. The No. 1 person who managed my accounts, a gentleman by the name of Amjad Awan. He managed accounts for
people who ran countries, for Manuel Noriega. He helped launder Noriega's drug profits from the protection he sold
to the Medellín cartel. And then Mr. Awan introduced
me to a host of other people within the
bank, including
someone on the board of the bank who was stationed in Paris and ran all of the branches
in Europe and North Africa, and during that time, we recorded
about 1,200 conversations, all of which were used as the cornerstones of the prosecution of
not just drug traffickers and money launderers, but senior officials of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce International. I needed to coast the conversations into the areas where I was
exposing their true intent, their involvement in criminality
. I couldn't allow them
to dance around issues. You have to try to get a way
to have the conversation. So, one of the things that I
used during that time frame, one of the most famous
businessmen at the time in the late '80s was a guy
by the name of Lee Iacocca. He ran Chrysler. Everybody knew who he was. And so when I would talk to
people, especially at the bank, I would say, "You know, if
my clients came in this room, you might mistake them
as being Lee Iacocca. The big difference is they don'
t
sell cars, they sell coke." And that was it. That was
probably my standard line in most meetings with the banks, and then later on, I'd be
talking to them about, you know, "We really need to get money to Bolivia because that's where the labs are. That's where it's made." All types of things that a jury would be able to understand. There's no mistake here. They're not talking about Coca-Cola, they're talking about cocaine. I dealt with dirty bankers. I dealt with lawyers in Switzerland who form
ed corporations to
hide the source of our funds. I dealt with attorneys in Panama, people who ran
financial-service corporations that do nothing other
than form corporations. They form tens of
thousands of corporations for people all over the world. All of these people are intermediaries who the underworld counts on. There were other people, real
money launderers at that time, who were sending what they
claimed to be precious metals in and out of the United States, which actually was lead
that w
as covered by gold, and that was their cover for
why they were depositing cash and were not bashful about
it, talking to the bank and saying, "This is a
cash-generating business." But I really think that
the investment company, the mortgage-brokerage
business, air-charter service, the brokerage firm, and
the jewelry business was more than enough for them to be convinced that I
was who I said I was. They were following me.
They were monitoring me. We knew that they had
sent people from Chicago wh
o were in the vicinity
of my investment company. I needed to show up at
those businesses every day. I needed to show up in Miami
at my businesses there, and in New York, so. But if you have enough that's believable, it's amazing how quickly
they'll convince themself that you are who you say you are. June of 1988, I was told that it would be the first week of October that the operation would be taken down. I've got two years' worth of work to do, and I've got to get it
done in about three months.
November was a presidential election. This was perceived by some to be a necessary "October surprise" to show the nation that the administration was very efficiently
addressing the war on drugs. So many times, these undercover operations result in indictments, but the bad guys, they're in countries that
do not offer extradition. Colombia was one. Pakistan was another. A lot of the people were from Colombia. A lot of people were from Pakistan. The management of the bank was
predominantly from Pa
kistan. One of the agents said, "Well, they obviously appear to like Bob." I don't think that they liked me. They saw me as an asset. I was a resource. Yeah, they liked me because I helped them to be able to carry out
their criminal activity. Not because we were golfing buddies. So someone suggested, "Well, why don't we have some
kind of a personal event?" And one of the agents I
was working with said, "How about a wedding?" And I said, "Well, I'm sure they'll show." And so we went about doing
t
hat. Printed invitations. Now, how do you get everybody you know are going to be there? This got personal. In some instances, children of future defendants were part of the wedding. Wives were part of the wedding. So we put this together
for a supposed wedding in Innisbrook, which is a country club, and people showed up. The night before, word was spread. We had a party at the country club, and the night before,
one of my informants, guy who played my bodyguard, a mob guy, went around to the def
endants and said, "Hey, Bob doesn't know this. We're going to have a
bachelor party tonight." And he said, "The cars will be here soon." And I left. So they got each car, and the high rise had different
levels of parking garage. So each one went to a different level. That team knows that
they're going to get off on a certain floor in the high rise. They get off. The arrest team's there. They arrest them as they
get off the elevator. Some of the reactions
were of great surprise. One of the guys w
ho was there
was Roberto's right-hand man, who I had hired to be
part of my organization, because Roberto was in jail. When he got arrested, he thought
it was for something else. And he was very intent on
asking the arresting officers to please get the word
back to me at the wedding that the only reason he wasn't there was because he'd been arrested, and he apologized, et cetera, and somebody else said some
other interesting things about not believing that I was an agent, and everybody was in di
sbelief. And the case concluded with the arrest of about 85 individuals, the collection of fines and forfeitures of about $600 million, and the seizure of about
3,000 pounds of cocaine. Ultimately, the bank imploded
on the night of the arrests. You know, it was all high fives. They wanted to go out and
have a celebratory gathering. I wanted nothing to do
with that whatsoever. I was emotionally exhausted. I went home. I don't
know how long I slept, but probably most of the day. And the longest tr
ial lasted six months. I was on the witness stand from the middle of June
to the middle of July, every single court day for three months. I could see the hatred in their eyes, even more so in the eyes
of their family members who were there. No doubt, they didn't see me as a person who was just doing their job, they saw me as a person
who I'm sure in their minds they feel tricked them. But I never tricked anybody into doing anything
other than trusting me. Nobody in there did anything
that they h
adn't done before. After I testified, my family
and I rented a motor home. We went into the mountains, got away from everybody,
and tried to heal. There was a pager number, an 800-number that they could call, the office could call
and leave me a message, and occasionally I would check, and I got word that the jury had convicted every single person of
virtually all accounts. I went back to the campsite by a river and just sat there thinking about it, and it occurred to me
that it was so surreal t
hat I had done the same things
that the bankers had done, and I was getting awards, and they were about to go
to jail for a long time. Bankers got, like, 12 years. That's a long time in jail for a banker. And I don't take what I did lightly. Some people think it's a sign of weakness. You know, I did drop a
tear or two that day. I kind of think that was good, because I want a
government with conscience. I don't want people high-fiving. I first learned about
the contract on my life about 30 days a
fter the
undercover operation was over. Someone from Customs
came with information, and then I received information from DEA about a National Security Agency, NSA, farm wiretap. They wanted to have two six-agent details in my home. People with shotguns. And it's supposedly to protect me from whoever's going to
jump through the window and come and get me. I thought that was absurd. My family went through more
of a trauma than I did, and these are my coworkers. I don't really want them
around me w
ith a loaded gun. So in anticipation of this, I had built another identity, and it was just sitting
there, ready to be used. I got the opportunity
to do the backstopping to create the new
persona, Robert Baldasare, and the businesses that
were related to him. In 1992 to 1994, I infiltrated the Cali
cartel as a money launderer. Same goal as C-Chase, infiltrate the intermediaries
and the money launderers, come up with methods to
get face-to-face meetings with the traffickers, and
attempt to arrest
as many people and seize as many, you know,
as much as you possibly could. I knew of the Cali
cartel from years before. They were, at the time
of Operation C-Chase, they were allies working together. Not allies — allies in the business, but, you know, certainly
a rivalry existed. But by the time we did Operation
Promo, the Medellín cartel and the Cali cartel were
rivals, lethal rivals. Gilberto Rodríguez
Orejuela and his brother, who ran the Cali cartel, saw the opportunity of the
demise of Pab
lo Escobar as their opportunity to become the biggest cartel in the world. And so they were behind the scenes helping the vigilante group that was trying to have Pablo killed, the Colombia National Police, DEA. they were behind the scenes
trying to take him down. The Cali cartel was different from a money-laundering perspective. They were much more sophisticated. They exploited a trade-based
money-laundering methodology that they taught me once I
was accepted into the group that involves the ope
ration
of various businesses, some fronts and some legal businesses, that are based in Colombia and that do business in North America. And they had methodologies
through corrupting bankers and Customs officials
to create an appearance of exporting large
amounts of valuable items that never existed, therefore giving them legal
cover for the repatriation of large amounts of
money back into Colombia under the guise of export sales. That was something that
they were coordinating with probably a doze
n different banks that were corruptly involved. I dealt with officers
of some of the banks, and I think that was
the principal difference between the two. Some of the codes are industry norm regardless of cartel. It's funny. Everybody called Miami "Las
Playas," "The Beaches." Everybody called New York
"Las Torres," "The Towers." Everybody called LA "La
Tia." I have no idea why. But those were normal. So, I had a business that financed trade, where I would forward monies on behalf of the traffick
ers
that would appear to be loans, and they would have to
pay me their receipts. They would send me an invoice. The invoice number was the phone number of the person to contact
who was holding the money. So the communication
oftentimes was by fax. The city would've been identified in the remarks section of the invoice. The amount, you'd the last three zeros off of whatever you're putting down there. So if it's 250, it's 250,000. If it's 2,000, it's 2 million. Pallets, pallets could be millions.
"We have a full pallet for you
in such and such a location. We want to get invoices in exchange." Invoices is a way of saying checks. But when we would meet,
because those people would come from Colombia and meet with me and I went to Columbia
and met with some of them. When money gets seized that was intended to be picked up by us and then they come to try to figure out who's responsible and
what are we going to do, I mean, everybody's so excited about trying to get this resolved that they forg
et about
being really careful, and a lot of the stuff was
just blatantly on there. I remember one time, I had
one of the money brokers for the Cali cartel at my apartment. Behind me, the TV was on, no sound, and it was showing an arrest of people in the Cali cartel, and he jumped up and was
pointing and breathing heavy, and he said, "That's one of our guys. That's one of our guys." So now we turn the volume on, and we're hearing, well,
"And a big representative of the Cali cartel ... "
blah, bla
h blah. So it was pretty obvious, you know, OK, he works with the Cali cartel. Eventually during the operation, I had a corrupt DEA task-force officer feeding information to people that I was an undercover agent. A guy by the name of [redacted] was a money broker who personally worked with
Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, the head of the Cali cartel
with his brother Gilberto, so Miguel and Gilberto. Unbeknownst to me, [redacted] was told by a DEA task-force officer who knew that I was playing
the role
of Baldasare that I was in fact an undercover agent. But [redacted] was being threatened by the Cali cartel because he had been held responsible for large losses of cash. So he needed to work for them for free, and he needed to make money for them. And he was so afraid that
he was going to get killed that despite the fact that he knew that I was a DEA undercover
agent, he wanted to meet me to convince me to help
him to launder money, because he thought he knew when the operation was going to en
d. And I'd told him that the
operation was going to end on a certain event that
was, like, four months later than when the real ending was going to be. So [redacted] made the calculated idea that he would come and meet
with me in my office in Panama. He would take the risk
that he might get arrested, but he couldn't really give
on that he knew who I was. He couldn't let the cartel know that he was coming back
to me, because if he did, it wouldn't make any sense. He needed money laundered or
they
were going to kill him. So I met with him in Panama. He tried to act like old buddies, and he kept looking at his watch, and then he got really nervous about almost 30 minutes into the meeting that he had to go. He had to go. What I found out later was
that he had flown to Panama. He met with three guys who were killers. They were in the car outside.
They had automatic weapons. Everybody in Panama at
that time had AK-47s. So they were told that if he wasn't out of the building 30 minutes after
the meeting started, that they were to go to this room, kill everybody in the room other than him, and get out of Dodge, because if he didn't get out by then, his mind, he would've been arrested and he was being held in
the room against his will. And I found out from the witness that they were getting ready to go in, and that I was two minutes away from that hit squad coming in before they were stopped and turned around and went back out. So, and, you know, there
was another undercover agent in
that room with me, and there were informants in Colombia that were working with me. All of whose lives were at risk
because of this corruption. It's unfortunate, but the
law-enforcement community and the private sector responsible for trying to
attack money laundering have been highly unsuccessful. The United Nations [Office]
on Drugs and Crime estimates that roughly $400 billion
is generated each year from the sale of illegal drugs. If you look at the statistics from the Department of Justice
A
sset Forfeiture division, you'll see that not more than a billion of actual drug proceeds
is seized each year. That's one-fourth of 1%. The cartels' coffers grow exponentially year after year, and their ability to corrupt
grows year after year, which is why so many
people have lost democracy and the rule of law. What I really do believe
needs to be done — you have to understand there are two different sides of banking. There's the sales side
and the compliance side. Sales side brings in the acco
unts, compliance in an unhealthy
bank only does the background to make sure they're not
dealing with a bad guy. That needs to be brought together. I'm suggesting it only on accounts that have $5 million or more that have been received in a year. I think that the
account-relationship manager that brought the account in should have to file with
the bank a sworn statement affirming that they've
asked certain questions, questions that if you ask them would expose whether
or not it is an account that
's being run by front people and whether or not there's
any illicit connection. Those questions don't get asked, and they don't get asked now because the sales side always
tells the compliance side, "If I ask those questions,
we won't get this business because they don't want to
answer those questions." You know, we have a joint
terrorism task force run by the FBI, but it's
also participated in by I don't know how many 100 agencies, federal, state, and city. There should be a joint
money-launder
ing task force that does the exact same thing. A lot of the things are done the same. Some people find that hard
to believe, but it is. There has been an evolution
of cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency I think has its place in certain parts of criminality, but mostly for those
who operate ransomware, for those who are involved in the dark net and who transact criminal
activities on the dark net. Like, Silk Road was once an entity that sold illegal drugs
on the dark net globally. There are people who
've been
involved in the drug world who have used cryptocurrency. Unlike cash, you can follow crypto. The other problem you have with crypto is you only need to look at bitcoin and see that unlike the US
dollar, its value is not stable. It goes way up and way down, and if I'm a money launderer and you gave me a million dollars and I happen to have bad timing and I get it done and
I give you the crypto and it's now worth half a million dollars, that's probably my last transaction. I don't think i
t's really
ready for the big time in the drug world. What is big: gold refining
in the Middle East, Dubai. That's big. I retired from undercover
work in the late '90s. "The Infiltrator" became a
New York Times bestseller and the basis for a film by the same name starring Bryan Cranston, and then subsequently
a book I wrote came out called "The Betrayal,"
which is a nonfiction book about the second undercover
operation that I did. I feel very happy that I now have the
opportunity to participate i
n the training of young officers who have an interest
in working undercover. It's a different world now, and there are certain
things that are liabilities because of the advancement of technology. And as we go into this AI craziness, I don't know what's going to happen. It's going to be really, really difficult. But I try to help them to
stick with the fundamentals. But as long as I've got that platform, I'm going to do everything I
can to try to share information that can in some way try to
hel
p us with the problem we face with this massive illegal-drug problem in our country and around the world.
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