How drug-money laundering actually works, according to a former undercover agent

My name is Robert Mazur. I’m back to tell the whole story of how I went undercover laundering 10s 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 multi agency task force to prosecute the biggest money launderers of the Medellin 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 Medellin cartel issued a contract on my life. I worked long term undercover in Operation C Chase from 1986 to 1988, infiltrating the Medellin Cartel as one of their money launderers. I went through psychological profiling, went through the undercover schools, was blessed with the tremendous training from long term former long term undercover agents, including a man who’s now a friend of mine by the name of Joe Pistone, who the book in 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 A2 year infiltration of the Medellin cartel and the banks that were supporting them. 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, ’cause 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 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 Lucella 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 we’re 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 folder 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 Wasella. 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 Wasella was from Staten Island. I’m from Staten Island. Robert Wasella was a businessman. I have a business background. I didn’t fake accents, fake anything. I was always just me. The first person I met that was working within the Medellin Cartel is a gentleman by the name of Gonzalo Mora, a small time money launderer who had an import export business. But the capacity he had the launder was probably limited to about $50,000 a week at best. We had my partner Amir 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 Moro 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 with 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 Ocaino, 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 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, NJ, where it was to be trucked to Chelsea in lower Manhattan, putting into a warehouse. Agents were able to be there when he showed up in in Chelsea at the warehouse and he got arrested. That was a seizure of 2300 lbs 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. You know, 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, Gotcha. Carlos. Later there were other people on the high side with Fabio and he would get 5000 kilos for US and 2000 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 1000 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 the 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 officially get dollars. I could sell it to him 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 it 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 One thousands and Rockwell nine 80s. Some money is smuggled out of the United States down to Columbia, and it’s used to make payouts to people in the military or prosecutors or politicians or whoever’s help they need to buy. Often times, especially if you’re physically in Medellin, 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 Coletta. And my 2 main clients, Herodo Moncada and Fernando Galliano, they were the two principal advisors to Pablo Escobar. They ran his smuggling 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 collector 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 became part of Los Pepes, the vigilante group that helped to hunt him down. Most of the money is in five 10s and 20s. That’s because people using illegal drugs buy it. With five 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, duffel bags, boxes. New York was a key point. Get a million, $2,000,000 for 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. Amir goes and gets the money. He’s probably going to be there with another undercover. They’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’re they don’t have no tail meaning nobody’s following them. And and then you know the counting starts. It’s usually wrapped in rubber bands in blocks of 5010 thousand, depending upon the nominations. 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. Call them Smurfs, the little blue guys, Smurfs running all over. We kind of dubbed them Smurfs because let’s say there’s ten 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 each of them gets $50,000 and a map that tells them where it is Locally. They can go to use cash to buy money grams, 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 $3000, so the end of the day, $500,000 that filled the trunk was now a stack of maybe 8 inches high of money orders, travelers 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 know, 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 Luxembourg 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. In order for anyone to trace the money backward, you have to 1st 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 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 in Paris with Pablo Escobar’s main lawyer, a guy my name is Santiago Uribe, and some other people that work 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 1,000,000 in the morning, 2 million in the afternoon. I had told the people 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 counter surveillance out there. And one of the people who I dealt with, the person who met with Pablo Escobar, often told me, make sure your people look on the street for gringos. White guys who were in their late 20s, early 30s, in good shape, wearing jeans, pull over shirts with collars, solid color jogging shoes, Fanny packs. That’s where the 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 an in law enforcement that sometime people don’t want to take that advice. So anyway, the surveillance got burned and the next thing that happened is that my partner Amir Brayo received a phone call from Gonzalo Mora and in the background was a screaming voice of Herodo 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 different 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 97,000,000 that we’re going to pick up. I’m not taking another nickel from 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 ADEAH or you can’t do that, you know, 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, you know, the guy opens the door and he leans on the top of the 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 that. And and I immediately stopped dealing with that guy because I thought that he was AI thought that he was a cop. So yeah, you know, there’s words that cops use all the time that you you just want to not use. And there, you know, alleged, you know or you know all all types of different words that if you sit, if you’re sitting around in a in a police station or 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 Marcella, 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 maze or 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. And I had been suspected by Moncada to be a ADA agent. Then 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’re supposed to bring some stuff from Switzerland. And I said, oh, it’s in my briefcase, 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 finished putting it back in. And I’m not sure what would have happened if he’d 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. And all of the traffickers said to me, you know, I love your money laundering system, but the end payout is U.S. dollar checks from accounts that are in the United States. We want you to open up U.S. 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 concerning the accounts. But what they told me also was, listen, we want your accounts in Panama because we own General 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 happen to be driving past a branch in Tampa of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, 7th largest privately held bank in the world, is a big gold sign that would have never walked in there if it wasn’t for that. So I called, I said I wanted 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 resume. I had a fully verifiable resume 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 crime. And I said to him, all of my clients are from Medellin, 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. 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’s 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 number one 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 Medellin 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 1200 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 businessman 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 formed 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 formed 10s 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 claim to be precious metals in and out of the United States, which actually was led that was 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, you know, 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 who 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 and my business is there and in New York. So. But you know, if you have enough that’s believable. It’s amazing how quickly they’ll convince themselves 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 got to get it done in about 3 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. You know, 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. Most of a lot of the people were from Colombia, a lot of people were from Pakistan. The management of the bank was predominantly from Pakistan. One of the agents said, you know, 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 like me because I helped them to be able to carry out their criminal activity. That’s, you know, not because we were golfing buddies. And so someone suggested, well, why don’t we have a 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 that, printed invitations. Now, how do you get everybody, you know, they’re going to be there, this, this got personal. You know, in some instances, children of future defendants were part of the wedding, wives 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 with a mob guy went around to the defendants and said, hey, Bob doesn’t know this, we’re going to have a bachelor party tonight and so the 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 teams there, they arrest them as they get off the elevator. Some of the reactions were of great surprise. One of the guys who was there was Roberto’s right hand man who I had hired to be part of my organization. Because Roberto is 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, etcetera. And somebody else said some other interesting things about not believing that I was an agent and everybody was in disbelief. 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 3000 lbs 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 trial lasted 6 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. You know, 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 them but anybody into doing anything other than trusting me. Nobody in there did anything that they hadn’t done before. After I testified, my family and I rented A motorhome. 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 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 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. 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 after the undercover operation was over. Someone from Customs came with information. And then I received information from DEA about a National Security Agency, NSA, foreign wiretap. They wanted to have two, six agent details in my home. People with shotguns and you know, 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 Co workers. I don’t really want them around me with 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 Baldessari and the businesses that were related to him. In 1992 to 1994, I infiltrated the Cali cartel as a money launderer. Same goal as Sea 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 Medellin cartel and the Cali Cartel were rivals, Lethal rivals Gilberto Rodriguez or Huella and his brother who ran the Cali Cartel, saw the opportunity of the demise of Pablo 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 Columbia 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 operation of various businesses, some fronts and some legal businesses that are based in Columbia 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 Columbia under the guise of export sales. That was something that they were coordinating with with probably a dozen different banks that were corruptly involved. I dealt with officers of some of the banks and and 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 Los Torres the towers. Everybody called LA Latia. 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 traffickers. 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 is holding the money. So the communication oftentimes is by fax. The city would have been identified in the remarks section of the invoice. The amount you drop the last three, three zeros off of whatever you’re putting down there. So if it’s it’s 250, it’s 250,000, If it’s 2000, it’s 2,000,000 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 Columbia 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. They forget 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 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 blah, blah. So it’s 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. The guy by the name of was a money broker who personally worked with Miguel Rodriguez or Huella, the head of the Cali Cartel with his brother Gilberto. So Miguel and Gilberto. Unbeknownst to me, he was told by Adea task force officer who knew that I was playing the role of Balasari, that I was in fact an undercover agent, but 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 Adea 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 end. 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 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. They 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 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-40 sevens. 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 have 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 2 minutes away from that squad, 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 and they were informants in Columbia 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 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 Asset Forfeiture Division, you’ll see that not more than a billion of actual drug proceeds is seized each year. That’s 1/4 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 accounts. Compliance in an unhealthy bank 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 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 tell us 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 laundering 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, you know, 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 darknet and who transact criminal activities on the dark net. Like Silk Road was once a 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 $1,000,000 and I happen to have bad timing and I get it done and I give you the crypto and it’s now worth half, $1,000,000, that’s probably my last transaction. I don’t think it’s really ready for the big time in the in the, 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 that came in New York Times bestseller and 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 2nd undercover operation that I did. I feel very happy that I 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 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 help us with the problem we face with this massive illegal drug problem in in our country and around the world.