The Jordan Harbinger Show - 987: Robert Mazur | How Money Laundering Works Part One

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Ex-federal agent Robert Mazur shares his experiences working undercover to infiltrate drug cartels, offering insights into the challenges involved. Pt 1/2. What We Discuss with Robert Mazur: How Robert, working undercover for US Customs and the DEA, posed as a money launderer to infiltrate Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel and other criminal organizations. The extensive planning that goes into an undercover operation, including developing a detailed backstory, establishing fake businesses, and coordinating with informants and other agents. How Robert built rapport with targets by researching their interests, using active listening, and offering them gifts to gain their trust. Undercover agents must be laser-focused on their targets and avoid thinking about their personal lives, as any slip-up could compromise the operation and endanger their safety. During trials, these agents must be prepared for defense attorneys' tactics, such as role reversal, and maintain their composure to avoid compromising the case or their credibility in front of the jury. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/987 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. I have to be absolutely laser focused on my enemy, although I really do care about my wife and my kids. I can't be thinking about the birthday party I just missed. I have to have two brains, my Mucela undercover brain and my Mazar brain.

Both of them have to be functioning at the same time because everything that I do on behalf of Mucela has to be calculated by Mazar. I have to move conversations in direct. where I'm getting actionable intelligence. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to

impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional organized crime figure, cold case, homicide, and investigator, hacker, real-life pirate or special operator, tech mogul or music luminary. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, AI, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste

of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. My guest today, Robert Mazur, has laundered money for Pablo Kabar and other drug cartels. He's worked for the mob, crooked businessman, and worse. Unfortunately for most of his clients, Robert Mazur was a Fed. Today we'll dive deep into the murky world of money laundering and organized crime. I wanted to know how this works. Who's involved? How money is laundered in the first place? Of course, I'm asking for science here, folks. And how Robert helped the Fed's take down massive international crime rings from the inside. He's had a couple close calls, and we are very lucky that he's still here with us today.

All right, here we go. with Robert Mazer. So thank you for doing the show today. I know at some level, media is obviously somewhat dangerous for you. I guess at some level, so I appreciate the trust first and foremost. Well, thanks. Yeah. There is a little bit of a security risk because I've continued, especially now that, you know,

there's a second book and we're working on a second movie. It's like taking a scab off of an old wound. There's some people who aren't very happy with me. Not only that, but I wasn't going to jump into that part so quick, Yeah, you've been a part of some movies about this. I mean, one with Brian Cranston, the infiltrator, which, like, you can't really beat that. I mean, he's an awesome actor. I hope you got to meet him.

Very much so. But now there's a second movie. So, like you said, you're picking at the scab off the old wound for the cartel guys that you busted. But also, when you're filming a movie and doing meetings and stuff, there's like 40 people in a room, and you got calendar invites, and it's like, we're going to be at this restaurant, having a party. And it's like, that's kind of the opposite of showing up remotely on a podcast from a darkened room where no one can see your face, right? That is lots of people know when and where you are going to be with tons of advanced notice. And that's like, not ideal.

Well, a lot of them didn't know that I was actually going to be on set. Okay. We kind of kept that a little quiet. And some of our, it's amazing what they can do with when they're making films. A lot of our shoots that were shown to be allegedly in New York and parts of the Northeast were actually shot in London. outside of London at a place that used to be a factory making nuclear weapons. Okay. So it was pretty remote, and the security there was fairly good.

So I didn't make it very well known, and I certainly didn't get involved in acting in the film, so I was behind the scenes, and I was constantly in the ear of Brian and other actors to the chagrin of the producer, trying to explain to him why I thought certain lines were flat and why I thought other stuff really flew. And thankfully, I got a lot of ear from Brian, and he did actually do a lot of the stuff that I had suggested. So we have a great working relationship. I enjoy speaking with him.

That's why I brought the second project to him initially, and he's very eager to do it. We're moving forward with the help of Brad Furman, a great director. We're moving forward with a screenplay that we're trying to get perfected and go from there. That's amazing. Again, I was going to talk about the movies. later on in their conversation, but I find it quite funny, the image of like, oh, we'll let you be on set because it's a movie that's about you and why not. And then you're suddenly like, let me talk to the lead

man about this. And I can just see some producer being like, can we un-invite this guy? He's like really harsh in my vibe right now. Who invited this guy? Well, yeah, because producers are all about time. Right. Because time is money. So if I'm talking to one of the actors, they decided the last minute, I mean, we know we're going to shoot that day. We get the day sheet. I would try to catch them a little bit earlier. But, you know, when they change what they're going to say or do, yeah, it could slow things down. And there's a bondsman there who's making sure that you're staying on time.

And yeah, so I was a producer's nightmare. Yeah. Yeah, they're like, we can't really un-invite the guy, but how do we mention to him sort of, is there like a polite way where we can say, stop talking to Brian Cranston in the middle of shooting? I don't know. But obviously, you wouldn't have it if you didn't have a good reason to, right? You're not just trying to get FaceTime with the lead man. You're trying to make the movie better.

So I suppose there is some tension there that the juice is worth the squeeze at some level. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you an example, a quick one. In The Infiltrator, they ended the film fictionally where the wedding actually occurred instead of it, in reality, went down in a bachelor party the day before. The main bad guy from Columbia, Roberto El Caino, was in the film, a fugitive at that stage. and showed up at the wedding, allegedly having been able to use another name and staying under the radar. And so Brian said to me, what would you have said to Roberto if he showed up at the wedding? And I said, I think I would have said something along the lines of, it's wonderful to see you, but there's a part of me that wishes you weren't here. Because we had developed a friendship.

And he said, oh, that's it. We're going to use that. And that's exactly the line that they wound up using during it. So I know it's really important for me to be very selective in the picking of times where I might say that type of stuff. And I would be emailing back and forth with the director the night before when I got that day sheet and giving him some of my thoughts. So a lot of times he would actually deliver that. And believe me, there were a lot of talented people there. So I only had a minimal effect on what was actually said on the screen.

So backing up the trucks, now that people are thoroughly confused, all right, he was in a movie, something, something. with Brian Cranston, what does the guy actually do? I'll have covered some of this in the intro, of course, but you started working initially with, what, U.S. customs chasing money launderers for Pablo Escobar? Actually, I started with what was then called the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS. Ah. In that case, I wound up working with other agencies on drug cases, handling kind of the financial side of it. It's typical, I mean, that agency is the agency that did the paper trail that put Al Capone away for income tax evasion. So I was really excited to get involved with that agency. I had an accounting background and business administration finance major and

I wound up getting involved in the criminal investigation division in IRS doing forensic accounting work for law enforcement. Then I decided when we were working with customs that it was probably better for me to move over to customs as a special agent. In comparison to other agencies, customs was moving pretty fast. For example, at IRS, it might take three levels of review on an affidavit for a search warrant before I could get the search warrant approved. And, you know, you've got to make sure that your probable cause is fresh. Yeah. And so at times, you would almost lose the freshness of the probable cause through all the bureaucratic layers.

And I'm talking to the customs guy. And I said, well, what do you guys do? He goes, well, I write the affidavit. I pick up the phone. I call the magistrate. I go to the magistrate's house. He reads the affidavit. He goes, okay, that's good.

And he gives me the search warrant. And I said, I think I need to work for your agency, and that's what brought me there. At IRS, I was trained as an undercover agent as well and did undercover. But when I went to Customs, after getting through all the basic trainings, I was also trained there as a long-term undercover agent. How do you get started in an undercover operation? I know you eventually went to the DEA, of course, so moving around a bit, but how do you get started in an undercover operation like this? You can't just walk into a bar in Medellin with a Hawaiian shirt on and be like, sure would like to meet this. Escobar, fella I keep hearing about, right? That's not, you got to have so many connections and

backstopping and where do you even begin? Yeah, well, it's a much more sophisticated plan than a lot of people would recognize. It starts with, first of all, you've got to have the personnel who were able to do that type of work. And that starts with volunteering. Yeah. Because they can't make you work long term undercover. So I volunteered because I was on a task force that was trying to identify and prosecute the most significant money launderers for the Medellin cartel. And we were having, I would say, average success at best, not even that, really. And I decided that, well, we decided that we needed a new tool in our toolbox. And that was going to be the long-term undercover technique.

So we needed somebody who was going to be trained as a long-term undercover agent who had the capacity, the ability to be able to convincingly pose as a money launderer. My background's very different from most people who are law enforcement officers. I'm not a criminal justice major. I was a business administration finance major, did a lot of a county, worked in a bank and a brokerage firm. I know books and records, having worked for the IRS. And so in my view, I felt as though that my background tended to give me an opportunity to be able to more convincingly pose as a corrupt businessman. And so I went through the undercover training, which is done not just by trainers, former long-term. Undercover agents. My mentor at that training was a guy by the name of Joe Pistone that the book in the movie Donnie Brasco is named after Joe. And I, our families, have become good friends. I talk to him often. He made a big difference in my life and my understanding about the effective ways of doing long-term undercover. And so once you get through of all that, now you need to actually, if you're going to go after an organization, you've got to go through a written proposal,

an overview of the project, an assessment. It's like a business plan. It's like a business plan. That's exactly what it is. You've got to talk about your resources, what you're going to need. In that particular case, as I wrote in the book, if I had asked for more than, I think the cutoff point was $30,000. If I'd asked for more than $30,000 in operating funds, then the plan had to be approved

in Washington. And I knew letting this get to the Washington level was not going to be, at least in my view, is not going to be to my advantage because I really felt as though we needed to stay as low under the radar screen as we possibly could. So I asked for like $29,900. And the advantage is once you get approved, this is called an attorney general's exemption. The attorney general, his or herself, has to actually approve the written plan along with certain agency heads. And that's because you're going to be committing a crime. And the crime you're going to commit is money laundering. And so what we did, we laid out the plan, we got the approval. And under that proposal, and under that

proposal, you're allowed to use the profits from the undercover operation to defray the cost of the undercover operation. Well, it didn't take us long before we were making millions of dollars. And we had more than enough money without using taxpayer funds to really sophisticate the operation. But key to the operation were three different informants. Two were informants of mine who were associated with one of the New York, Italian, American organized crime families. And one of them was an informant from Columbia who had an import-export business. So with those informants, we were able to do a lot. Can I pause you for a sec?

I just think it's so funny because, of course, what people are hearing right now, and I know we're probably going a little bit fast for some folks, so I want to reiterate the idea that you ask for this smaller amount of money so it doesn't have to go all the way up the food chain, knowing also we're going to be committing a crime, and the entire point of this crime is to generate a ton of cash, illicit cash. So you could have asked for like a dollar, right? Or whatever you needed to buy like the calculator and folio that you needed to start laundering money and some other sort of expenses.

But like you're really people who don't know what money laundering is, right? And we'll get to that in a second. But if you're posing undercover as a drug dealer and your crime that you're going to be committing is you're going to be slinging cocaine, you're going to have profits from that cocaine that you can then put back into your undercover illicit business. Money laundering is just pure money. Oh, but there are a department to justice guidelines. you can't sling cocaine. Oh, I see.

That's got to be approved at the highest levels. I would imagine, yeah. In order for you to be able to do that. And also, please keep in mind also that money laundering facilitates crime. And so we were authorized by the Attorney General to actually commit that money laundering offense. But we needed a start-up money. And the way the operation worked, my whole theory is that you don't want to be knocking on somebody's door and trying, as you said in the beginning, hey, where's that Pablo Escobar, dude, I want to meet him because I can launder money. No, you don't

do it that way. My whole theory kind of goes back to high school. If you want to date the cheerleader, the captain of the cheerleaders, you don't go up and ask her. You've got to have somebody put that idea in the cheerleader's head. So in this instance, what we did, my partner, amazing undercover agent, better undercover agent than me, more of a street guy, ran as my manager of my street operations. I mean, when he walks in a room, I had to show like, doctor documents and this, that, and the other thing and convince people I was what I was. This guy walks in a room and they go like, I don't know what crime he commits, but he's definitely a criminal. So he worked with them, with the understanding in their mind that my boss is the one who's helping

me to open the accounts and get some of this money laundered. But he never wants to meet you. He's not going to do big money. But let me tell you, brother, if you could ever meet him and you could convince him otherwise, the river of money that could be laundered would be outrageous. but he works for his own family, meaning an organized crime family. And that's really his main job. So he's not really wanting to expose himself. So after six months, they were banging on the door. They wanted to meet me in the worst way.

And that's how we really were able to get them to get us moving. And then if people didn't want to do it the way I wanted it done, because like so many undercover agents feel as though they've got to please the bad guy, which is the worst thing they can ever do. And my theory was, okay, I'm going to deal with this first level guy. And if I can't get him to sell to his clients, which are the major cartel leaders, if he can't convince them that I need to be more involved in managing their assets so I don't get caught, I can't just take money in, launder it, and send it back. If he can't get him to do that, then I'm not going to work for it with him anymore. And eventually I told the guy, I said, listen, I'm hearing you. You can't convince him. That's okay. You can't. can put us face to face. Let me convince them myself. If I fail, we'll continue to work. But I want that opportunity to be able to convince them. And that's how I met the bigger guys. That makes a lot of sense. I'm stuck on one thing you'd mentioned before about not being allowed to

sling cocaine or whatever. I know I've interviewed some mobsters on this show before, and I always make them show me their court documents. And they always get permission from, oh, I guess it is what you said, right? They get permission from the Department of Justice to do, to basically commit certain crimes as part of their agreement to be an informant. And a lot of the times it's like racketeering, but I remember on one set of documents, it was like associated with these sales of illicit substances or something like that. And I assumed that meant drug dealing. Yeah, no, you can do buy busts and you can do buys and you can sell Coke in smaller quantities that is approved to be done. And a lot of times this is the way it really does work in the big world. And that is that somebody says,

okay, well, I'll give you a sample so that you can test it. And, you know, the big deal, let's say, is going to be 1,000 kilos. Maybe they'll take them, let them cut into a kilo and take so many grams. But they're not going to, on a regular basis and in the guidelines, they're not going to allow a lot of dope to move. Now, in our case, I must admit that there was a time in Detroit, and I thought it was the stupidest thing that could have ever been done. I think it was 109 kilos. They let that. walk. Wow. That was ridiculous. They sold it to drug traffickers from the Middle East. I think they were Iraqis, but I haven't properly identified in the book The Infiltrator. That was a decision that was made on the ground that DEA went crazy over because customs should not have made that. They tried

to claim that they did that because they didn't want to compromise the undercover operation, but that's ridiculous. That's crazy. Yeah. That's where I'm from. I'm from Detroit. And there's a lot of Iraqis there, but a lot of them are Christian and Catholic. They were. They were. They were Christians. Yeah, so if they're Christian or potentially Catholic, there's a group that no one has ever heard of outside of Michigan, apparently, in Iraq, called Caldean. Have you heard of this? Yep. Yeah. They were Caldeans. Okay. Yeah. I identified him in the book. They're Caldeans. You know, you grew up with these guys. They're all over, like, they're in your school and, you know, your gym. And like, a lot of them are, of course, normal, upstanding citizens of the United States.

I want to highlight that, like. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's just like Italians and mobsters, you know, one in a million or so are in the organized crime. So I just wanted to highlight that because I hate, you know, you got to be careful when you paint people with a brush like this. We're talking about organized crime, but it makes sense that they were dealing with Chaldeans because there's like a large organized criminal contingent of Caldeans, which no one has heard of, but specifically in Detroit area, Dearborn, Michigan, where I grew up. Yeah. And then the Coke was actually being driven up from Miami on 18 wheelers up into Detroit. But a lot of times, the Medell, they work closely with the Canadian-Italian-Iroman-organized crime

and Canadian-Italian-organized crime and the biker gangs control virtually every port in Canada, including those that are in north of Detroit. And so a lot of the coke actually comes in Canada and comes from north down to south into Detroit. What organized crime is in Canada? You mentioned bikers. That makes sense. I guess when you think of Canada, you don't think of organized crime, but surely there are groups. Oh, major, major organized crime, Canadian Italian organized crime, just like there's American Italian organized crime. They work very, very closely with the Hells Angels in controlling the ports in Canada. It's common knowledge.

Your listeners should just put in Canadian organized crime bikers ports, and they'll get all kinds of information about it. I'll have to do it. I'd love to do a show about Canadian organized crime because you never put those words together. It's just not a thing. Yeah, I testified as an expert witness in Canada against three major. Italian, Canadian organized crime figures, they had these massive operations, massive. Scary. Yeah, I guess that stuff still alive and well. So how do you build a background? You know, if you're undercover as a drug dealer, you pretend to be a dealer, you learn about drugs,

maybe some other guys vouch for you. But your undercover is a money launderer. So what do you need? Like, I'm imagining you basically have to build an office and get a bunch of tax returns or financial documents and you've got to have fake clients, you got to have a fake company. as easy as just being like, yeah, I know this guy who sells heroin. Yeah. I realized that we couldn't do this in the way that sometimes law enforcement traditionally does it. They'll, as you say, open up a business and it's kind of like put the lights on when the bad guys are in town, shut the lights off later. You can't do that. Yeah. So I was blessed with, I thought, it was an advantage that I had a friendship with leadership at customs. But then in addition to that, I had worked with them already

while I was with IRS. So they knew that I was serious about what it is that I wanted to do. And they gave me 18 months before I even came on stage to put my backstop together. Wow. And my theory was that I needed to be embedded in real businesses. So with the help of those three informants, as well as what I would consider to be a concerned citizen who had other businesses, I was embedded in a real investment company, a mortgage brokerage business. We had a jewelry chain with 30 locations on the East Coast, an air charter service with a private jet, even a brokerage firm with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. So when I would entertain targets, they could come back anytime they wanted. And all those businesses were operating 24-7. And I was involved in them.

It wasn't uncommon for me. Let's say they might come to Florida. I had a guy who was, at one time a bodyguard for a copo. I prosecuted him. Most of the informants that I had throughout my law enforcement career were people I prosecuted. They knew that I would treat them fairly. It wasn't personal at all. We put cases together against them, and I tried my best to put the biggest, heaviest sentence against them that I possibly could, and I also made it very clear to them. Listen, your tongue is the key to getting yourself out of here. If you decide that you want to provide honest, substantial assistance and you want to help this country to be able to make bigger cases, then I'll work with you. We're not going to screw you. We're going to do the real thing, the way that we're supposed to do it.

And this one particular guy decided to do it. He went into the witness protection program. He did five years in prison. He came back out. He wasn't really targeted because his boss, who he was working with, wound up committing the Cardinal sin. One, he was moving a lot of coke that his bosses didn't know about. And number two, he was using it. He was using it. That's a Cardinal sin. So nobody came to really kind of whack my CI, my informant. And eventually, I needed a house when the bad guys came in town. So instead of using the 350 bucks a month that they probably give me for a one-bedroom studio, I talked to this guy and I just said, hey, listen, this is what we need to do. You're going to be my cousin. You're going to be my bodyguard. And

And one thing I'm telling you right now, if you do any contact with any of these people, and I don't know about it, and it's not authorized, I promise you, we will find a way to prosecute you again because that's a big no-no. Informants are not allowed to do that type of thing. You've got to stay on script, and as long as you stay on script, this is what I'm looking for. Let's take pictures with me and your family. I'm your cousin. We'll have those that we'll be able to put around the house.

My story to these guys is going to be that this is my house, but my cousin stays there with his family when I'm not around. I'm not around most of the time. So he would leave and go into a hotel if bad guys came in town for two weeks. He'd leave. I'd had the house. It was a nice house. It was the type of situation, I mean, like, you know, you went into the bedroom and you opened a master closet and there was a three-foot walk-in safe. Yeah.

And this guy enabled me through other contacts to be involved. in the brokerage firm as an advisor to the brokerage firm. So it wouldn't be uncommon for the bad guys to come in town. I'd entertain him in Florida. We'd get on the private jet. We'd fly up to Teeterboro. There'd be a limo at the base of the stairs when we got off. Get in a limo, go down to Wall Street.

We'd go into the brokerage firm. I'd talk to them about, you know, what we did. At that time, before 9-11, because we had a seat, I could take them on the floor of the stock exchange. So I took them on the floor of the stock exchange and, you know, everybody's screaming and and they're doing what they're doing. And I could explain to them a little bit about what's going on. At night, there might be something going on on Wall Street, like for an IPO and an initial

public offering where there would be a meeting where investors would be there and stuff. And sometimes I'd take them to something like that. But most importantly, I was in social clubs that you either had to be a politician or a gangster or both to be able to be a member. You know, so I would be able to take him to the social club. This one guy, Roberto El Cajano, who was the most important guy for me to get close to. Roberto was a jeweler, had a high-end jewelry store, had that in L.A. He had an import, export business.

He exported seafood. You could imagine what that was used for. Yeah. And he was also a real estate developer and a fight promoter. Of course. It goes about saying. He was in a boxing and promoted fights. Why is that?

What is up with, this is a whole. all the show, but what is up with boxing and illicit money? Like, it's just you, there's so much of this. Yeah, from the Kinnahans to, I mean, it's just all over. It's like you can't separate those two things. The sport is wrapped in corruption. Yeah, for those who read the infiltrator, they'll find out that one of the launderinges that we did was to finance a world championship fight. It was the super flyweight, the champion from Mexico against the champion from Columbia, and it was at the Jackie Gleason Arena. It was really weird. I mean, I came in with Roberto because he was one of the promoters of the fight. We used the drug money to actually,

we put it through my mortgage company, made it look like a loan, and that was actually used to pay for some of the costs of the fight. Most of their money that they were making back then was cable, probably is now too, but they were making money from the cable. But there were a lot of people. There were a couple thousand people there at that fight. Oh, from like the pay-per-view cable. Yeah, Paperview cable. I was like, the mafia sells cable? That makes so much sense now. No one of the pricing and service sucks. Yeah, okay, that makes more sense. But it was kind of weird being right there at ringside. Every time you watch a fight, I always get kind of interested in it. Who are those people sitting right in that first row? Yeah. And I get Roberto El Cano, who's one of the major distributors

for the Medellin cartel sitting next to me. On the other side, I've got this Cuban mobster who's a distributor for him and we're sitting there watching the action. And it was kind of surreal. But, you know, that was what my life was back then. Yeah. God, that must have been, I really feel like this would have been such a fun job to have in many ways. I mean, stressful. But like, when you're in your, how old were you at this time? 20s, 30s? I was in my 30s. During this operation, I was from 36 to 38. Okay. You're just unfortunately at the point where you realize you can probably die. and that this isn't a good idea all the time, right? Like, it'd be great.

If you were 28 and you're doing this, you're like, I'm riding in private jets, front seat at a boxing match. I've got all these crazy mafia guy friends, only I'm not going to prison because I'm the one putting them in prison, and we can do whatever we want in a lot of ways. But yeah, 36, 38, you're starting to be like, these guys could just bury me out here and no one would ever find me.

And maybe I have a family at this point, right? So, oh, I did. And, you know, my children were 9 and 11. Oh, man. My wife and I had been at that stage, we'd been married 13 years. But, you know, you talk about putting a young kid out there 26, 27 years old. That's a worst idea. Worst idea in the world. You've got to have somebody who's going to be rooted who has family, who, if you took a new hire and freshly married, move him to a city where he doesn't have family. His wife's got to stay home alone. And he's flying all over the world. First of all, you're headed for a divorce. There's no doubt in my mind on that. And you're not going to have somebody who's grounded who's going to be thinking operationally as much as they really should be. Where I knew, and this is something that every single undercover agent I stress to them, they have to remember. The bad guy's smarter than you. Don't ever forget that. Bad guy's smarter than you. They're

looking for any kind of little tiny sign that they can possibly see. And if they pick up on it, you're dead. And so although people go like, wow, you were in. Paris and going to these great hotels and restaurants and all that other stuff. And it wasn't that exciting. I go, no, you know what? What really got me and what I don't think is a good idea, but I confess to other undercover agents, was my motivation and can be your demise, is that information became my heroin. I had to get the next big piece of information and the risk had to be higher than the last risk,

or I wasn't accomplishing my mission. You know, I was in the military, but I was never in a battle where somebody was shooting at me. I got to think that it's very similar to being on a battlefield where you have to recognize that I have to be absolutely laser focused on my enemy. And although I really do care about my wife and my kids, I can't be thinking about that. I can't be thinking about the birthday party I just missed. I can't be thinking about that at all. I have to have two brains, my Mucela undercover brain and my Mazur brain.

both of them have to be functioning at the same time because everything that I do on behalf of Moussela has to be calculated by Mazur. I have to move conversations in directions where I'm getting actionable intelligence and I can't do that if I'm just hanging out. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Robert Mazur. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, it is because of my network, the circle of people that I know like and trust and I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for yourself for free over at six minute networking.com. This is not for booking show guests on a podcast. Obviously, you can see how trust comes into play if you are, I don't know, an undercover

agent working for the feds against the mafia. This course is about improving those relationship building skills and it is non-cringy. It is very practical. I've taught this to law enforcement. I've taught this to law enforcement. I've taught this to folks like Robert Mazer for their work undercover. And six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Robert Mazer. To clarify Muscella was your undercover identity and your real name, of course, Bob Mazer. I'll throw that in the intro, but just in case people are like, wait, who, what? Yeah, that actually

makes a ton of sense. And I was also wondering how you could possibly enjoy it. Because on the one hand, it's like, you got to live the high life. If you're a money man of a drug cartel, you got fancy food, great hotels, private jets, you're balling out of control, and then it's like, but also, if you get too drunk and you say something and the guy's like, wait, what? You said that, but you told me, and then they start to realize that something's wrong, you're like, I'm possibly dead now, or the, like, best case, the operation is blown, worst case, you're going to be in a hole in the desert or whatever. That's scary. I'm a detail freak by nature, whether I'm doing undercover or whatever. I mean, accounting background.

formerly IRS. I take a different approach, you know, until I got into college, I was at best a B-minus student than in college. Maybe I was a B-student, but I tried harder than anybody else that was out there. There's nobody that can outwork me. I promise you that. I will work harder and more focused than the person who gets the easy A. And for me, that works. And so I was constantly looking to make sure that I could get new actionable information. And at times, some of the information was so mind-boggling. I mean, I work myself into, you got to remember, there's two sides to this as a money launderer. You can't wander money all by yourself. And so there are other people who are in the money laundering process. And for me, in that first operation,

it was the senior executives of what was the seventh largest privately held bank in the world at the time. So I'm dealing with people on a board level in a situation who they are representing not just my interests. My financial advisor also was the financial advisor for the corrupt leader at the time of Panama, Manuel Noriega. And I was getting information about Manuel Noriega on a continuing basis because he trusted me. The investment advisor trusted me. And I would, of course, bring up conversations about Noriega. and because of the fact that Noriega was being paid off by the people I was working with on the other side. But he was also, you know, he had hidden accounts for people who were running other countries, President Zia of Pakistan.

He was managing accounts. Actually, for Casey, the CIA director at that time. There were intelligence operatives. There were drug traffickers. There were arms dealers. There were corrupt world leaders, money launderers. I mean, the international banking community has a very, very unusual array of clients, but they all have the same need, and that is they have money seeking secrecy from governments.

And so they're looking for people with highly sophisticated methodologies that are going to help them to be able to do it. Casey wants to do it because he doesn't want our enemies to find out who we're sending money to. Noriega wants it because he doesn't want the rest of the world to know that he's on the take. The cartel wants it because they want to be able to hide their money from the government that's going to steal it. And so, you know, everybody has that same common interest. It was part of the thing that really it just drove my hunger for more information. I was so excited to be able to get information that I knew was tremendously actionable. I mean, a month before we ended the operation, Roberto Alcayno had trusted me so much that he told me that, you know, there was more than a ton of,

dope sitting on a dock and it was going to be coming in. A lot of people wonder why does he tell the money launder? That's because, do the math, there was 1,000 kilos or 1,200 kilos. Each kilo is selling for at the time wholesale, probably $15,000. So there's a lot of money that has to move quickly. And the people who own the product want that money back within 10 days in Columbia. So if you've got a money launder you're going to rely on, you need to give them a heads up that they need to be ready. And Roberto gave me so much information that we were able to seize. I mean, the customs in DEA found the load. It was in Camden, New Jersey, across the river from Philly.

And it went to Chelsea to a warehouse in Manhattan. And Roberto wound up going there. I told everybody, don't move that stuff because he was there when he packed the 40-foot container. Right. And he knew exactly how it was packed. but they had to take it all apart and take out the couple of thousand pounds of coke. So when he was there and they opened it up, they used customs people to pose as the warehouseman. And I got to talk to Roberto about this later when he was in handcuffs months, months, months later,

because I continued undercover for a month after he got arrested. But what he wound up doing is he's sitting there and he's looking at these guys and he's going, And they're gringoes, their hands look like pillows. They're speaking English. These aren't talk workers. I've never seen these guys before. So he ran out of the place and jumped in a cab. And then it was a chase all over Manhattan that finally Customs won.

Wow. But now I had a situation where I was worried that I would be compromised because I was one of the last people he talked to before he wound up getting arrested. So we did what they did in Goodfellas. And, you know, when somebody gets arrested, you go to the mattresses and, you know, all the bad guys don't talk to anybody. Because if you do, you never know who's on the phones, who's listening in. So I didn't talk to anybody. And then Roberto's wife, we had a way to send codes to one another. And I wound up talking to her pay phone to pay phone.

She said to me, Roberto has a message for you. I just visited him in the tombs in New York. And I'm really worried about this message. And she goes, well, you know, he feels. you're the only one he can trust that he wants you to take over. And so now for the last 30 days, for those who saw the movie Austin Powers and the character Mini Me, I became Roberto's mini me and I ran his operation. So she gives me the list of the distributors, how much product everybody's holding, needs me to collect money to pay the lawyers. And I'm like, I'm now right in the

middle of it. Yeah. I've got to pay the suppliers. It was a lucky accident that happened. But Roberto was 100% believed in me, and that's what got us there. You wrote in the book, I found out in a few days what would take a normal investigation months to learn. This is exactly why, right? Because it's like, normally they got to do all this detective work and they find out, there's a drug shipment here. Meanwhile, you got this guy's wife and all of his associates being like, all right, here's

our next 10 shipments and the dates and where they're going to be and how much is in each one. And you're like, great. Just like, here's the document that I would have spent a year trying to assemble and not getting on time, probably. We had undercover agents in different cities meet with his distributors to collect cash from them. And we timed that at the same time of the Bachelor party where a lot of people came to a country club thinking that I was going to get married. And so we timed the pickups. And I also timed an offer I made to pay the suppliers in Columbia.

And they flew in and met me at my, well, one guy flew in with a woman who was a girlfriend of Roberto's to pick up $400,000. thousand bucks. And so I met with him. So the supplier gets arrested. The distributors are getting arrested. The bankers are getting arrested. A lot of the drug traffickers that I dealt with were getting arrested. And that's basically how that particular case concluded. Yeah, that essentially, what was you were having a fake wedding? Can you take us through that a little bit? Sure. These cases are important, but they're mostly important for law enforcement being put their hands on the bad guys and be able to arrest them. It doesn't prove anything if you have a beautiful looking indictment, and the bad guys are sitting in a country that doesn't allow extradition.

And so we needed to come up with something that was going to, in an ideal situation, lure them to the Middle District of Florida, Tampa, where the indictment was returned by the grand jury. And so I'd say it was probably in the summertime when we had to come up with something. And one of the other undercover agents said, you know, I think they really like us. And I think that they would come to a family event. What about a wedding? And there was a female agent who had at times appeared as my girlfriend slash fiancé, who now was going to be the person that I was allegedly going to be marrying.

And a lot of their families, I mean, she became good friends with Roberta's wife, with other people who were involved in the operation. So it made sense to them. And that was probably the toughest undercover meeting I had was not with a bad guy. It was actually with a wedding planner at the Innesbrook Country Club where I was supposed to act like, you know, the happy groom. Yeah. You know, and we made all the arrangements with nobody knowing that we were really feds because, you know, the bank had a branch in Tampa and had financial relationships with actually some of the people who were. board members at the country club. Oh my God. And there was no way in hello we were going to take the

chance of saying that, you know, this is what's going to happen. Right. Oh my God. We needed to lure them to the country club, which we did. It was a three-day affair. Let me just, I'm imagining you with this undercover, this female undercover, and the wedding planner's like, what do you think of the creme brule? And you're like, oh, yeah, it's great. And she walks away and you're like, okay, do you think we can lure all these guys at the same time? How are we going to swoop in and make the, like, you're just sitting there tasting your fake wedding food. It's got it, at some level, it's funny because it's ridiculous. Well, it's surreal.

There's no doubt about that. I mean, it was an important part of the formula because, you know, one guy came from Pakistan. There were people who came from Columbia. A guy came from Panama. We missed a couple people that, unfortunately, we didn't get our hands on. But we got our hands on a lot of people that we wouldn't have otherwise gotten our hands on had we not come up with that kind of a plan.

So, you know, it's kind of like going to today's events where you see this. FBI informant who was providing information allegedly about Joe Biden's corruption in Ukraine, and they arrested him in Miami. But the indictment had been returned in San Diego, and you have a Miami magistrate that's going to let the guy out on bond. You know, we want it in our home court. We don't want to have to deal with the unknowns. But that's even an advantage to have them in some other jurisdiction in the United States. But forget it if you're going to have them in Pakistan or Colombia. You're not, you could not get them to the United States. So, yeah, so the Before the scheduled wedding, there was a party out by the big pool at the country club. You know, you can imagine the carved ice and the string orchestra and all that other stuff. And there's a lot of people who were there that were posing as family that were actually law enforcement officers. And we arranged it so that we had one of the informants went around to all the bad guys and said, Bob doesn't know this, but we're going to do a bachelor party.

in Tampa tonight. And so the limos will be here shortly and all the guys are going to be going there and, you know, there'll be other entertainment here for your wives this evening. So we'll call you when that happens. So, you know, now the limos line up. So one or two of the family members, which are really agents, get into the limo with one of the bad guys. We tried to do it that way and not put more than one bad guy in a car. And then they drove to a high rise that had like a 10 level parking and they went to different levels so they didn't run into one another. They get on an elevator. They go to different floors. And when they get off the elevator, there's a full arrest team there that takes them down. And as I noted in the book, one of the guys, there were a lot of people in disbelief. But one of the guys

who got off, there was an arrest team, uniformed arrest team that included two female officers and they put the cuffs on them and the guy is laughing. And they said, why are you laughing? And he said, Well, I've been to a bachelor party like this before where the women dress up as cops. You know, where's the party? And it took him a while to convince him that he was actually under arrest. Like, no, really? You're going to prison. The funniest story.

Yeah. And he's like, no, no, no, no. Yeah, take me to prison, baby. Yeah. No, no, you're really actually under arrest and you're spending the night in jail. And you're probably going to be there for 30 years after we're done with you. Like, his hangover the next day was probably nothing to envy, I'm sure. Wow.

That's amazing. I did wonder how you manage. to arrest all those people at once because how do you, yeah, getting them to go in separate elevators is smart, right? You don't want like 30 or 40 or however many guys all in one big old party bus and then you're trying to wrangle them. No. Especially because these are hardened criminals who are probably not super keen on going to jail and willing to kill somebody in order to avoid it. Yeah, it was like about a 30-story high rise in downtown Tampa. So, and on the top was a restaurant at the top where they thought that that party was actually going to.

occur. The funny thing is that the owner of that restaurant was the, it was called McBeth's. He was the sponsor of the law enforcement softball team. And so the guys all had Macbeth shirts on that were related to the place at the top. So that's what they thought the party was going to be. Oh my gosh. It seems like, especially in the 80s, right, there's no email, there's no mobile phones. It must have been hard to separate this stuff from your regular family life, right? Because aren't bad guys calling your house? Don't they have to see you in person? Well, first of all, there were mobile phones.

I had one of those... Giant ones? Sleak, the sleek shoe phone. And actually, there was a New York number in it and a Miami number in it. Okay. Because I was back and forth between New York and Miami.

And so I never, ever used any of the phones at my offices, undercover offices, or my cell phone to communicate with my office or with the bad guys. I had a home in Key Biscayne. So generally speaking, I would go maybe at about, oh, say, 11 o'clock at night, sometimes a little bit later. This was the time frame of banks of payphones. So behind BCCI, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, along Brickle Avenue, there were three long lines of pay phones.

There were probably 20 pay phones in a row. So there's a mass. massive number of pay phones there. I drive there. Of course, all the other cars that were parked there were Bentley's, Mercedes, BMWs. They were all guys with polished fingernails and speaking Spanish that were on the phones talking to Columbia working their deals. I'm on the pay phone and I'm talking to the prosecutor, to the case agent, to my wife, because everybody knew that the smartest thing to do would be to use a different pay phone every day. You don't want use the same pay phones because if people pick up on that, they might tap that payphone. You don't want to make patterns. So, you know, pay phones became my way that I would be able to communicate

with other people. Sheesh, man. And I had contact agents. I had contact agents in each town. Yeah. So they had undercover phones. So I could use my undercover phone to call another undercover phone that was a contact agent for me. That phone was to be used only, you know, to speak with me about, you know, okay, where am I going to be? What am I doing? I couldn't have surveillance on me all the time. That's too dangerous. But there has to be surveillance at times when there is potentially a risk. Say, for example, if you're receiving a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash, yeah, it might be a ripoff. So, you know, there needs to be covered teams. But for the most part, most of my meetings, people just knew where I was going to be, where I expected to go, and we'd operate that way.

When you're creating an undercover profile, of course, you've got to know everything about yourself, your undercover identity, et cetera. But when you're doing it with a bunch of other people, because you had colleagues, right, a lot because you're running this big operation. I assume you all memorize and discuss tons of the details of each of your stories with one another as well, right? It's like a study group. I made them prepare them in writing because you know what's going to happen. You're not going to be in every meeting all the time. Right. I've got this female agent who's posing as a fiancé who very well may wind up in the room,

alone with them, and then I'm not there, so we can't play off of one another on what's being said. So we better all have a very, very clear understanding. I mean, these things were super detail, like, what's your favorite drink? What high school did you go to? What your parents, how many siblings, who's dead, who's alive, who's sick, who's not sick, I mean, to the nth degree, details. And if you weren't going to do that, then you weren't going to be involved in these meetings. There's no way, because you're going to create a lot. liability force. Yeah, it seems like, look, if I've worked with you, let's say even for merely 10 years, right, and I'm your money laundering colleague, I got to know all kinds of weird quirks and

small details about you. Like, I can't just know, like, oh, yeah, Bob went to the University of Michigan. He used to be an attorney. It's got to be like, he always asks for extra chili flakes, and he puts it on Hawaiian pizza, and that always ruins the pizza for everyone else. And it's a running joke with our crew that you're going to go with him and he's going to order a crappy Hawaiian pizza and put chili flakes all over it. Like, you have to know these little things. And because it's probably a terrible example. I suppose you could just not put the chili flakes on your part of the pizza. But it's an idea of the granular detail that you would have on a colleague or a coworker or somebody you've known for a long time. You'd have little quirks that were annoying,

that were kind of funny that other people commented on a lot. Absolutely right. And one of the things that I always tell undercover agents is when you're building your persona, you want to build it as closely to your real persona as you can. Robert Lucela was a person with a business background from Staten Island, who worked in a bank and worked in a brokerage firm, and now was involved in an investment company, mortgage brokerage business, et cetera, et cetera, et et cetera. Well, Robert Mazer, born and raised on Staten Island, had a business background, worked in a bank, worked in a brokerage firm.

It was very easy, even to the point that when we started building things with respect to the fiancé, it was, well, how did you guys meet? Well, I used the same story how my wife and I really met. I was really good friends with my wife before we ever started dating. And I liked her best friend. She liked my best friend. We tried to set each other up. They wanted nothing to do with it.

And we were sitting there one day and said, well, I really like you. You know, would you like to go out? And so that became a part of the persona between me and the fiancé. That was how we met. We met because we were trying to hook each other up with our best friends. Best friends rejected us. So you want to build as much as you possibly can. based upon what your real life is all about.

I grew up on Staten Island in a neighborhood called Mariners Harbor. At the time, it was a very Italian neighborhood. There were a lot of wise guys in the neighborhood. And I wrote in the book, my grandfather worked at one time, along with a lot of people from his family, the Safaro family, for Lucky Luciano. So I knew a lot about, you know, that stuff.

But my mom always said, you go anywhere near any of those people or you do anything that comes close to that, you know, you've had it. My mom and dad were dedicated to the idea that their two sons were going to be the first in the family to go to college. And we were. And we were going to have good educations, good businesses. We weren't going to get anywhere near any of that kind of stuff. So I didn't have to really worry about understanding that.

What does your mom think about you? Like, oh, my son went to college. Oh, he joined customs. Oh, he joined the DEA. Wait, now he's hanging out with all the people that I wouldn't let him hang out with when he was a kid? What's going on here?

She must not have been super thrilled about that. She must have been worried about you. Yes, she was worried about me because I was her baby. Yeah. But, you know, she was very proud as my dad was. My dad was a World War II vet.

My dad fought in Africa, in Italy, and in France. Hardly ever talked about it was a very, very patriotic guy. My brother fought in Vietnam. Hardly ever talks about it. very patriotic guy. My mom worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian employee. She became the comptroller at Fort Wadsworth and later Fort Hamilton, the two army bases on either side of the Verisano Bridge. Family, God, and country are the mainstays of the people who meant the most to me in my life.

And that's another important thing about being grounded. Because if family really, really matters, to you and your maker really matters to you and your country really matters to you. You're far, far less likely to become a victim like my partner in a subsequent undercover operation who went to prison for 11 years and be compromised. And it's very, very important for people who do this type of work to recognize that there is potentially, if you don't operate smartly, there is a potential for you to compromise yourself and to before you even realize it, slide down a slippery slope that there's no way in hell you can come back from. I was very fortunate. My parents were ideal models for me. My leadership gave me the opportunity to train me. I was taken very,

very seriously, long-term undercover training, and then very seriously to build this undercover operation. and I was surrounded by extraordinarily talented people. You know, at the height of the operation, there were probably 150 agents, analysts, supervisors, administrative people, and prosecutors who were part of the operation. So by far, I was not a lone wolf in this thing. I got the privilege of earning a leadership role in the undercover team, but there was an investigative team, a prosecution team. There were many, many other moving parts that were extremely important.

And if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. Man, you mentioned your partner in another operation went to prison. I guess it's got to be tempting at some level knowing you got a trunk or a duffel bag with two million bucks in it to just try and vanish with it or take a couple hundred thousand off the top, especially if it's 80s, 90s money, you could do a lot with that. So the temptation is definitely there, especially if your job is to move it around and hide it. It's like, you probably think, well, I can let these guys know that some of this is gone and tell the other side the same thing, and I could get away with this.

Well, his compromise started even before the undercover operation because he was a young officer with very little experience who was taken from a uniform position after 18 months and thrown in vice because he was Puerto Rican and spoke Spanish. And they thought, well, you know, we're going to have him do undercover work. Well, that's not a reason for selecting someone to do undercover work. And then they put him with two informants from Columbia who were extremely manipulative. And he started making some cardinal sins right in the beginning. Initially, he did everything by the numbers. He met with another officer when he met with them. Everything was on paper. Then he started to like them. Then he started to meet with them alone. Then he started to socialize

with them. I had pictures of him when he was with the two informants with their kids and his kid, he was divorced in the park. And they were, you know, doing a little park picnic. And so now he's with them one-on-one. And the very first thing that the manipulative informants did to test him was they said, we're going to be working with you and you're going to be doing undercover and we're going to be working with you undercover. And your investment for us, you're not going to be able to do it the way you're doing it. Now, you're not dressed right. Let's go to the store. And, and let me show you the kind of clothes you need to be wearing.

So they go to the mall, shows him the clothes, and the guy goes, you know what? It's an investment for me. Between us. I'll buy this stuff. And he buys the guys

a bunch of clothes for the guy. And the guy lets him do it. Well, of course, the light bulb goes off on the informant's head and goes, I got something to work with here. So now,

the next thing he does, he goes, and you know, you need to have some nice jewelry. And he takes this watch off of the his arm, it was a rotto, it was worth about 10 grand at the time. He says, here, I'll loan this to you. The guy takes it. The cop. The cop. The cop takes it. Yeah. Well, now they know, okay, he's taking this

stuff. There's something else that's going on. They're hanging out personally. His personal background was his mom was on assistance living in the Bronx, and she was ill. He had two divorces, and he was paying child support out the yin-yang. And he was always talking about his financial problems. Well, what do you think that's going to lead to? Yeah. And so the informants start explaining to him how it is that he might be able to make some money. And then before you know it, he's down the slippery slope. Man, it seems very difficult. You mentioned selecting the right people for the job. How do you know if someone's going to be corruptible or not, I guess, or don't you? Well, we wind up getting polygraphed. But of course, I'd like to say that my

former partner that did 11 years beat the polygraph. Yeah. But, you know, but, you wind up. We because he's such a psychopath, but there are ways that people can actually study looking in a mirror and say false responses and eventually convince themselves that it's not that false of a response. And, you know, it takes a little training, but they could do it. You know, you've got to know enough about the background. You've got to do a complete background. You don't want an agent who has bankruptcy. Do you want a guy who's got two divorces and financial stress? No, obviously not. You know, you want to make sure. that these are people who have good sound financial backgrounds who have good sound character.

And you know, you got to do a quality background in order to make sure that you're hiring people who deserve this type of responsibility that you're willing to give to them. I'd like to say that corruption is something that only happens elsewhere. But unfortunately, it is a situation in, you know, the U.S. law enforcement community. Maybe not to the degree that it might be in some other countries, but it is a situation. is. It's an ongoing problem, and it's something that I also do a lot of instructing or presenting to law enforcement agencies. And I love to get the opportunity to talk to people who are in management in law enforcement and ask them to confront themselves about the fact that what do you

normally do when you have a circumstance, like my former partner who went to prison for 11 years, what do you do with that knowledge? What they normally do is they try to sweep it under the rug because they really don't want the public to see that these chinks in the armor exist because they don't want the public to lose faith in law enforcement. Now, I can understand that kind of an approach, but my view is that you need to use that. That story needs to be used within the law enforcement community to help people to recognize how even a good guy can become a bad guy and how it can absolutely turn around. You don't want to sweep this under the rug. You want to talk about it. You want to talk about what happened, why it happened, how you can prevent it from

happening, and to help officers who might be working with another person and go, you know, I need to pull his reins in because I can see him making a problem. You know, I know law enforcement officers who deal with informants and the informant goes, yeah, yeah, my brother's got a used car lot and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then another officer goes, well, me, I'm going to go look and see what they got on the line. No, no, you don't do business with informants or family members or friends of informants. No, no, that's not part of what you're supposed to be doing. It's part of getting down that slippery slope and making stupid judgment decisions that ultimately you turn around and you go, well, why not go for a little bit more? I've already made these other mistakes.

Yeah. And then you really make the big mistakes. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Robert Mazen. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, just email me, Jordan atjurbaner.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of Part 1 with Robert Mazer. I can see that process, right? Like, oh, he's got to use car a lot.

He goes there and takes a look, and then somebody's like, oh, isn't that the guy that don't work? Give him a really good deal. Just give him the car. Well, now he gave him a car. Okay. Why are you driving to use car? Let me get a nice car. No, I can't really do it.

I mean, it's just like one thing. And then you're like, well, I'm getting in trouble for that. What am I? No, it's part of the operation. You start rationalizing this stuff. And suddenly it's like dot, dot, dot, dot they're wiring you $100,000 to look the other way when they do something. or whatever. One of the things that early stage stupidities that my former partner did, he wanted to be a superstar. He had great informants. Well, they gave him great information. Well, in turn, they were

looking for a little bit of help. So he goes and tells them on two occasions about investigations that were being started focusing on them. Don't deal out of your club. They know about that club. You're going to get yourself in big trouble. And he told them another time, hey, they got a warrant for your arrest. The guy fled. He went to New York. Oh, man. He was getting the opportunity to make big cases against the competitors of his informants that made him look like a superstar in the eyes of law enforcement, but he was paying a price for that as he continued to slide down the slippery slope because he was doing things that he really didn't think at first were all that bad. Because, look, I'm getting something for the government on this. So, yeah, maybe I'm helping this guy a little more than I should, but, look, Look at that. We arrested five people. We seized five kilos. We seized this. We did that. Somehow he rationalized that stuff out. I can see that, though. You know, I can see how this happens. And I don't sympathize, really, or I guess, because I think the guy sounds like he'd made a lot of dumb mistakes. But I can really see. I mean, and I suppose you can too. You can really see how this

is tempting in the moment, how it's easy to rationalize, especially if you're like, look, we arrested five dangerous people. So what? We let one other guy go and he's feeding us a ton of information. Seems like a good deal, but it's a bargain with the devil in many ways. Yep, absolutely. There's a throwaway line in the book, and by the way, if people buy the books, please use the links in the show notes. It helps support the show. There's a throwaway line in the book. You say, you're talking about meeting with sources and you say, through silence and active listening, these people can offer up more than you bargained for or more than they plan on talking about. What are you using to draw people out when you're talking with them? Sure. So a good example of that, I think if your

listeners watch the film The Infiltrater. This is a bad guy using active listening. It's Roberto Alcano. He's sitting there in a movie theater alone and in walks Brian Cranston. And he turns to Cranston and he says, so, Mr. Moussela, what can you do for me? And he doesn't say anything after that. And what happens is the person to whom that active listening comment is made becomes a little uneasy and feels like they have to fill the space. So now they've got to give the information that this guy is looking for. Best example I can give you that of what happened to me where somebody used active listening on me and it goes to a personal story. You know, my mom was in the process of clearly passing away. and a priest from hospice came by, and he just turned to me and he said, how are you doing? And I said,

oh, I'm doing fine. And he just continued to look at me in kind of an inquisitive way. And I felt like, all right, he's not buying what I said. I guess I've got to tell him. I said, well, you know, the fact is I'm not doing well. And this is what's bothering me. And I started opening up and I was talking to him and I was telling him things that I was otherwise not inclined to tell him. And so anytime you can use that type of a approach, instead of trying to say, well, hey, this is what I can do for you. And I can do this. I can do that. I can do the other thing. You know, my approach would be, I can help you. The way I help people changes based upon their needs, their capabilities. So what is the problem that problems you face that you need the most help on from me? You know,

what my capabilities are. What is your greatest concern? And don't say anything after that. Just look at them and wait. Let the time go. They're going to feel like they got to say something. Right. And they're going to start talking about it. It's almost like get enough rapport to ask them what keeps them up at night and they're just going to unload on you. I would imagine a lot of these guys don't have a lot of people they can talk to anyway. Yeah, I probably hit it off best with Roberto. One of the number one things that you have to do if you really want to try to establish report and communicate with people is you have to be willing to do the homework. Before I met Roberto, I knew I was going to have the opportunity to if I could get past guy number one. There had been failed big investigations

of Roberto previously. So I knew about his family, about his businesses, what his likes, his dislikes were, well, guess what? When I'm going to be talking to him, a lot of his likes, he's not going to know I got this because I did my homework. But for example, he came to my home, actually my informant's home, but he came to my home in Florida. Through another informant, I had the use of a Rolls-Royce. I knew Roberto was a collector of Rolls-Royces. He had five of them. So I had it parked in the garage, and when we got to the house, I popped the garage to we walked in through the garage, never saying a word about the Rose Royce.

He saw it, and immediately he was glued to it. And he's, oh, wow, I said, yeah, well, and I knew everything about that particular Rolls-Royce, and I talked about it. I told him, you know, I really wanted to become a collector. Oh, I want to be a collector too. Now we're buddies. We're starting to become buddies.

We have a lot in common. He, even though we became kind of like buddies, he would promise bigger, bigger jobs. And I'm getting 100,000, 150,000. I know he's moving thousands of kilos at a time. I'm not getting the biggest part of his business. Right. But he keeps promising it to me.

So I went to this informant whose home I was using, the former bodyguard. And I said, you know, what would you do in this kind of a situation? You know, you got this guy who's got a lot of potential. He keeps promising that he's going to do big stuff. Does a little bit here, does a little bit there, but never really. delivers. He goes, oh, that's easy. I'm going to give him a gift. A gift. What do you mean? He goes, I'm going to give him something that's the next time he says, listen, we're partners. We're going to do this. We're going to do another thing. I'm going to give him a gift and I'm going to bless

our relationship. And it's going to be a gift that's really going to be something that's meaningful to him. Now, Roberto was a religious guy. And I said, the government's going to give me like a 12-inch plaque and white TV if you give him this a gift. I mean, what am I going to do? He goes, here, let me show you the type of thing I'm talking about. So he goes into his safe and he takes out this gold studded, it was like quarter-inch bars of gold

and studded with diamonds. It was a cross. Wow. And it was worth like 25 grand. Yeah. So I said, well, that's great, but, you know, we can't buy that from you. So he goes, no, here's, I got an idea. I'll loan this to your agency.

and you just make sure you get it back from him at the end of the thing. And I go, well, I'm a dot the eye cross the T guy. I'm going to go back to my boss. I wrote up this borrow agreement. He wasn't getting any money for his cooperation. Right. And so we said, okay, we'll borrow this. We'll try to get it back for you at the end.

If we can't get it back, it's worth $25,000, and we'll give you a $25,000 award for your help in this case. So with that, signed off by my boss, I get the cross. So now it's a time when Roberto flies into Teterboro with me. We're at the brokerage firm. The guy at the brokerage firm did a great job. We're sitting there talking. Now, he's related to the guy that I'm, is my informant.

So he knew who I was. We had him signed up as an informant as well. And, you know, he starts with the story of like, you know, This freaking SEC. They're just giving me hard time because my last name ends in a vowel. They think everybody who's Italian is in the mafia. This is garbage, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Right. So we leave there. We go to a social club. Now we're in the limo. We get to his apartment building, which is like right near the United Nations. The female agent is in the car. He goes to get out.

And just as he's closing the door, I grab it and I open it up and I go out. And I close the door and I said, you know, Roberto, you've told me many times that, you know, you're prepared to begin a partnership with me. I mean, I'm not an idiot. I know, you know, what we're doing right now is you're putting your toe in the pool. You're not jumping in the water. I mean, what's the matter? Don't you trust me? What's going on? He goes, oh, I trust you. We're like brothers. I go, if we're going to really get involved in this business, this is a situation where we have to make a promise to one another. And the promise is that I'm, I'm prepared to die for you. Are you prepared to die for me? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, we're in it. We're blood brothers in this thing. I go, all right, that being the case, my family has a tradition.

And in honor of that tradition, we have a gift for you. And this is our gift to you in honor of the partnership that we now have. And he opens it up. Now, this guy's a high-end jeweler. Oh, I see. He opens this thing up, and he's got this $25,000 cross. He couldn't believe. it. Oh my gut. I said, and there's one other thing. And now an agent's not going to do this,

but I said, see her in the car? And at the time I was 37. I said, I'm 37 years old. I have no kids. My family's Italian. That is not acceptable. So she's going to be my wife. Don't ever talk business in front of her. Never. And as long as we, you honor that and you honor the fact that we're prepared in our partnership to risk our lives for one another, let's do it. And he said, okay, compadre, I'm in. The money started flowing like crazy. And it worked because I don't think in a million years at that stage, he thought that I was an agent. Never, nor did his wife. And the day that they did this, they arrested him and they did the search warrant on his, on his apartment by the UN. So his wife eventually gets in touch with me, making me the mini-me. And she goes, thank God

DEA did not take the splashboard out from underneath the dishwasher because that's where Roberto's fake passport and a lot of the blocks of cash were hidden. Oh my gosh. She goes, I've already destroyed the passport. I tore it up. I don't think that she did destroy it because he would have needed that in order to get access to accounts that were in that name. But she said she'd already destroyed it, but she wanted to give me the money because that money needed to go to the lawyers and they needed help and then I needed to work with their distributors and stuff. But, you know, little things like that, little things like taking the time to really understand who these people are and what makes them tick. Not only just doing your homework on that,

but also knowing to be asking these open-ended questions, that you should be asking. Preparing yourself for being compromised in advance of being with these guys, I thought about all that. And of course, everybody goes like, well, people not in law enforcement go, what if they told you the only way they're going to do business is you got to snort a line with them? And I go, well, that's really easy because I had this built into my background. I've already told them, listen, you guys are the cherry on the top of the cake. My bread and butter is my family.

If they think that I'm out of control, they're not going to give me the tens of millions of dollars that I wind up having to move for them. You're going to get me killed. So if that's that important to you, take your line and put it where the sun doesn't shine because I am not taking a chance of losing my main gig. Now, the other problem that I had was, of course, women. And I wasn't prepared for this one. So I'm with the first level guy and we're at a men's club. And he comes by. and this is in the movie, and he's got two women, one under each arm, and he goes, Mr. Bob, this is for you. Take her upstairs into the private room, and my mind's flying like a thousand miles a second, and that's when I came up with the idea of, listen, I'm a 36-year-old guy, I have a fiancé, I've never been married before, I don't want to screw this thing up. Thanks, but no thanks, that ain't going to happen. And they had a funny line in the movie where Cranston, delivers that line and says, well, you know, I have a fiancé and I don't want to compromise that. And he goes, so?

You have a fiancé, so? Come on. Take the girl. No. I hadn't thought about that type of compromise and I really should have. But you really need to pre-think a lot of that type of stuff out. You got to be convicted as well, right, convinced of your own red lines. Because I can imagine it would be tough to be in that situation.

They're like, all right, don't do the line. But come on, man. No one's going to come. And you're like, well, I'm serving. my country, I guess I'll just, you know, I don't have to go all the way. I could just kind of hang out for a minute and have a drink, right? I mean, it's real slippery slope, especially when you're a 37-year-old guy and you're with a bunch of gangsters. It'd be an easy thing to rationalize, I think, at that point. Well, one of the things that stuck out of my mind was, you know, the first thing that Joe Pesone taught me, which was think trial from day one. Remember, there's going to be a jury of 12 of your peers who are going to be, or 12 of their peers, but they're going to be everyday people. And keep in mind also that you need to be convinced that you're informant or even the bad guys. If you're not recording it, they may be recording it. Right. And carry yourself like every single second that you're in this mode, you're going to have to show to a jury and not be ashamed of. Right. Oh, man, that makes a lot

sense. And good, think of trial from day one. Nothing, nothing, nothing kills the mood when you're being presented with two beautiful women, like thinking of your trial and having to talk to 12 boomers about why you did what you did, right? And your whole, yes. Your conviction is based on whether or not the old lady staring at you thinks you're a decent person after you tell this part of the story. And almost Stockholm syndrome almost occurred for me with respect to the jury in that, in this first case. I got on the witness stand in the middle of March, and I got off in the middle of June. I was on the witness stand every court day for three months. Wow. And so the jury really, really knew me and really, really knew the defendants and the lawyers. And one of the things that I try to help undercover

agents know is that there is a definite formula defense attorneys use to attempt to embarrass agencies and agents in undercover operations. And one of them is role reversal. Roll reversal. So do not ever answer a question because you're trying to be courteous to a question posed using your undercover name. One of the lawyers, a guy named Jay Hogan, who is a big representative of Colombian drug traffickers out of Miami, would start at what you saw calling me, Agent Mucela. And I would politely say over a period of almost three months, Mr. Hogan, my name is Mazer. Moussela was my undercover name, and then I would answer the question. And eventually, it got to the point where he would call me Moussela, and I could look up and see the jury and see them roll their eyes and kind of look at me with sympathy in their faces.

And so I thought, I knew the judge, Judge Hodges, pretty well from many cases, and I decided to take a risky chance. And not every undercover agent should do this because you could get locked up doing it, but what I said was, Mr. Hogan, you've called me Agent Moussela hundreds about hundreds of times. If you'd like, tomorrow I'll bring a name tag. My name is Mazur. So, ha, ha, ha, next day we come in, in between my notes, I have a yellow sticky. I had two yellow stickies. And with a black sharpie, I wrote Mazur.

First question out of the box from Hogan, Agent Moussela, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I took it out and I put it on my chest. and I said, Mr. Hogan, I promised I'd bring a name tag and here it is, and my name is Mazur. He tried to laugh it off and the jury laughed. I had told him, oh, I brought a second one so you could put it up by the podium as well. And that's when he walked toward me. He took that and he was walking back. And I said, when we all know, you know my name is Mazur.

Wow. You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom. He charred around. He's screaming at me. everybody knew he knew he knew he knew right and thank god the judge well the judge warned me not to volunteer any information just answer the questions blah blah blah blah blah there are other judges that i think would have probably had the jury leave and would have probably had me sent down to the lockup for at least the rest of the day really but anyway i got away with that and hogan completely lost

credibility in front of the jury. But role reversal is something that you've got to be very, very aware of in reality that you don't become a victim of role reversal, and two, that you have the armor on and prepare yourself with respect to, as a law enforcement officer, ever answering a question when someone poses it as though you are an agent whose last name is your undercover identity, because they'll run with that and then they'll say, you know, this guy doesn't even know who the hell he is. Did you notice he's been answering questions to his undercover name? He loved that life so much he never wanted to leave it.

He got my guy to do things that he'd never do because he didn't want this over. I mean, you could hear it all coming. Right. There's no doubt about it. Interesting. That's a very creative technique from the lawyer, but it's also, it must have been so annoying for the judge. The judge let you get away with it because she was probably super annoyed by the whole thing

as well, because it's just, it's like this endless repetitive you correcting him, you correcting him, and he just thought he was going to wear you down eventually. It didn't happen. Yeah. You know, and another extraordinarily important thing is, and when I talk to undercover agents, I bring up the example of Abraham Lincoln,

who had adversaries that he needed to somehow, these were people who ran against him, who somehow he needed to get them to be supportive of them. And what he did was he made them cabinet members within his own administration after he became president. Right. So what do you do when you have a bad guy who doesn't like you and is trying to make your life miserable? And I had that happen to me in that Roberto had his main distributor was a Cuban guy who actually had been in the Bay of Pigs,

who was seeing me as a challenge maybe to being Roberto's favorite. and somebody who might be able to cause Roberto to do things with me that this guy would have otherwise had done with him. And so I had to find a way to get him not to hate me, not to dislike me, and to see me as an ally. So what I did was I went to Roberto and I said, listen, Roberto, I would never work with anyone on your team without your permission. I've noticed that his name was Tuto. I noticed how Tuto really carries himself so tremendously. I have a few things that need to be done that I think if you'd give me the permission to work with him, he could do good things for me and I can do good things for him.

He said, sure, sure, don't worry about it. So then I had two agents posing as bad guys, couriers, and I said to Tuto, listen, man, I'm going to have delivery 150 grand in Miami. I'll pay you X amount. could you pick up the 150, keep it overnight, then I'll have you deliver it to somebody else the next day. Sure, sure, I'll do that. Okay, fine. So we took money, our money, not government money, it was profits from the undercover operation.

Right. Street wrapped 150 grand. He met with the undercover, got it from him, took it to his house, held it, gave it to another agent the next day, and he got paid for being a courier. And then I said to him, you know, I know you go to Columbia a lot. I got to get these checks down there. If I pay for your airfare, could you go down there, deliver them to so-and-so in the Medellin cartel who was working with me? And Tuto knew this guy was somebody important in the Medellian cartel. And I paid him to do it.

Well, now he's working for me. Right. And now we're becoming buddies. So what happens, he comes to me and he goes, you know, Bob, I know about your family. I got a problem. I got these Cuban guys in Chicago, they owe me 250 grand and they won't pay. We just need somebody to grab one of them, you know, and scare them and get the money. And I said, well, I don't know. You know how much that's going to cost you.

Now, I had already talked to one of my informants who used to collect those types of debts and the fee's going to be 50%. So I told them, you know, well, I could get somebody to do it, you know, but it's going to cost you 50% of it. He goes, well, 50% is better than nothing. Yeah. And I said, okay, well, what if we grab one of them and somebody says, I don't care? Do you want us to go all the way? You'd never say, do you want us to kill him? You would just say, you know, do you want us to go all the way?

Yeah, yeah, you got to. And I go, well, that's going to cost you even more. And he said, well, you know, I got to get this resolved because these guys think that they can do it. They know other people. Everybody's not going to pay me. Now, instead of being my enemy, he's coming to me. asking me to do work for him. Obviously, we're not going to kidnap anybody, and I kept delaying that because it happened near the end of the operation. But, you know, that's how you have to deal

with somebody. You've got to find a way to bring them, as Lincoln did, on his team, show them you trust him so that they can return and show trust to you. By the way, what you're talking about is the guy said, I know about your family. You were using, part of your backstop was that you had mafia connections. And there's a funny anecdote in the book where you go to this Italian restaurant and your fake cousin Dominic is like, if you mess with them, we'll kill you. You know who we are? Because it's to sort of show that you're connected, a connected guy. And so he knew about this, yeah, and was like, hey, can you leverage this? Because I can't go to my own people to get this debt settled. Yeah. And actually, I always denied to them that the mafia even existed. Because that's

what a mobster does. Right. I did. You're right. I had, I had, I had, this guy, his name is Alex, I had Alex come to the table. And Alex always had 15 different things going. He had a sun tan lotion company. He was selling clothing. He was doing all kinds of stuff. So he comes there. He goes, boss, boss, I know you're busy, but could I just talk to you for a minute? Because I've got to get back to so-and-so on something. And I go, oh, yeah, yeah, okay. I said, well, I apologize. Roberto, I need to talk to Alex for a minute. He's my cousin. He takes care of sensitive things for me. So then he leaves. I didn't say anything. Roberto goes to me, he goes, Let me guess.

Sicilian, Brooklyn, and started stealing cars when he was 13. I said, Roberto, you almost got it right. He started stealing him when he was 12. And Roberto just laughed his butt off. So they're the ones who came up with the idea, not me. And that's a technique called using passive reinforcements. You never want to tell somebody you're a mobster. You give them the passive reinforcements that makes them say to other people,

he's a monster. I used to do something similar with dating. This is such a funny connection, right? It's like if you tell somebody, I'm kind of a big deal around here. It's like a joke, right? It's like, well, sure you are. Sure you would say that.

Yes, I'm very impressed. Whatever, this guy is nobody. But if your friend tells him, they're like, okay, there's an element of credibility here. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not. You know, he didn't tell me, his friend told me. But if they find out for themselves that you're well-liked

or you got a successful, whatever sort of message you're trying to convey, it's much more credible because they're the ones that came up with it, right? It wasn't you telling him. It wasn't your friend telling him. It wasn't some elaborate show. It was something they deduced, and that has the highest level of credibility. You got it.

That's it. That's so funny. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with an undercover FBI agent posing as an Islamic terrorist. I live with and grew up with the religion of Islam. After 9-11, and knowing full-war, well that this was not the religion that was being portrayed. It kind of broke me a little bit inside. I was in law enforcement. I spoke Arabic. I'm a Muslim. And my knee-jerk reaction was to simply

help working undercover. It definitely is an adrenaline rush, unlike anything I could describe, putting your arm around someone, telling them that you're their best friend, getting them to believe you. But what attracted me a great deal to this case or what blew my mind about this case was the fact that he was arguably one of the smartest, most brilliant men I've ever been in front. This guy was on the precipice of curing infectious diseases. The shit that he talked about in his work was science fiction. How could someone so smart, so brilliant, such a gift to humanity, turn into a fucking killer, an absolute disgusting piece of garbage overnight?

He was the epitome of evil. So we're going up to his apartment, and it was right next to Ground Zero. And he put his arm around and looked up to where the towers were. And he said, Tamer, this town needs another 9-11, and we're going to give it to it. I've heard him say so much horrible things for so long that you think at that moment in time, I could have just accepted it and gone up and did my job, but I couldn't. I imagined killing him right there and then. I imagine stabbing him in the eye with a pen I have in my pocket.

I'm leaving him for dead. To hear more from Tomor El Nuri about what drew him to the exciting and dangerous life of undercover law enforcement work, check out episode 572 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. That's the end of part one, part two out in a few days, if not already. All things Robert Mazur will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. That includes transcripts, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please, I would love it if you would consider supporting those who support the show.

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