How I Laundered Money For Pablo Escobar's Cartel | A DEA Agent's Uncut Story | How Crime Works

My name is Robert Mazur. I'm back to tell the full

story

of how I went undercover laundering tens of millions of dollars for drug

cartel

s. And that's how

crime

works

. Money laundering allows

cartel

s to produce the most lethal thing they produce around the world: corruption. It allows them to control countries, presidents of countries. Operation C-Chase was a multi-institutional task force to prosecute the Medellín cartel's biggest

money

launderers. Most of the people I dealt with were high-level drug dealers who had hundreds of millions of dollars. I am doing this interview in silhouette because two agencies and an intelligence agency informed me that the Medellín cartel made a contract on my life.

I worked undercover for a long time in Operation C-Chase from 1986 to 1988, infiltrating the Medellín cartel as one of their

money

launderers. He went through psychological profiling, he went through undercover schools, he was blessed with tremendous training by former long-term undercover

agent

s, including a man who is now a friend of mine named Joe Pistone, who in the book and movie Donnie Brasco is based on. in. After receiving that training, I spent a year and a half putting together what I believe is one of the most sophisticated fronts used in the covert operation. I built the personality of Robert Musella.

He dressed me appropriately, he certainly had the lifestyle. He drove a Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Jaguar. He was immersed in real business. He had an air charter service with a private jet. We had a jewelry store chain with 30 locations on the East Coast. A large amount of cash passes through the Diamond District every day. So if you have that type of business, you have a very good excuse to know where the cash came from. He was embedded in an investment firm, a mortgage brokerage firm, and even a brokerage firm based on the New York Stock Exchange. And then my partner and I began a two-year infiltration of the Medellín cartel and the banks that supported them.

There are different ways to create fake identities. Some may be based on real deaths and some may be based on other forms. Every covert identity I started with the name Robert, because I'm a naive guy, if you say Robert, I'm looking. I'm checking to see if you called me. Then "Javier" wouldn't work for me. And then the last name has to be Italian-American. I guess I take appearance very seriously: my family is 100% Italian on the one hand and 100% Polish on the other. In fact, just as I got the name Musella, I had already been working on a previous case.

I was a courier for a fake cocaine group. My job was to take suitcases of cash to a casino that was laundering drug money and deal with the owner and manager of the casino who were laundering money. And they were working with a drug trafficking organization that we also infiltrated. When we broke up the case, we did search warrants and one of the things we found was a folder with 250 fake identities that had been collected. Some in earlier stages, others in later stages. I looked there for one that was close to my birth. Robert Musella was there.

One of the keys to doing undercover work is developing your undercover persona so that they have as many traits in common as you do. Robert Musella was from Staten Island. I'm from Staten Island. Robert Musella was a businessman. I have business experience. I didn't fake accents, I didn't fake anything. It was always just me. The first person I met who was working within the Medellín cartel was a man named Gonzalo Mora, a small-time money launderer who had an import-export business, but his laundering capacity was probably limited to about $50,000. year. week at best. We had my partner, Emir, deal with him and just 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 over." From the shadows, the rivers would open and you would be able to launder untold amounts of money." At the end of those six months, Gonzalo Mora was knocking on the door to greet me. You know, it's always better to play hard to get. I also knew that these people They have a sixth sense. If you're afraid of a dog, they know it. You're the first one they bite. So I knew it would be working against me and undermining my cause if I showed any fear.

What I had going for me was that, like anyone involved in

crime

, I was motivated by greed. And I finally said, "Listen, I have to make these people understand that they should let me invest some of their money. Your only responsibility is to introduce me to them. If I'm successful, we'll do even bigger business." He felt obligated to make introductions and then I started moving up the ladder to meet increasingly important people within the cartels. We fully expected to prosecute the middlemen, the bankers, the dirty lawyers, the couriers with the beneficial owners and to be able to prosecute them not only for money laundering, but also for drug trafficking.

A classic example of this is my encounter with a person named Roberto Alcaino, a major cocaine transporter in the United States, Spain and Italy. He and I got along extraordinarily well. If he hadn't been a drug dealer, we probably would have been friends. In his opinion, I think we were. And not only did I end up talking to him and working with him, regarding the laundering of his drug money, but also the money of Fabio Ochoa and other people he was working with. He explained to me that they had a laboratory in Bolivia that produced thousands of kilos of cocaine per month.

We were able to identify a 40-foot container of seafood, anchovies packaged commercially in cans, that he had shipped from Buenos Aires to Camden, New Jersey, from where it was to be trucked to Chelsea in lower Manhattan, where it would be placed in a warehouse. Officers were able to be there when he showed up at the Chelsea warehouse and arrested him. It involved 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 CEO. There were other individuals who were on what I would consider the cartel's board of directors: the Ochoa family, Rodríguez Gacha, Carlos Lehder. There were other people at the top with Fabio, and he would get 5,000 kilos for the United States and 2,000 for Europe, and he had the responsibility of getting them there. He also had a relationship in which, if they had drugs in the United States, he would distribute it to them at a cost of 20% of the shipment. So let's say it was 1,000 kilos. He would receive 200 of the kilos.

They would receive the rest's money. 200 kilos at that time probably cost $15,000 a kilo. You know, money launderers like the ones I worked in basically operate what is called the black money market. It is an informal banking system that is made available to people who operate through the metro. So, as a black money market operator, I have a supply of dollars. My supply comes from drug dealers. Now I have to find people who have a demand for dollars. People who want to buy dollars are often importers from around the world who otherwise have to go through their central bank and spend 25% of their money to officially get dollars.

I could sell it to you for 10%. My traffickers, in many cases, wanted Colombian pesos. So the best people I could sell those dollars to were Colombian importers. All I have to do is change. So I had supply clients, dealers and demand clients. But most of the time the money ended up in bank accounts controlled by the cartel in Panama, and from there they distributed it around the world where they wanted to hide it. In some cases, I know he went to Germany. Millions of dollars went to a bank in Germany with which they had relations. Well, sometimes you had to use the money to buy airplanes.

There was a guy, his responsibility was to acquire the planes and trucks and things like that that the cartel needed, so he was basically the buyer of the cartel's air force. So I dealt with him because I needed money to buy the specific planes they were looking for, which were Rockwell 1000 and Rockwell 980. Some of the money is smuggled from the United States to Colombia and used to pay military personnel, prosecutors, politicians or anyone. help they need to buy. Often, especially if you are physically in Medellín, many of the traffickers, at least their local money, are literally kept in a hole that is dug in the basement of a house.

It's called a cove. And my two main clients, Gerardo Moncada and Fernando Galeano, were Pablo Escobar's two main advisors. They traveled his smuggling routes. Apparently they decided to divert part of the drug profits and not pay the war tax they had to pay Pablo, but he discovered that there was a cache with $22 million in it. And after they found that money, Escobar summoned them to what they call La Catedral, which was his own prison. He had them tortured for two days, then they brought in and killed whatever relatives and associates they could find, and Pablo began the internal cleansing.

Those who escaped became part of Los Pepes, the vigilante group that helped hunt him down. Most of the money is in 5, 10 and 20 bills. This is because people who consume illegal drugs buy them with 5, 10 and 20 bills. This is collected by people who here are responsible for the cartels Don't do anything but raise money. They try not to have traffickers and money manipulators in the same place. Too many assets to potentially lose. So the dollars usually came to me in suitcases, duffel bags, boxes. New York was a key point. Get a million, 2 million dollars per delivery. He usually had runners pick him up and bring him back.

You don't often find the guy who actually controls the safe on the street. The way it

works

is that we get the information from Gonzalo Mora. Then you could give us a phone number in the form of an invoice number. You might say, "You have to contact Guapo and he will have 250 boxes." It's $250,000. They generally like to meet in a public area, so it could be at a McDonald's. They sit. Not much is said. He pushes the keys on the table. "He's in the trunk." Emir goes and gets the money. He'll probably be there with another undercover

agent

.

There will be surveillance guys who will make sure that no one does anything that could endanger the undercover agents. He takes custody of the cash. In the end he gives it back to us after everyone is convinced that they have no tail, which means no one is following them. And then the counting begins. Typically, he is rubber-banded in blocks of $5,000 and $10,000, depending on the denominations. You know, a lot of times what they do, if they don't want to deal with a person like me, they use an army of messengers. We call them smurfs. The little blue ones, the Smurfs, running everywhere.

We call them Smurfs because, say, there are 10 of them. Your job every day is to go meet your money contact. And that guy may have $500,000 in his trunk, and each of them gets $50,000 and a map that tells them where they can go locally to use cash to buy MoneyGrams, cashier's checks, money orders, traveler's checks. They will purchase a money order for $987.25 to try to make it look like it is a payment. Leave the beneficiary blank. They generally don't want to buy anything over $3,000. So at the end of the day, the $500,000 that filled the trunk was now a stack perhaps 8 inches high of money orders and traveler's checks.

There were times when they offered it to me and then took it out and washed it. That was security for them because we had no direct contact with their main money people. We had just received a box from FedEx 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 they're in cash." Unfortunately, there have been people in almost every agency who have fallen victim to the slippery slope of greed. My motivation was that information became my heroine. If I couldn't get the next big piece of information and couldn't risk more than I did to get the last piece of information, I felt like I wasn't fulfilling my mission.

Yes, he was addicted, but he was addicted to information. Layering is a process by which a series of corporations, usually offshore entities, are used to continue receiving what initially began perhaps as a suitcase full of cash. The way we stratify it, the money would first be deposited in a certificate of deposit in Luxembourg in the name of an offshore entity. That money was used by the bank as collateral for a loan in another part of the world. So, let's say the loan was in Paris, and it was for a Gibraltar corporation. And then that Gibraltar corporation would transfer the funds to Panama, and from there to accounts controlled by drug traffickers.

So heThe purpose you would use layers for is simply to confuse the path in which money moves. For someone to be able to trace the money back, first you have to pierce the corporate veil in Panama and the bank secrecy laws, then you have to pierce the same thing in France, then you have to pierce the same thing in Luxembourg, and by the time you do that , they would all be at the end of their natural lifespan anyway. So the purpose you would use the layers for is simply to confuse the path in which the money moves.

I think the biggest deposit was around $2.1 million. There was a time when I met in Paris with Pablo Escobar's main lawyer, a guy named Santiago Uribe, and some other people who worked directly with Pablo. He had sent Uribe to evaluate our money laundering processes and, at the same time, at the end of that meeting we reached an agreement. We would receive in a relatively short period of time 100 million dollars that they wanted to keep in Europe in case they had to flee. So when we came back from Europe, we started taking deliveries. One million in the morning, two million in the afternoon.

I had told the people who were doing surveillance that they had to be very careful and that we had to try to keep it as light as possible, because there would be counter-surveillance out there. And one of the people I dealt with, a person who frequently met with Pablo Escobar, told me, "Make sure your people look for gringos on the street," white guys, "who are between 20 and 30 years old, in good shape, jeans, collared pullovers, solid color, joggers, fanny packs. That's where the guns are hidden. That's what the cartel people informally call the feds. an office, but this was becoming 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. to convince them that was the uniform everyone was looking for, but egos are such in law enforcement that sometimes people don't want to follow that advice.

So, anyway, the surveillance was burned and the next thing you know. What happened is that my partner, Emir Abreu, received a call from Gonzalo Mora. And in the background you could hear the shouting voice of Gerardo Moncada, shouting that Musella, I, had to be an undercover DEA agent, because they saw all the feds there, and all deals from now on were off. And I had to talk myself out of it. I guess the point is that there are a lot of different moving parts to these covert operations, and it's pretty easy for any of us to do something that could potentially endanger someone else on the team.

When I was accused of being a DEA agent, my tactic was: "Listen, I understand your concern, but the information you have is critical to me, because someone has a problem. It's either on your side or on my side that there's a leak." ". I don't care that we have another 97 million dollars that we are going to raise. I won't take a nickel from you in New York, not until we figure out what this problem is. If you help me identify him and he's on my side, no one will ever hear from that trouble maker again." And I have to act like a bad guy.

I can't go in there and I can't say, "Well, you could be an agent of the DEA." You can't do that. But you have to think like a bad guy. Actually, one of my informants who was with the mafia said, talking about when an undercover agent was trying to infiltrate him and convince him that he was a bad guy, and He said, "The guy opens the door and leans on the top of the door when it's open in a way." And he says, "You know, the cops have stopped me like a million times, and that's his pose.

And I immediately stopped dealing with that guy, because I thought he was a cop." So yeah. And, you know, there are words that cops use all the time that you just don't want to use. And they're "presumptuous" or, You know, all kinds of different words that, if you're sitting in a police station or in your office, you hear them all the time. You basically have to have two brains working at the same time. And while I'm there acting and thinking like Musella, There's a little voice in my head that's guiding me on where I should take the conversation to make it meaningful and evidentiary.

Beyond that, I wouldn't let my Mazur brain get involved at all, because it had to be natural. I had a house in Key Biscayne. That was wired. I had a house about 25 miles from Tampa. It was wired for video and audio. I had several and one of them malfunctioned, which created a problem. quite potential. Moncada suspected that I was a DEA agent and, to get out of that, I asked for a meeting with one of Moncada's trusted people with whom I got along well. So I was in the room with this guy and he said, "Well, where are the bank records?

You were supposed to bring some stuff from Switzerland." And I said, "Oh, he's in my briefcase, he's outside." I went to look for it, brought it and threw it on the bed. I opened it, the velcro came loose, the recorder fell into the briefcase with a bunch of cables, and he was on the other side, and I'm trying to act as normal as possible while I walk over and put the velcro back together. And he's getting impatient for the discs, gets up and comes back just as I finish putting them back. And I'm not sure what would have happened if I had seen the recorder.

It's that old theory that a dog senses that you are afraid. I just can't let it out. And I was lucky. All the traffickers told me, "I love his money laundering system, but the final payment is checks in US dollars from accounts that are in the United States. We want you to open US dollar accounts in Panama." ". Panama uses the US dollar more than its own currency. They know that secrecy is great in Panama from the corporations, from the banks. It is more difficult for the DEA to obtain information about the accounts, but what they told me was also : "Listen, we want your accounts in Panama because we own General Manuel Noriega, and he won't touch any of your accounts because you are with us." So now I have to open an account in Panama.

It happened that I was passing by a branch in Tampa. from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the seventh largest private bank in the world. It was a big gold sign. I would never have walked in there if it weren't for that. So I called him I wanted a meeting with someone from the private client division. , that I needed accounts in Panama because my clients were in Latin America and could they help me? And they said, "Well, we'll give you a meeting if you can give us a resume." all of which the bank in particular wanted to see before opening up to me and explaining how they

laundered

money for many organized crime people.

And I told them, "All my clients are from Medellín, Colombia. They operate businesses here in the United States that are very sensitive, and my job is to very cautiously help them move capital across borders." So he says, "Well, that's the black money market. We have a lot of clients who are in that business." He said, "You know, yeah, Panama is where you want to be. There are a lot of hands that go through these checks and sometimes mistakes can be made." And in fact, that's how I actually got into the International Bank of Credit and Commerce.

That got me into the BCCI's inner circle of dirty agents, and I later met more than a dozen of them. The number one person who managed my accounts, a gentleman called Amjad Awan. He managed accounts of people who ran countries, for Manuel Noriega. He helped launder the drug profits Noriega obtained from the protection he sold to the Medellín cartel. And then Mr. Awan introduced me to many other people within the bank, including someone on the bank's board of directors who was based in Paris and ran all the branches in Europe and North Africa, and during that time, we recorded approximately 1,200 conversations, all of which were used as cornerstones of the prosecution not only of drug traffickers and money launderers, but also of senior officials of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

He needed to take the conversations to the areas where he was exposing his true intent, his involvement in criminality. He couldn't allow them to dance around the problems. You have to try to find a way to have the conversation. So one of the things that I used during that period of time, one of the most famous entrepreneurs at that time in the late '80s, was a guy named Lee Iacocca. He ran Chrysler. Everyone knew who he was. And then when he talked to people, especially at the bank, he would say, "You know, if my clients walked into this room, you might confuse them with Lee Iacocca.

The big difference is that 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 I would talk to them about, you know, "We really need to get money to Bolivia because that's where the labs are. That's where the manufacturing is done." . ". All kinds of things that a jury could understand. There is no mistake here. They are not talking about Coca-Cola, they are talking about cocaine. I dealt with corrupt bankers. I dealt with lawyers in Switzerland who formed corporations to hide the origin of our funds.

I dealt with lawyers in Panama, people who ran financial services corporations who do nothing but form corporations. They form tens of thousands of corporations for people all over the world. All of these people are intermediaries that the underworld relies on. people, real money launderers at the time, who were shipping what they claimed to be precious metals in and out of the United States, which was actually lead covered in gold, and that was their cover for depositing cash and they were not ashamed to But I really believe that the investment company, the mortgage brokerage business, the charter flight service, the brokerage firm and the jewelry business were. more than enough to convince them 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 who were in the vicinity of my investment company. I needed to show up at those businesses every day. I needed to present myself in Miami in my businesses there and in New York, then. But if you have enough believable things, it's surprising how quickly they will be convinced that you are who you say you are. In June 1988 they told me that it would be the first week of October when the operation would be completed. I have two years of work to do and I should finish it 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 effectively addressing the war on drugs. Many times, these sting operations result in indictments, but the bad guys are in countries that do not offer extradition. Colombia was one. Pakistan was another. Many people were from Colombia. Many people were from Pakistan. The bank's management was predominantly Pakistani. One of the agents said, "Well, they obviously seem to like Bob." I don't think they liked him. They saw me as an asset. I was a resource.

Yes, they liked him because he helped them carry out their criminal activity. Not because we were golf buddies. Then someone suggested, "Well, why don't we organize some kind of personal event?" And one of the agents he was working with said, "How about a wedding?" And I said, "Well, I'm sure they'll show up." And so we started doing that. Printed invitations. Now, how do you get everyone you know to be there? This became personal. In some cases, the children of the future defendants were part of the wedding. The wives were part of the wedding. So we set this up for a supposed wedding at Innisbrook, which is a country club, and people showed up.

The night before, word spread. We had a party at the country club and the night before, one of my informants, a guy who was a bodyguard, a mobster, walked up to the defendants and said, "Hey, Bob doesn't know this. We're going." having a bachelor party tonight." And he said, "The cars will be here soon." And I left. So they got each car, and the skyscraper had different levels of parking. So each one went to a different level. That one The team knows that they will get off on a certain floor of the skyscraper. They get off.

The arrest team is there. They arrest them when they get out of the elevator. One of the guys who was there was Roberto's right hand. , whom I had hired to be part of my organization, because Roberto was in prison. When he was arrested he thought it was for something else and he was very determined to ask the officers who arrested him to please let me know at the wedding. The only reason he wasn't there was because he had been arrested, and he apologized, etc., and someone else said some other interesting things about not believing I was an agent, and everyone was in disbelief.

And the case concluded with the arrest of about 85 people, the collection of fines and confiscations of about $600 million, and the seizure of about 3,000 pounds of cocaine. In the end, the bank implodednight of the arrests. You know, it was all high fives. They wanted to go out and have a celebratory gathering. I didn't want anything to do with it at all. He was emotionally exhausted. I went home. I don't know how long I slept, but probably most of the day. And the longest trial lasted six months. I was on the witness stand from mid-June to mid-July, every day of the trial for three months.

I could see the hatred in his eyes, even more so in the eyes of his relatives who were there. They certainly 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 cheated on. But I never tricked anyone into doing anything other than trusting me. No one there did anything they hadn't done before. After testifying, my family and I rented a motor home. We entered the mountains, he got away from everyone and tried to heal. There was a pager number, an 800 number that they could call, the office could call me and leave me a message, and from time to time I would check it, and I found out that the jury had convicted all the people on virtually all accounts.

I went back to the camp by a river and sat there thinking about it, and it occurred to me that it was so surreal that 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. The bankers received about 12 years. That's a long time in prison for a banker. And I don't take what I did lightly. Some people think it is a sign of weakness. You know, I shed a tear or two that day. I think that was good, because I want a government with a conscience.

I don't want people to high five. I first found out about the contract on my life about 30 days after the sting operation ended. Someone from Customs came with information, and then I received information from the DEA about an agricultural wiretap from the National Security Agency, NSA. They wanted to have two detachments of six agents at my house. People with shotguns. And it's supposedly to protect me from whoever jumps out the window and comes looking for me. I thought that was absurd. My family went through more trauma than me and these are my coworkers. I really don't want them around me with a loaded gun.

So, in anticipation of this, I had constructed another identity and it was there, ready to be used. I had the opportunity to provide support to create the new personality, Robert Baldasare, and the businesses related to him. From 1992 to 1994, I infiltrated the Cali cartel as a money launderer. Same goal as C-Chase, to infiltrate the middlemen and the money launderers, devise methods to meet the traffickers face to face and try to arrest as many people and confiscate as many, you know, as many as you can. possibly could. I had known about the Cali cartel for years before. At the time of Operation C-Chase, they were allies working together.

Not allies, allies in business, but, you know, there was certainly a rivalry. But when 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 Pablo Escobar's disappearance as their chance to become the largest cartel in the world. And so they were behind the scenes helping the surveillance group that was trying to kill Pablo, the Colombian 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 I was taught once I was accepted into the group that involves the operation of several businesses, some fronts and some legal businesses, that are based in Colombia and do business in South America. North. And they had methodologies, through the corruption of bankers and customs officials, to create the appearance that they were exporting large quantities of valuable items that never existed, thus giving them legal cover for the repatriation of large amounts of money to Colombia under the pretext of sales. from exportation. That was something they were coordinating with probably a dozen different banks that were involved in corruption.

I dealt with officials from some of the banks and I think that was the main difference between the two. Some of the codes are industry standards independent of the cartel. It is funny. Everyone called Miami "Las Playas", "The Beaches". Everyone called New York "The Towers", "The Towers". Everyone called Los Angeles "La Tia." I have no idea why. But that was normal. So, I had a business that financed trade, where I sent money on behalf of traffickers that appeared to be loans, and they had to pay me their receipts. They would send me an invoice. The invoice number was the phone number of the contact person who was holding the money.

So communication was often done by fax. The city would have been identified in the comments section of the bill. From the amount, you would remove the last three zeros from whatever you are putting 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 at this or that location. We want to receive invoices in return." Invoices is a way of saying checks. But when we met, because those people came from Colombia and met with me and I went to Colombia and met with some of them. When money that we were supposed to collect is confiscated and then they come to try to figure out who's responsible and what we're going to do, I mean, everyone is so excited about trying to figure this out that they forget to really be careful, and a lot of the things They were blatantly there.

I remember that I once had one of the Cali cartel's money brokers in my apartment. Behind me, the TV was on, with no sound, and showing an arrest of people at the Cali cartel, and he jumped up and pointed and breathing heavily, and said, "That's one of our guys. That's one of our guys." guy." So now we turn up the volume and hear, well, "And a big representative of the Cali cartel..." blah, blah, blah. So it was pretty obvious, you know, okay, work with the Cali cartel. Finally, during the operation, a corrupt DEA task force officer provided information to people that I was an undercover agent.

A guy named was a money broker who worked personally with Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, the head of the Cali cartel with his brother Gilberto, then Miguel and Gilberto. Unbeknownst to me, a DEA task force officer who knew I was playing Baldasare's role told me that he was actually an undercover agent. But he was being threatened by the Cali cartel because they had held him 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 of being killed that even though he knew I was an undercover DEA agent, he wanted to meet with me to convince me to help him launder money, because he thought he knew when the operation would end. was going to end.

And I told him that the operation was going to end in a certain event that would be, like, four months later than the actual ending was going to be. So he took the calculated idea that he would come meet me at my office in Panama. He would risk arrest, but he couldn't really take it for granted that he knew who I was. He couldn't let the cartel know that he would come back to me, because if he did, he wouldn't make any sense. He needed money

laundered

or they were going to kill him. So I met him in Panama.

He tried to act like old friends and kept looking at his watch, and then got very nervous almost 30 minutes into the meeting he had to attend. He had to go. What I discovered later was that he had flown to Panama. He met three guys who were murderers. They were outside in the car. They had automatic weapons. Everyone in Panama at that time had AK-47. So they were told that if he wasn't out of the building 30 minutes after the meeting started, they should go to this room, kill everyone in the room except him, and get out of Dodge, because if he didn't.

If he hadn't come out by then, he thought, they would have arrested him and kept him in the room against his will. And I found out from the witness that they were preparing to go in, and that I was two minutes away from that assault squad going in before they stopped them, turned around and walked back out. So, you know, there was another undercover agent in that room with me, and there were informants in Colombia who were working with me. All whose lives were at risk due to this corruption. It's unfortunate, but the law enforcement community and private sector responsible for trying to tackle money laundering have not had much success.

The United Nations on Drugs and Crime estimates that approximately $400 billion is generated each year from the sale of illegal drugs. If we look at the statistics from the Asset Forfeiture division of the Department of Justice, we will see that no more than one billion in actual drug proceeds are seized each year. That's a quarter 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 think needs to be done: you have to understand that there are two different sides of banking.

There's the sales side and there's the fulfillment side. The sales side brings the bills, compliance at a bad bank just does the background to make sure they aren't dealing with a bad guy. You need to put that together. I suggest it only on accounts that have received $5 million or more in a year. I think the accounting relationship manager who introduced the account should have to file with the bank an affidavit stating that he has asked certain questions, questions that if asked would expose whether or not this is an account being managed. by front men and whether or not there is any illicit connection.

Those questions aren't asked, and they aren't asked now because the sales side always tells the fulfillment side, "If I ask those questions, we won't get this business because you don't want to answer those questions." "You know, we have a joint counterterrorism task force led by the FBI, but I don't know how many 100 agencies also participate in it, federal, state and municipal. There should be a joint anti-money laundering task force that does exactly the same. Many things are done the same. Some people find it hard to believe, but it is. There has been an evolution of cryptocurrencies.

I think cryptocurrencies have their place in certain aspects of crime, but especially for those. operate ransomware, for those involved in the dark web and those who transact criminal activities on the dark web. For example, Silk Road was once an entity that sold illegal drugs on the dark web globally. involved in the drug world and have used cryptocurrencies. Unlike cash, you can follow cryptocurrencies The other problem you have with cryptocurrencies is that you just need to look at bitcoin and see that, unlike the US dollar, its value is not. stable. It goes up and down, and if I'm a money launderer and you gave me a million dollars and I happen to have a bad time and I do it and I give you the crypto and now it's worth half a million dollars, that's probably my last transaction.

I don't think I'm really ready for the big time in the drug world. The important thing: gold refining in the Middle East, Dubai. That's great. I retired from undercover work in the late '90s. "The Infiltrator" became a New York Times bestseller and the basis of a movie of the same name starring Bryan Cranston, and a book I wrote called "The Betrayal" subsequently came out. ", which is a non-fiction book about the second covert operation I did. I am very happy to now have the opportunity to participate in 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 responsibilities due to the advancement of technology. And as we get into this AI madness, I don't know what's going to happen. It's going to be very, very difficult. But I try to help them stick to the fundamentals. But as long as I have that platform, I will do everything I can to try to share information that can somehow help us with the problem that we face with this huge illegal drug problem in our country and around the world.