- 3 years ago
Robert Mazur is a former government agent for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service intelligence division, and the Customs Service. He posed as an Italian American businessman named Robert Baldasare to go undercover to expose international money-laundering networks associated with the Cali cartel, gathering evidence via secret recordings and transfers.
At its peak, the Cali cartel is estimated to have produced 80% of the world's cocaine supply. The cartel rose to prominence in the late 1980s and operated until 1995, running production out of Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. It was controlled by Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, Pacho Herrera, and José Santacruz Londoño. The group funneled money via Panamanian banks and other financial organizations.
Mazur is the author of "The Infiltrator," which became a New York Times bestseller and inspired a 2016 film of the same title, starring Bryan Cranston. Mazur's second memoir, "The Betrayal," is about his time inside the Cali cartel.
Today, Mazur speaks and consults on the issues of money laundering, drug trafficking, and corruption around the world through his company, KYC Solutions.
At its peak, the Cali cartel is estimated to have produced 80% of the world's cocaine supply. The cartel rose to prominence in the late 1980s and operated until 1995, running production out of Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. It was controlled by Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, Pacho Herrera, and José Santacruz Londoño. The group funneled money via Panamanian banks and other financial organizations.
Mazur is the author of "The Infiltrator," which became a New York Times bestseller and inspired a 2016 film of the same title, starring Bryan Cranston. Mazur's second memoir, "The Betrayal," is about his time inside the Cali cartel.
Today, Mazur speaks and consults on the issues of money laundering, drug trafficking, and corruption around the world through his company, KYC Solutions.
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00:00 My name is Robert Mazur. I'm a former government agent who spent five years undercover with the two biggest cartels in Colombia.
00:07 This is how crime works.
00:09 There are a lot of different moving parts to these undercover operations.
00:16 It's pretty easy for any one of us on the team to do something that might potentially endanger somebody else on the team.
00:24 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.
00:33 I worked long-term undercover in Operation Sea Chase from 1986 to 1988, infiltrating the Medellin cartel as one of their money launderers.
00:49 I built the persona of Robert Mucella.
00:53 I had informants who were within organized crime who gave me credibility.
00:58 And I belonged to all the social clubs that you either had to be a politician, a gangster, or both to be a member.
01:05 I knew that my background would be challenged.
01:07 I had a fully verifiable resume that covered everything from my first job to ten years later.
01:14 I had three bank references, three business references.
01:17 Once I started laundering money for the cartels, I made a condition to them.
01:23 I said, "You're going to get me caught. You have to play by my rules. I have a family here that I work for."
01:30 I didn't mean a blood family. I meant an organized crime family.
01:34 If I do anything that jeopardizes their money, I'm going to get killed.
01:38 So, here's the way it works.
01:40 A portion of your money has to be left with me in an investment.
01:45 It can be in CDs, certificates of deposit, or you can have me manage your money to make it appear to be what was used to finance assets.
01:55 One person had me, gave me cash, and then had me issue a loan out of my mortgage company that was used to build a condominium complex in downtown L.A.
02:12 We needed to get inside the money launderers so that we could follow the money.
02:17 So, yes, we fully expected to prosecute the intermediaries, the bankers, dirty lawyers, the couriers, with the beneficial owners,
02:26 and to be able to prosecute them for not just money laundering, but for drug trafficking.
02:33 A classic example of that is my meeting a person by the name of Roberto Alcaeño,
02:38 a major transporter of cocaine in the United States, Spain, and Italy.
02:43 He and I got along extraordinarily well.
02:45 If he hadn't been a drug trafficker, we'd probably been friends.
02:49 In his mind, I think we were.
02:52 And not only did I wind up talking with him and working with him with respect to the laundering of his drug money,
03:01 but also of Fabio Ochoa's money and other people with whom he was working.
03:05 He explained to me that they had a lab in Bolivia that was producing thousands of kilograms of cocaine a month.
03:13 We were able to identify a 40-foot container of seafood, commercially packed, anchovies in cans,
03:21 that he'd sent from Buenos Aires to Camden, New Jersey, where it was to be trucked,
03:28 to Chelsea in lower Manhattan, put into a warehouse.
03:31 Agents were able to be there when he showed up in Chelsea, and he got arrested.
03:38 That was a seizure of 2,300 pounds of cocaine.
03:40 And the arrest of a very important transporter, who had a contract with the cartel to move thousands and thousands of kilos a year.
03:47 I met other people like him, and we had similar success with them.
03:52 Of course, Pablo Escobar was the chief executive officer.
03:57 There were other individuals who were on what I would consider to be the board of the cartel,
04:03 the Ochoa family, Rodriguez Gacha, Carlos Lader.
04:08 There were other people on the high side with Fabio, and he would get 5,000 kilos for U.S. and 2,000 for Europe.
04:18 And he had the responsibility of getting that there.
04:24 He also had a relationship where if they had dope in the United States,
04:30 he would distribute it for them at a cost of 20% of the shipment.
04:35 So let's say there was 1,000 kilos, he would get 200 of the kilos.
04:41 They would get the money from the rest.
04:44 Another functionary was Pablo Escobar's lead consigliere, a lawyer, a guy by the name of Santiago Uribe.
04:50 He wrote the paper that was used as the basis for creating the Colombian law that Pablo wanted so bad,
04:58 which was making extradition to the United States illegal.
05:02 And so that's why the cartel leaders were called extraditables.
05:06 And Santiago Uribe based his legal theory on a Colombian law saying that this was an invasion of the sovereignty of Colombia,
05:14 and that if there was an offense that had occurred, it should be prosecuted in Colombia.
05:19 The only problem was 80% of the Senate, by some estimates, were in Pablo's pocket.
05:25 They would get away without local law enforcement involvement in Colombia
05:28 because they control, at times, local law enforcement.
05:33 You basically have to have two brains operating at the same time.
05:44 And as I'm there acting and thinking, like Micello, there's a small voice in my head that's coaching me
05:55 about where I need to take the conversation in order to make it meaningful and evidentiary.
06:01 Beyond that, I wouldn't let my maze or brain get involved at all because I had to be natural.
06:06 I had a home, actually, in Key Biscayne. That was wired.
06:10 I had a home about 25 miles outside of Tampa. That was wired for video, audio.
06:16 I had a briefcase recorder. I had several, and one of which malfunctioned, which created quite a potential problem.
06:23 I had been suspected by Moncada to be a DEA agent, and to talk my way out of that,
06:29 I asked for a meeting with one of Moncada's trusted people, who I got along with well.
06:34 So I'm in the room with this guy, and he says, "Well, where is the bank records?
06:37 You were supposed to bring some stuff from Switzerland." And I said, "Oh, it's in my briefcase. It's outside."
06:42 I went and got it, brought it in, threw it on the bed. I opened it up. The Velcro let loose.
06:47 The recorder fell into the briefcase with a nest of wires, and he was on the other side.
06:54 And I'm trying to act as normal as I can as I'm reaching around and putting the Velcro back together again,
07:00 and he's getting impatient for the records, and he gets up and comes around just as I finished putting it back in.
07:06 And I'm not sure what would have happened if he'd have seen the recorder.
07:11 It's that old theory of a dog sensing that you're afraid. You just can't let it out there. And I got lucky.
07:18 I dealt with attorneys in Panama who formed corporations, or dealt with people who ran financial service corporations.
07:31 They formed tens of thousands of corporations for people all over the world.
07:36 I dealt with lawyers in Switzerland who formed corporations to hide the source of our funds.
07:42 I dealt with dirty bankers. All of these people are intermediaries.
07:48 Some money doesn't go to a person like me for the laundering process.
07:52 Some money is smuggled out of the United States down to Colombia.
07:56 Oftentimes, especially if you're physically in Medellin, a lot of the traffickers would, at least their local money,
08:03 would be kept literally in a hole that would be dug in the basement of a house. It's called a coleta.
08:09 And my two main clients, Gerardo Moncada and Fernando Galeano, they were the two principal advisors to Pablo Escobar.
08:21 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.
08:34 But he found out that there was this coleta with $22 million in it.
08:40 And after that money was found, Escobar summoned them to what's called the cathedral, which was his self-made jail.
08:47 He had them tortured for two days.
08:51 Then their family members and their associates that could be found were brought and killed, and Pablo began the internal cleansing.
09:01 Those who escaped became part of Los Pepes, the vigilante group that helped to hunt him down.
09:09 I think I was numbed by my addiction for information.
09:15 I didn't want to face the fact that the risks were at such a level that I should get off this roller coaster.
09:25 And I didn't want to get off the roller coaster because information was my heroin.
09:30 [Machine whirring]
09:36 I first learned about the contract on my life about 30 days after the undercover operation was over.
09:45 Someone from Customs came with information, and then I received information from DEA about a national security agency, NSA, foreign wiretap.
09:56 They wanted to have two six-agent details in my home.
10:04 People with shotguns, supposedly to protect me from whoever was going to jump through the window and come and get me.
10:12 I thought that was absurd. These are my co-workers. I don't really want them around me with a loaded gun.
10:19 So in anticipation of this, I had built another identity.
10:25 And it was just sitting there ready to be used.
10:29 I got the opportunity to do the backstopping to create the new persona, Robert Baldessari, and the businesses that were related to him.
10:37 In 1992 to 1994, I infiltrated the Cali Cartel as a money launderer.
10:44 Same goal as C. Chase. Infiltrate the intermediaries and the money launderers.
10:49 Come up with methods to get face-to-face meetings with the traffickers.
10:55 By the time we did Operation Promo, the Medellin Cartel and the Cali Cartel were rivals.
11:02 Lethal rivals.
11:04 Gilberto Rodriguez Urjuela 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.
11:17 And so they were behind the scenes helping the vigilante group that was trying to have Pablo killed.
11:24 The Colombian National Police, DEA, they were behind the scenes trying to take him down.
11:30 The Cali Cartel was different from a money laundering perspective.
11:34 They were much more sophisticated.
11:36 They exploited a trade-based money laundering methodology that they taught me once I was accepted into the group.
11:44 That involves the operation of various businesses, some fronts and some legal businesses that are based in Colombia and that do business in North America.
11:56 And they had methodologies through corrupting bankers and customs officials to create an appearance of exporting large amounts of valuable items that never existed.
12:10 Therefore, giving them legal cover for the repatriation of large amounts of money back into Colombia under the guise of export sales.
12:21 That was something that they were coordinating with probably a dozen different banks that were corruptly involved.
12:36 Some of the codes are industry norm regardless of cartel.
12:41 It's funny. Everybody called Miami Las Playas, the beaches.
12:46 Everybody called New York Los Torres, the towers.
12:51 Everybody called LA La Tia. I have no idea why.
12:55 But those were normal.
12:57 When you're talking about the Cali Cartel in our discussions over the phone, we tried to make them very much similar to the types of things that you would say if you were in the import/export business.
13:11 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.
13:25 They would send me an invoice.
13:27 The invoice number was the phone number of the person to contact who was holding the money.
13:32 So the communication oftentimes was by fax.
13:35 The city would have been identified in the remarks section of the invoice.
13:40 The amount, you drop the last three zeros off of whatever you're putting down there.
13:46 So if it's 250, it's 250,000.
13:49 If it's 2,000, it's 2 million.
13:52 Pallets, pallets could be millions.
13:56 We have a full pallet for you in such and such a location.
14:00 We want to get invoices in exchange.
14:05 Invoices is a way of saying checks.
14:07 But when we would meet, because those people would come from Colombia and meet with me, and I went to Colombia and met with some of them.
14:14 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.
14:23 I mean, everybody's so excited about trying to get this resolved.
14:26 They forget about being really careful.
14:28 And a lot of this stuff was just blatantly on there.
14:32 I remember one time I had one of the money brokers for the Cali cartel at my apartment.
14:36 Behind me, the TV was on, no sound, and it was showing an arrest of people in the Cali cartel.
14:44 And he jumped up and was pointing and breathing heavy, and he said, "That's one of our guys."
14:49 It was pretty obvious, you know, okay, he works with the Cali cartel.
14:59 Eventually, during the operation, I had a corrupt DEA task force officer feeding information to people that I was an undercover agent.
15:07 A guy by the name of [beep] was a money broker who personally worked with Miguel Rodriguez Urjuela, the head of the Cali cartel, with his brother Gilberto.
15:21 So Miguel and Gilberto.
15:22 Unbeknownst to me, [beep] was told by a DEA task force officer who knew that I was playing the role of Balasari, that I was in fact an undercover agent.
15:38 But [beep] was being threatened by the Cali cartel because he had been held responsible for large losses of cash.
15:50 So he needed to work for them for free, and he needed to make money for them.
15:54 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.
16:08 Because he thought he knew when the operation was going to end.
16:12 And I 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.
16:20 So [beep] made the calculated idea that he would come and meet with me in my office in Panama.
16:26 He would take the risk that he might get arrested, but he couldn't really give on that he knew who I was.
16:33 He couldn't let the cartel know that he was coming back to me, because if he did, it wouldn't make any sense.
16:39 He needed money laundered or they were going to kill him.
16:41 So I met with him in Panama.
16:43 He tried to act like old buddies, and he kept looking at his watch.
16:49 And then he got really nervous that he had to go.
16:53 What I found out later was that he had flown to Panama.
16:57 He met with three guys who were killers.
17:01 They were in the car outside.
17:03 They had automatic weapons.
17:05 Everybody in Panama at that time had AK-47s.
17:08 Even with the McDonald's, the security guy had an AK-47.
17:12 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.
17:28 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.
17:38 And I found out that they were getting ready to go in and that I was two minutes away from that squad, hit squad coming in before they were stopped and turned around and went back out.
17:54 And there was another undercover agent in that room with me, and there were informants in Columbia that were working with me, all of whose lives were at risk because of this corruption.
18:17 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.
18:32 It's either on your side or my side that there's a leak.
18:35 I don't care that we've got another 97 million that we're going to pick up.
18:38 I'm not taking another nickel from you in New York, not until we figure out what this problem is.
18:42 And I promise you, if you help me identify it and it's on my side, nobody will ever know about that problem maker ever again.
18:50 And I have to act like a bad guy.
18:52 I can't go in there and I can't go, "Well, you might be a DEA agent, but you can't do that."
18:57 But you have to think like a bad guy.
18:58 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.
19:09 And he said, "You know, the guy opens the door and he leans on the top of the door when it's open in a form."
19:16 He goes, "You know, I've been stopped by cops like a million times."
19:19 And that's their pose.
19:21 And I immediately stopped dealing with that guy because I thought that he was a cop.
19:27 I retired from undercover work in the late '90s.
19:36 The Infiltrator became a New York Times bestseller and the basis for a film by the same name starring Bryan Cranston.
19:43 And then subsequently, a book I wrote this past year came out called The Betrayal, which is a nonfiction book about the second undercover operation that I did.
19:53 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.
20:04 [ Silence ]
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