The Jordan Harbinger Show - 988: Robert Mazur | How Money Laundering Works Part Two

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Ex-federal agent Robert Mazur shares his experiences working undercover to infiltrate drug cartels, offering insights into the challenges involved. Pt 2/2. [Pt 1 can be found here!] 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. Money laundering enables cartels to produce their most lethal product: corruption. Corrupt officials and governments facilitate drug trafficking operations. Money laundering methods are highly sophisticated, involving legitimate businesses, secret codes, and multi-national operations to evade detection. Banks and the global financial system need to change to combat money laundering effectively, with severe penalties for those involved in facilitating the flow of illicit funds. Despite the risks and close calls, Robert continued his undercover work to gather intelligence and evidence against drug cartels until it became clear that the price his family was paying was not worth continuing. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/988 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.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. His eyes keep flashing toward the briefcase, like he almost knows that there's a recorder in it or something. He just keeps looking at it and looking at it. I open my briefcase, and sure enough, the Nagra falls out of the secret compartment into the briefcase with a nest of wires. And this guy's on the other side of the briefcase, and I'm trying to put this thing together without looking like I'm putting something together. I got it done two seconds before he came around to the other side. 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 tech luminary, extreme athlete, more a correspondence, or neuroscientist, and if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that. Our episode starter packs are a great place to begin.

These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, AI, crime and cults, and more. It'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. Today, part two with Robert Mazur on money laundering and financial crime. You haven't heard part one. Definitely go back and listen to that. It came out just a little bit ago.

I don't know what else there is to say. Let's jump right back in with Robert Mazer. People are going to wonder why I change clothes if they're watching on YouTube. But hey, the magic of part two. So I appreciate you doing this part two with us. There's so much. Bob, honestly, when I started to prepare this, I was like, oh, man. You know, this guy's so interesting.

But I really hope we can fill an hour with this money laundering thing. And now it's like we're going to be dealing like three hours or something. something and trimming it down. No problem. Apparently that wasn't the issue. Okay. As you mentioned before, active listening and drawing people out, and you had a lot of really smart psychology with that, tell me how you almost got yourself in trouble. You actually told me this before we started recording. You really wanted to show this guy your office, and it didn't smell right to him. Yeah. This was a guy who, very, very high up in the Medellin cartel. He worked for Pablo Escobar and most everybody who reported to him. He was a former Avianca pilot, 747 pilot, and he was responsible for

collecting the Air Force for the Medellian cartel. He sought out certain types of aircraft, mostly Rockwell 1,000s, because of the specifications that they have. And so he was sent to meet with me in Paris when I met with Pablo Escobar's main attorney to explain. how we laundered money. And in the process of it, everything went really, really well. And he then made a surprise visit to Tampa. And I said, well, you know, we really, I'd really like to make sure that I take you to the brokerage firm and give you the opportunity to see how effectively we work financially. And we talked about it and I kept talking about bells and whistles and why it was good. And he just looked at me, it got quiet, and he said, why do I sense that it's so important for you to take me

to your office? I realized I had gotten too pushy, I had gotten too cocky, I had forgotten some of my own fundamentals. It really could have created a major, major problem. He was a very perceptive guy. You said you forgot some of your own fundamentals. What are the fundamentals, like act as if you're really, maybe a criminal doesn't have some sort of desire to really expose their business to other criminals, right? Is that kind of what you're aiming at? Yeah, in a sense. And I mean, these were outwardly legitimate appearing businesses. So, I mean, it wasn't as though I was going to take him to a safe house where we had millions of dollars in currency. But I think that he recognized the fact that it was, there was some ulterior motive on my

part to try to get him there. I was working too hard at it. When it's something very important, like it was very important for me to get people to presume that I was part of an Italian-American organized crime family. The fundamental is you never say it. The fundamental is you actually, as I did, deny it, deny that it even exists. But you give them all of the passive reinforcements that cause them to look at you and they say to themselves, oh, this guy's a mobster. It's far, far less persuasive. And it's actually undermining for me to try to convince someone that I am a member of the Italian-American mafia.

You mentioned that you are, well, of course, you're laundering the money and it puts you in contact with people like, what was the guy, the guy who was, you said, the Air Force. So basically this guy gets airplanes for the cartel. Are these guys generally presentable as professional semi-corporate types, or are they kind of like 50-50 scumbaggot off the street and then another guy's a corporate type? It seems like you're dealing with people who, if you saw them at a restaurant, you wouldn't be like, what's that guy doing here? You would just think he's a lawyer and then he talks about how Pablo Escobar wants 50 airplanes. Right. That guy in particular, he had gone to medical school, decided he didn't want to become a doctor after a while and became a pilot for Avianca,

which is the Colombian airline, an extremely bright guy, very, very well read. Yes, he would fit in just about anywhere, as would most of the people that I dealt with. If you were a person who looked like a bad guy, you were not going to be in meetings that were related to the sophisticated aspects of moving literally hundreds of millions of dollars. And the same thing pretty much goes, you know, Roberto El Cajino, major distributor and transporter, he was a very smart man who had a high-end jewelry store and dealt in real estate and in other businesses and was extraordinarily bright. So there were people at times that were not professional. Best example of how that gets received in the upper circles of the cartel. This guy that came to a meeting in France,

he had been drinking, he was loud, he was also drawing attention. And before those series of four-day meetings concluded, Pablo Escobar's principal consigliere, his main lawyer, approached me and my partner and said, he's a liability. We need him to be killed. Would you handle that for us? And, you know, they asked you to do it? Well, they first brought it up with my partner, and they knew that my partner isn't going to do anything because I'm like his Mr. Big. So then they brought me in on the conversation. And as my partner said to them, you control all of Medellin. Just send them back to Medellin and do whatever it is you need to do to them. We're not going to kill him here in France. In freaking Paris. We're out of our turf.

But that's how they deal with people, not just because they may be, oh, if you're disloyal, you're dead. But not just disloyal, but if you are an individual who they feel could potentially draw the attention of others, they are not going to either allow you to get involved in very important stuff or they're going to eliminate the problem. So you're laundering the money and it puts you in contact with other key men in the cartel like the airplane guy. I assume this is like just gold for law enforcement, right? Because it lets you paint a really good picture of how the cartel is spending its money. You're not just washing the money and you're like, all right, we're at $100 million. You're like, it's $100 million, and $20 million went to airplanes, and then $10 million went to fuel and parts.

And then this one went to this operation over there. And then we met in France and then they bought this piece of real estate. Like you're just getting, you're really in the inner circle looking at what they are doing with the money, which makes it a hell of a lot harder for them to be like, hey, maybe we're guilty of money laundering, but nothing else. Yeah, I got those meetings because of the technique that I used with the money broker who became a partner of mine, a Colombian money broker, who had an import-export business in Medellim. And that was that I told him, you've got to recognize that we don't want to get caught, buddy, and you're going to get me caught. You want to give me a million dollars on Monday,

and on Friday you want me to wire out less my fee the money to some Panamanian bank. I can't do that. I have to be a person clearly seen and supported by records to be an investment advisor. So you need to convince these guys that I need to hold some of this money for a period of time. And I need to have the opportunity to have some of my businesses in play. Like if they're going to buy a plane, give me the cash, I'll get it into my mortgage brokerage business, we'll issue a loan, and then you guys can use the loan proceeds to buy the

plane, but I need cover. I can't be having money coming in and going out. That's what the feds look for all the time. And so he came back to me and said, well, I've told them about this, but, you know, they're not convinced that it's something that they should do. And at that point, I said, well, listen, here's one or two things is going to happen. You're going to give me the opportunity to sit down with them and convince them about this, or we're not going to do any more business because I'm not going to get myself caught. I've told you all along. You're the cherry on the top of the cake. My main job is to take care of my family here in New York and there's no way in hell that I'm going to put them at risk. There's a lot of seemingly close calls. Like people threatening

to kill you if they find out, you know, if there's a seizure and it's like if I find out this is your fault, how does the DEA or any law enforcement agency make it seem like the seizure is random or accidental and not tie you to that stuff? Like, you. If you're like, hey, 100 kilos of cocaine on this dock and you know about it and people know you know about it, how do they make it not obviously your fault? Well, you know, each situation as it evolves, you've got to look for an opportunity to try to find a way to get, you know, and we oftentimes would have someone provide reliable information to another agency or a local law enforcement agency about where certain people might have stashes of cocaine and that type of. thing. But unfortunately, I wish I could say that people were always looking out for me in that regard, but they weren't. And in matter of fact, in one instance, in my own agency in Detroit, they filed an affidavit. They, you know, said under seal. That means it goes into the safe in the

judge's office and people don't get it in the public record. But they filed an affidavit, I would say probably four months before the planned end of the operation, they filed an affidavit that spelled everything out, who I was, that it was an undercover operation, the whole bit, and they never told me. Oh, that's even worse, because you didn't even know. Oh, yeah. I didn't even know. So you're just walking around with a potential target on your back for months.

Well, you've got to play each scenario out to the best, you know, that you can, like that when it was suspected because of the seizure, and it's the same seizure, there was a seizure of like 109 kilos of coke. Oh, my God. In Detroit. And this was a period of time when Herodomankara, who was Pablo Escobar's right-hand man, this was his operation. And he gets in touch with the plane guy and also with the money broker down there.

and says that he's convinced that I must be a DEA undercover agent because there's no other way that the feds could have known A, B, C, and D. So now I've got to figure out how do I try to talk my way out of that thing. I had become a friend in the mind of the airplane guy, and I called him. He was in Miami. And I said, listen, I'm hearing some bad rumors. I want to meet you alone so that we can talk about something. And another reason that this happened was a lot of times we try to get to seize cash.

And so surveillance teams in some cities get a little bit more aggressive than others. In New York, this is right after Paris, right after I get a verbal contract to do $100 million in business. It's mostly going to be picked up in Manhattan. like a million in the morning, two million in the afternoon. And I talked to the surveillance people and I said, hey, listen, we've really got to try to be as light as we can on the surveillance. Following these guys away and seizing money from them is going to get a little bit too risky. And I said, by the way, and this is before I actually met them, I said, I learned from Roberto Elcano. Roberto goes to me, hey, listen, they're going to be, make sure your people look for these people.

They're going to be gringoes, white guys who are going to be in their 20s, early 30s. They'll have blue jeans. They'll have pullover shirts with collars, fanny packs, jogging shoes. That's what you look for. And I walk into the New York office, which I hardly ever went near a federal building during this. And I walk in there and here's a room full of guys who are like between their late 20s and early 30s. They're all white guys with jeans on and pull over solid color shirts, fanny packs and jogging shoes. And I tell them, you know, you guys need to try to mix it up.

And everybody's heard of the term in New York attitude. And that's what they had. It's like, hey, listen, you're not from here. We know what the hell we're doing. We're professionals, blah, blah, blah. Well, guess what? The Colombians had counter surveillance out there. They identified every surveillance agent in every car.

And then that's when my partner got a call with Herodoro Moncada in the background, screaming that I had to be a Fed because the fact. feds were out there surveilling during that time frame. That's when I asked for the meeting with Rudy, who was the plane guy, one-on-one alone. And I begged my office, my contact agent in Miami, please, no surveillance, because if they pick up on surveillance with me going to this hotel, I'm going to be a dead man. And all you're going to be able to do is find my body. So they agreed they wouldn't do any surveillance. I went there. I had no idea whether he was going to be alone. He promised me he would. And we were on pretty good terms. And lo and behold, when I went in the room,

he was alone, thankfully. And so we started talking about these issues. And I started explaining to him what I thought, now I got to think like a bad guy. If I think like a cop, I'm liable to say something like, well, you know, your people are probably the ones who got the feds on us. Yeah. You know, we know. I didn't say that. I said to Rudy, I said, listen, the information you people have is extremely valuable to me. Number one, I know we haven't just started on the $100 million, but I don't want another nickel. Not until we resolve this problem.

So find somebody else to handle the rest of that. How many cops are going to say, take your other $95 million and go away? No, that's not typical. And then I said to him, now, I need you to share with me all the details. I need you to see for sure if you have any question about the loyalties of anybody on your team, I'll do the same. If I identify

a problem on my side, I assure you the problem will be eliminated. I need your assurance that you're going to do the same thing. And Rudy was kind of like, well, you know, I'll tell them, you know, what you're saying and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that was the same meeting where a piece of equipment failed. And my briefcase recorder was almost. discovered. That's terrifying. And I just, I want to say, I think it's quite funny in a sort of sad way that the feds are all, at the top of the show, I said something like, you can't just walk into a bar wearing a Hawaiian shirt and be like, hey, I'd sure like to meet that Pablo Escobar fella. Meanwhile, the feds are like, don't worry, we would never do that. We wear polos and fanny packs.

No one's going to spot us. It's like, have you guys, have you looked at, it's like a frat. Like, you guys are all dressed the same. No, we're not his polos, blue, mine's pink. What are you talking about. You guys all look the same. What are you doing? Yeah. It's just like even you telling them, hey, they know what your uniform looks like. You just think they would go, oh, okay, well, we should switch it up. But instead, it's like, we know what's best, even though a criminal literally told you how they were going to spot us. We're going to do it anyway. It's mind-blowing arrogance, really. Yeah. There were unfortunately more times than I would like to remember where that type of machismo on the law enforcement side basically overrode the common sense of those who had the illness of

macho and who also forgot the most important thing that you should never forget, which is the bad guy is smarter than me. Yeah. And I need to be prepared for that. I need to approach every single thing that I do and say with a clear remembrance that he's got a lot more brains than I do when it comes of this type of stuff. So, you know, and on the briefcase thing, I was afraid I was going to get shaken down in that hotel for a recorder. So I left my briefcase outside, which had a concealed recorder inside a thick lid to the top of it. But I was supposed to bring the guy some foreign bank account records. So we're into the meeting and he goes, you know, hey, did you bring those records?

And I go, oh, shoot, they're in the car in the briefcase. So let me go get my briefcase. So I go and I get the briefcase, I throw it on the bed and continue talking about what we were talking about. And as we're talking, his eyes keep flashing toward the briefcase like he almost knows that there's a recorder in it or something. He just keeps looking at it and looking at it. Finally, I take it. We're sitting opposite one another at a table. And so when I open the briefcase, the lid goes toward him and he can't see what's in the briefcase. When I opened it, I had told, the text, that the Velcro that was holding the secret compartment that had a recorder in it, it's a Niagara recorder used a lot in the movie industry. It's a heavy recorder. I said, you know,

the Velcro is letting go sometimes. We need to get that fixed. Oh, yeah, we got it fixed. You can use that briefcase again. Okay, so I opened my briefcase, and sure enough, the Nagra falls out of the secret compartment into the briefcase with a nest of wires. And this guy's on the other side of the briefcase, and I'm trying to put this thing together without looking like I'm putting something together. Right. And he begins to get impatient. Just as I get it back together, he stands up and comes around to get the records. Oh my God. It was two seconds. I had maybe two seconds. I got it done two seconds before he came around to the other side. And you've got to be calm. Like, you're like a kid whose mom walks in when he's looking at Playboy magazine. You're just like,

I need to shove this under my bed as fast as like. can without looking like I'm shoving this under my bed as fast as I can. It's crazy. Oh, my God. Meanwhile, you're like clenching up every sphincter in your body because you're like, this guy's going to kill me. And you're like, but I'm just, let me just shuffle in my papers. And he comes up like, all right, let's see it. Oh, my God. These people have a sixth sense and they can pick up on fear. And so I knew that if I outwardly showed fear and if I outwardly showed nervousness, I would become my own worst enemy. And so that's why I had to have the two

brains operating. I would be getting virtually coached by myself about, you know, no shit, you better not do that. Got to handle it this way. And so you've got to keep both those brains actively moving. There was another close call that I read in the book that I thought was interesting and also I was a little confused. You mentioned that you were in a hotel and you're in a meeting with guys who are already suspicious a little bit. And this guy walks by and is like, hey, Bob, and it's some guy that you had already busted before. Am I getting that right? Because I don't understand how you got through that one in one piece. Yeah, it's a little different. Here's the thing. I'm with Roberto Okayano. He has his bodyguard who's armed outside in the car waiting for us. And we're waiting for

the female agent to come down. So we're in the lobby. I think it was the Helmsley Palace. Yes, I had done previously one prior, I would call it a midterm, mid-level UC operation. It lasted six months. It would be a thing where for a week or 10 days, I would be undercover, and then I'd be back out and, you know, back in my office for a week or two weeks. And, you know, it was in and out kind of thing. Yeah. And it was a group, a Thai marijuana and Colombian marijuana group, huge, one of the biggest in the United States run by a guy by the name of Bruce Perlo and P-E-R-L-O-W-I-N. People should look them up. What a story. He had an accountant and an attorney who were laundering for him. I had infiltrated the accountant and the attorney, and I became the main witness against them. They pled

guilty. The accountant, his name is Charlie, he decided to cooperate. And I even, testified on his behalf at his sentencing. He got a very favorable sentence of like only five years. So while in prison, he happens to be in the same prison with one of the Watergate guys, Chuck Colson, who wrote a book about being born again. And so Charlie became born again. I hadn't seen him in eight years plus. And we're in the Helmsley Palace and I'm there standing next to Roberto. and I hear from the other side of the lobby, Bob! And I look over, and it's Charlie Brune. And he's walking fast toward me. So I turn to Roberto and I go, oh, Roberto an old friend, wait here, I'll be right back. So now I'm walking over to Charlie as he's coming to me. Little did I know

until a few seconds later, Roberto was shadowing me. So I get to Charlie and I hug him. And I whispered in his ear, Charlie, I'm under, play along. And I stepped back. I literally felt a bead of sweat go right down the middle of my back. I bet. And Charlie, who had a lot of Las Vegas connections, that's, we put him away because he was laundering through a casino out there. I wound up becoming the courier, taking the money to the casino.

Charlie goes, Bob, man, you're working too hard. the boys in Vegas haven't seen you in a long time. Why don't you come out? I'll get you comp. You know, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And he just plays along the whole thing. And so the next morning I met with him. And he actually wound up helping us in this case later. But Roberto never heard Charlie say anything about the real truth, about the relationship between me and him, luckily. That is such a... So he played along because he's like a man of God now. Because it seems like he could have been like, this guy put me in jail and then you're just dead. That's it. Yeah. You know, I remember a scene from Joe Pistone's movie, Donnie Brasco, where a prosecutor was coming up an escalator. He was with bad

guys and the guy came right up to him. And in that case, at least according to the film, Pestone knocked him out. That would have been my next move that I would have done with Charlie. And when Pistone did that, he said, oh, that guy grabbed me, he's coming after me or blah, blah, And so that explained why he knocked the guy out. Everybody left and then they moved on. So, yeah, if Charlie hadn't played along, I would have had to do something to shut him up. Oh, my gosh. I bet you're glad you didn't have to do that.

I am. That could have just gone so poorly. How long does it take to launder $100 million? Your cut is 15%. Is that how it usually works? Or is it five? It's going to vary based upon how high up the food chain you are dealing closest to the owner. Okay.

At that time frame, the owner's going to expect to lose about 15% of the value of the money. But I always tell people, there are as many different methods of laundering as there are different forms of snowflakes, an infinite number of different ways. In this particular case, we were dealing money through the black money market. So when you're a black money market operator as I was, you have supply and demand clients. I went to college in New York and my economics 101 professor. The only thing I ever remembered from economics was supply and demand. Keep it equal.

You'll have lots of profit. You're not going to have clients that you're not able to get your supplies to. And you won't have excess supplies sitting there when you don't have enough clients. So we had supply clients of money, dollars, and these are drug traffickers. So they've got all this. and they want to get something else. So now I need to find demand clients that possess what the supply clients want. And a portion of this money, they wanted to get Colombian pesos.

So now I've got to find people who possess Colombian pesos and want dollars. Well, anybody who's been operating in the black money markets know that the best place to go for that is importers. importers within the country where your supply client wants to get whatever it is. That could be Mexican pesos, Colombian pesos. It depends on who you're dealing with. But the bottom line is, now I've got importers who want dollars. If they wanted at that time to get dollars, they had to go through the official channels. And they had to prepay like 25% in taxes, duties.

So if they've got $100, they're only going to get $75. dollars worth of dollars, if they've got $100 worth of pesos and they want to get dollars, they're going to give up 25%. So now they're going to have 75 bucks. Well, you come to me in the black money market. I'll sell it to you for 10%. So in theory, bottom line, the supply client is willing to give up 15%. The demand client who wants to get what the supply client's got is willing to pay you 10% to get the dollars. I arrange a swap. So on a million dollar swap, I'm making 15% on one side, 10% on the other. It's a quarter of a million bucks. Oh, wow. That's why black money markets operate throughout the world so aggressively. Wow. In order to get around official channels. Anytime a government creates capital restriction. Back then, that was a capital restriction based upon importers. Now China becomes a major player because they have a capital restriction. You can't invest more than $50,000 worth outside the borders of the People's Republic of China in a year.

But they want to go to the black market. They're going to buy tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in order to do it. And people who run the black money markets know geographically where it is that they can get the clientele that they need on both sides. 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 intelligence agencies. I've taught this to folks like Robert Mazur 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. I did an episode about this. The money laundering or the capital flight from China, it's crazy.

They'll drop off $50 million to somebody in China who basically calls like a laundromat or dry cleaner. in Vancouver, and then that person's laying out, I've seen the photos of the bus, they're laying out duffel bags full of cash locally. So no money has to actually cross the border. It's just like a sort of weird banking system that they can do. And then they'll use it to buy like three houses in Vancouver or something like that to park their cash. It's really amazing. There are a couple of reasons beyond just that capital restriction. First of all, there are massive free trade zones in China. And so a lot of times,

these traffickers want to get goods. It's called trade-based money laundering. So if they can exchange lockers full of cash and they can get container loads full of refrigerators, that's a deal. Because they can bring those back to Columbia. They can sell them. They can say, hey, I got a legitimate business. I got this appliance store and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's free trade zones, but most importantly, especially in an area, town called Guangzhou, they are experts in creating counterfeit goods. So now, not only can you get goods, but you can get counterfeit goods. And if you're a bad guy, there was a case called the Guangzhou Enterprise case, $5 billion in counterfeit goods brought into Latin America. You don't have any legitimate businessman were knocked out of business because

of their counterfeit goods. But then there's also unregulated pharmaceutical companies in China. They are selling precursors for methamphetamine. They're selling fentanyl. If I can give the Chinese $10 million in Vancouver and they can make arrangements for me to get a shipment of methamphetamine precursors, I'm doing great. And so that's another reason for China to become so involved. But they're also, it's impossible for you to serve a subpoena on an institution in China. Right. The People's Republic of China is not going to honor due process from the U.S. courts. So you got another layer.

So, I mean, there's a ton of different reasons why China has become the guerrilla in the money laundering world. Can we do like a brief trace of the path of money from a drug buyer on the street and then through the money laundering process? Like, what? So a user buys a baggie on the corner, then what? I mean, they got to aggregate this. You're not laundering 50 bucks at a time, right?

No, no. I get into the process when the courier that is responsible to the cartel has a reasonable amount to be turned over. Normally, we would get quarter of a million, half a million at a time. That's done through codes, the money broker in Medellin, who, was a real bad guy that I dealt with, who had the import export company, the representative of the cartel leader would come to him and go, okay, we've got two million dollars in Detroit. Here's the cell phone number. The code is that the money is for Paco to be paid to Isabella. So now that gets passed to

my partner. And then my partner or one of the undercover agents that's working in given cities would go pick it up. Now, my partner at times would use our jet, our private jet from the jet company. So I'll use that one as an example. He would go to Houston. Before he left, he would be on the phone. He'd talk to that phone number, talked to the person, they would confirm codes, and then they would work out where it was that they were going to meet in order to pass the money on. Most often, they want and we want to meet in a public place, a McDonald's. So you show up at the McDonald's, the guy's inside, and my partner goes over, the guy says little, if anything, and shoves keys over to my partner and says the white Chevy out there.

Usually it's a beat-up, ratty-looking old car. It's in the trunk. Because they're going to get rid of the car, right? Yeah. Single use. Now my partner takes the car, making sure he's not followed. Of course, if they've put anything on there in order to follow the car, a monitor of some sort, that's a problem. We weren't too crazy about taking their cars because we don't know whether or not they're wired up.

But anyway, just in this example, I can tell you that, okay, so he goes to another location. They offload the two million. They bring back the car. He meets the guy. the guy as keys, we've now got the money. I talked them into, they want all the money right away. And I said to him, okay, listen, I got the government to give me $5 million in recoverable funds. And my position to my superiors was, if we're picking up a million dollars, I think we could quickly tell whether or not there's at least $750,000 there. They're usually bound in rubber bands

in blocks of $5 or $10,000 and $20,000. So I paid within 24 hours 75% of what we picked up. And about eight days later, they'd get the rest that would come in through a wire transfer after we were able to count, verify, and do all the other stuff that we needed to do. The reason I wanted to tell you the story on the private jet and my partner picking it up is so my partner's out there and he picks up $2 million. bucks. He comes back to the air charter service, and I had given him a credit card to pay for the gas. He had outspent the limit. So he's there with the fixed base operator who says, do you owe me

$2,500. And he goes, okay, wait a minute. Puts one of the suitcases down, unzips it. It's a suitcase full of cash. He takes out $2,500, counts it out of one of the bundles. and gives it to the guy. And then he gets on the plane. So you would think that the guy who runs the fixed base operation is going to pick up the phone and call the cops and say, you're not going to believe what just happened. Yeah.

That did not happen. The next time my partner comes back on the jet to the same fixed base operator, they rolled out a red carpet, they brought him a tray of fruit and champagne, and they did everything, they could to cater to him. That's American greed. I'm sorry, but that's unfortunately how that went down. That's insane, right? Yeah, hey, should we do something about this? Yes, we absolutely should do something

about this. Go to the store and get some Dom Perignon and put it on ice for when this guy gets back. That's what we should do about this. There's more where that came from. And double his fuel bill. He's not going to bat an eye. Do you see how much cash that guy brought on that plane? That's, man, you're laundering this amount of money. It sounds like you're doing what, like a million bucks a week, probably do more than that, right? Like, I guess I've, going back to my earlier question, how long would it take to launder $100 million, for example? Okay. Well, first of all, we're not going to want to do that. You're going to have to realize that by laundering money, we're facilitating their criminal organization. Right. Our position always was, if we're laundering for the same people and we're

not getting any new information, new intelligence, with respect to what they're up to, we need to find a way not to pick up money from them anymore. You know, it could be, hey, they're sloppy. We don't want to deal with them. We thought we saw eyes. You name it. Now, unfortunately, getting back to that machismo law enforcement angle, a lot of cops go like, hey, we had this really big money laundering case. We laundered $400 million. dollars. Banko shares was one of the first major FBI money laundering on stings, and they did launder about $400 million. In this operation, the first one that we're talking about that the infiltrator film was made on, it may not sound like a lot. We only laundered $32 million. The name of the game is launder the minimum amount you can and get the maximum amount of information that you can, because otherwise, you're just helping them. Right. Okay. Make sure you've got a plan

to get them arrested and not have to worry about them being in a country where they can't be extradited. And because there have been prior cases where that unfortunately has been the case, where the major bad guys, they couldn't get collared. So really, you have a pretty piece of paper. You've laundered a lot of money. To me, that's not a big case. To me, that's a travesty. Right, because then all you've done is supply them with tons of money to continue criminal operations and corruption around the globe, but you didn't really get anything in return. Basically, all you did is help criminals at that point by working for free. For your fees.

Yeah, for your fees. Yeah, for your fees. How do you learn money laundering in the first place? Not like for people who are listening that want to learn how to launder money, to be clear. How do you particularly learn money laundering? Because I know you've got a degree in business administration, but I'm guessing that money laundering is not a course at most universities.

So does the DEA or customs or whatever be like, okay, here's how money laundering works, you kind of get a crash course in that and then you're like, all right, I'm a money launderer undercover. Well, there's training in that area in basic training, your intermediate training, there's advanced training in money laundering. But I have to say that I learned tenfold about money laundering from real bad guys more so than I did from people who were involved in law enforcement. It's amazing to me the unfortunate sad truth. And, And that is that the United Nations on drugs and crime estimates that roughly $400 billion a year is generated from the sale of illegal drugs.

Wow. On its best day ever, the Department of Justice can only take credit for probably less than, but let's say, a billion dollars in bad guy money. Now, you've got to watch how they cook the books because when a bank, pays a $19 billion fine, they structure that as a forfeiture, and it makes the numbers look so much better. I'm talking about real bad guy money. So if they're only getting a billion and $400 billion is made, do the math, one-fourth of 1%. Yeah. We're not even scratching their coffers, not even coming close. And what we sometimes don't recognize is nations are involved in this.

Sure. When I was undercover in the infiltrator case, now we haven't talked much about the other side of the case, which is by infiltration of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, but I was at a social gathering. I was one of the other social clubs I belonged to was René's. René's had locations in every major city, and it was like where all the beautiful people went back during that time frame. So I met René's in Miami and with this guy. And he goes to me, you know, the biggest money launderer in the United States is. And I'm the eager agent. You know, I've got my sickness, my heroin. I'm going to get more information. This is going to be fantastic. And he goes, well, it's the Federal Reserve, of course. And I said, what? He goes, Bob, how naive are you? This is all hypocrisy. Here's the bottom line. at the bank, and this was true at the time of the conversation and continued on for a few years after that, at the Bank of the Republic in Columbia, there is an arrangement called the Sinister window. Some called it the anonymous window. Your listeners can just Google Sinister Window, Columbia.

They'll read the whole story. So if you had the right connections, in Columbia, you could go to the Bank of the Republic with all the cash you had, and you would get a very quick exchange into Colombian pesos, and it would happen fast. And then the central bank would get the dollars. Why was that happening? Well, because at that time, the inflation rate per year in Colombia was 28%. So if you held your assets in pesos, at the end of the year, no matter what you put in your mattress, it was worth 28% less than it was before. Wow. So the central bank doesn't want to be holding all those Colombian paces. But oh, guess what? It's illegal at that time for any Colombian to have a U.S. dollar account, period, totally illegal. So now, as the banker said to me, well, what do you

think the Bank of the Republic does with those dollars after they get them from these anonymous people? They put it on pallets, they shrink wrap it, and they send it to the Federal Reserve. They fly it in. And then what happens, it is counted and it's put because every central bank and many other banks, major, major banks, they are members. They've got their accounts with the Federal Reserve. So they want to get that money into their U.S. dollar bank balance. Wow. They don't want to hold it in currency. So now, he goes to me, don't you think that there's somebody with enough brains at the Federal Reserve when these pallets of hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S.

dollars are coming in from Columbia, where it's illegal for anybody to have a dollar account, where the heck do you think they got? Obviously, they know where this money's coming from. It's all a joke, Bob, and it was quite an eye-opener for me. Yeah, man, I can only imagine. I just Googled Renee's Social Club, I don't think it exists anymore. Is that possible? No, it does not. What happens if you lose money that you're supposed to launder or move for the cartel? Because of the obvious answer is, oh, they just kill you. But what if it's not your fault? I mean, do they care at all? Because, look, yes, these are like heartless sociopaths that lack compassion, but they still

theoretically want to find out where the real problem is in their business and organization as opposed to just like killing the last guy who touched the money. Or am I giving him too much credit? No, you're spot on. It was extraordinarily important for the cartel to demand from whoever had the money last for them to get documents that proved that in fact the money had been lawfully seized, that there was a seizure warrant, maybe there was an affidavit, and they wanted to look at the affidavit for the search warrant, if it was public, most times it was, to be able to see who's responsible. They would immediately say, to anybody who was likely to be responsible, get your butt down here to Columbia and answer questions.

Federal agents at that time, despite the fact that I begged to be able to go, were not allowed to go to Columbia. It wasn't until the second undercover operation by then that I was able to do that. This infiltrator story, the undercover operation, started about 18 months after Enrique Kiki Kamerena, the DEA agent was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. Columbia and Mexico were off limits for being able to do that. And the Colombian traffickers knew that, which is why they kept inviting Mew to come there, because they know, oh, he's not going to come. He can't come.

Why? Because he's a DEA agent. That's why he's not going to come. Yeah, so they want to get that. Now, if you can prove that it was not your fault, but you were in the mix, you would be expected to participate in paying back. Sometimes what they would allow you to do would be work for free. You're not going to get your cut and you're going to continue to do this

until your portion of this is repaid. And if you didn't do that, like one of the Colombian money launderers that I dealt with, he had horses. He was a big horse fan. Bottom line is they were expensive horses. and what they did is they poisoned his horse, one of his horse, his favorite horse. And then they came, they took all of his furniture out. They came and they forced him to sign documents to turn over all of his properties.

And they told him, you better find a way to pay the rest of this or you're dead. So, I mean, it depends upon how deep your responsibility is for what it is that occurred. Man, yeah, it seems like, I mean, obviously you take the work and off thing rather than the getting killed thing. I assume you cannot just throw other criminals under the bus. That's probably not allowed since you know that those people are likely to get killed if you do that. I'm guessing that's against policy slash the law. Yeah, well, closest we came to that, we had a seizure. If you read the betrayal, the second book in Houston.

And the money was actually, we went there for the purposes of picking it up. The DEA agent who was there was supposed to have gotten in touch with, you would call it a clearinghouse. where law enforcement tells each other on the day of or a day before what they're going to be doing because we don't want to have cops arresting cops. And so he didn't go through the clearinghouse. Our guy shows up to pick up the money and they're ahead of us and they're going to seize $4 million that's sitting inside the house. But our guy's there. Oh, no. And we're going to be suspected undoubtedly. And it really wasn't our fault. But it sure did appear to be our fault. And we wound up getting authorization to turn over a report as though we had somebody on the inside that threw

blame in another direction. I'm not sure that they actually bought it, but we had to do something in order to be able to get out of it. And actually, the real truth of it is, the place was under surveillance because they had been for years investigating the person who was involved in that operation. So we shared some of the truth.

And unfortunately, it really did rattle the undercover agent. That's the guy who ultimately wound up compromising me and going to prison for 11 years. But he was scared to death. After that, it happened because they thought that he was either an informant or a cop, one or the other. So I think the smarter thing would have been to come back and go, you got to have a scenario

where they think I died because I just, I'm not going to do this anymore, but he didn't unfortunately take that route. You wrote in one of your books that money laundering enables cartels to produce their most lethal product, which is corruption. And I thought it was interesting because my reading of that was that you think the corruption is worse than the drugs. Is that accurate? Absolutely. I can give you an example. Well, during my time, I'm sitting around with the guys high up in the cartel and somehow or another the subject of Manuel Noriega, the ruler of Panama at the time, came up. And, you know, it was very clear. Don't worry about any

your accounts getting tagged by the government. He's on our side. We pay him. We move drugs. We move drugs through there. He has his people turn the other way. We own him. That became a method by which the cartel was able to facilitate massive, massive amounts of movements of illegal drugs. You can fast forward until just a year or so ago, there's a case. I've written articles about it, and all the articles that I've written are on my website under publications. there was a DEA case where DEA had determined that there was this very mysterious person, always referred to by the traffickers as El Patron, the godfather, who was providing information about what was going on within law enforcement, helping them to avoid seizures, helping them to

basically beat anything that law enforcement was trying to do. Eventually, D.E.A. identified who, who El Padron was. And he was, actually, General Salvador Sinfuegos, Zapeda, who was the Minister of Defense for all of Mexico from 2012 to 2018. Wow. They arrested him and they held him, no bond. And it became a big political problem. And Attorney General Barr decided that, okay, we're going to give him back. It took the Mexicans 30 days. somehow in 30 days, they were able to go through thousands of text messages and wire intercepts, and they determined in 30 days that General Sinfuegos was completely innocent. He never did anything wrong.

As a matter of fact, this year, I think it was this year, he received, you know, one of the highest awards from the president of Mexico for his tremendous service to Mexico. We've now convicted this year in February, the recently former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez. I saw that. Who was in the pocket. He was in the pocket of the cartel. His brother is doing life in prison. He's yet to be sentenced.

There's a room full of senators from Honduras. They owned Honduras. The Honduran government, anybody who tried to stand up to them and to try to do anything about this, wound up getting whacked. by their leaders. They had a general who's pled guilty, or the head of their, excuse me, their narcotics, their military. He's pled guilty. He's facing life in prison. He was going to testify against Juan Orlando Hernandez in the February trial of this year. They owned Honduras, and they could do anything there that they wanted, and the rule of law was stolen from the people of Honduras. And I just don't think that the average American recognizes how many journalists, how many, hey, it could be podcasters

who are trying to get the free word out there who wind up missing. Yeah. And become part of the missing. So it's happening in many of these countries. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Robert Mazur. 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 other.

the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, just email me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.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 my conversation with Robert Mazur. We have journalists who listen to the show that run accounts and things like that under basically like pseudonyms, right? So they'll release a story online and they publish things online under fake names. And I read this stuff and I remember mentioning it once on a show and I got a DM from them.

And they're like, I heard you mention me on the show. I listen to your podcast. So some of these very same people who are outing narcos and things like that in Mexico or other countries and writing the real news who are living in fear. They're listening to this right now. I mean, it's a thing. It's terrifying that these people can't do anything in public because half their colleagues are dead or more, or at least just no longer writing about anything narco related is too dangerous, which is insane. It's amazing to think that the people who were in charge of the Honduran government operated clandestine labs in Colombia and Honduras, provided a gateway for hundreds of tons of cocaine to the U.S. and Canada, put millions of dollars.

in political figures, killed hundreds of people involved in human rights defenders, environmental defenders, competing traffickers. They conspired with corrupt senior military and law enforcement leaders. They sold military-grade weapons to the cartels, and they provided military escorts for caravans of drugs. And this was going on just under the nose of all of us. And it has been and continues to and will continue to that it's not going to stop. What made you finally get out of the undercover game? When it became very clear to me that in the second operation, the one I wrote the book,

The Betrayal about, that I came within three minutes of being murdered after the operation was over. I didn't pull out then. But after the operation was over, it was clear to me that the, The price that my family was paying was not worth my continuing, and it was time for some young up-and-comings to pick up the baton. Are you still worried at all about these guys coming after you? I should probably mention for the listeners that your face is darkened here so we can't see it. I assume that's because there's an active threat or at least the shadow of the threat.

You're concerned enough to take precautions. Yeah, you know, in today's world where it's so easy for people to communicate with you, via the internet. And at times, especially when the film came out, that would have been in 2016. There were threats that came in, I expected it from drug traffickers, but there are also people who are of the belief. And this is not true, but they are of the belief that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI, which was not just the seventh largest privately held bank in the world, but the largest Arab bank in the world, which was on the way to becoming a major player in the Western banking world. Some people from Pakistan believe that a combination of the Western banks,

you know, the city banks of the world and the CIA were the orchestrators of what became the prosecution of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International because they didn't want to see the Arab world, become the major financial player that BCCI was most certainly going to become. They had, I think, 1,200 branches. They were in 72 countries. They were massive. I read your resume, and it's case after case of 10 million seized, yachts seized, hotels, seized, shares in this company seized, 20 million in assets, $100 million in product. Those kinds of numbers are going to sting a little if you're on the other end of that.

So I'm guessing at some point, there's probably a contract out on you, at least after the first couple of years, or are they kind of like, what's done is done? We're not going after a cop. Within 30 days after the end of the infiltrator story, the undercover portion of it, within 30 days, two law enforcement agencies and an intelligence agency reported that there was a half-million dollar contract on my life. You got to take that serious. I was a very, very important witness. Among the defendants charged that we were going to try to get our hands on and we never did was Pablo Escobar's most important lawyer. There was also Pablo Escobar's right-hand man, the manager of 60% of his operations,

who ultimately Pablo tortured and killed, had him tortured and killed. And so as far as product goes, that doesn't really bother them. When I was in the game, it cost about 250 bucks to make a kilo, or Coke, and it costs maybe $2,500 pro-rated to transport that kilo to the United States, so a $3,000 investment. Most of the transportation was done by giving a portion of the load to the transporter. So if the load got seized, they lost $500 a kilo. Right.

And that's it. So, hey, no big deal. They've got loads coming constantly in semi-submersible submarines, in containers, and you name it. It kind of bothers me that a lot of people have this suspicion that people who run across the border and jump over a fence are, you know, the way that we're getting fentanyl into this country. I think there were 62,000 pounds seized in L.A. That's a lot of backpacks. And that's enough to get everybody on the planet high, twice. So these are very sophisticated. They have what they call pipelines. You know, Roberto gave me his

entire pipeline. It was pretty simple. A lab in Bolivia producing about 6,000 kilograms. I got to look back, whether that was a month or a week, and maybe it was a month. But anyway, 6,000 kilograms. They had a remote airstrip there, so small planes would come in. They'd fly out like 500, 600, Kilo's at a time. Land in north of Argentina. They would take it in vans to Buenos Aires, where he had a seafood packing plant. It would get packed. If you had a 40,000 pound shipment of anchovies in commercial cans, there might be 2,000, 3,000 pounds of Coke in some of the commercially sealed cans. They were very, very sophisticated. They would have electric scales for the real can, which was 23 pounds, they'd have an open can with the lid on the other

electric scale. They would put in half kilo bricks of Coke, lead ingots, sand, get it exactly the same, seal it commercially, and then pack it. There was a very low-key secret way. The name of the company was Dipez. So the dot in the eye of the box, that had two 23 pound cans, the eye had a pinhole in the dot of the eye. Oh my God. So that they knew that that was the box that needed to be pulled. That's how they operate. They operate with very sophisticated.

And they buy companies that have operated for five, ten years in a very legitimate way. And then they take it over because they want a company that has a track record. They know we can't possibly screen all the containers that come. across our border. It's impossible. Man, the methods now must be even more. Now they're probably using like RFID and when the barcode number ends in a odd number and then another odd number, it's like, I mean, there's just unlimited ways you can do this kind of thing with the whole digital footprint stuff and the way the shipping works now.

It's just absolutely nuts. How much money is laundered globally, do you think? Well, according to the United Nations on drugs and crime, that number, it comes from many different sources, not just drug trafficking, illegal arms dealing, pilfering treasuries, which is a sport in African nations, white collar crime, hacking, all that. They estimate that to be roughly $2 trillion a year. That's somehow way more than I thought, but I guess it all adds up fast. Wow. And what percentage has to do with the United States? I guess that's probably really hard to break out by country, right? With the human trafficking drugs and arms in the United States,

is that something you happen to know? The UNDOC, United Nations on drugs and crime, periodically puts out the information that they get from all of the country members. And so those numbers are out there. I don't remember them off the top of my head, but the U.S. by far has the most insatiable appetite in the world for illegal drugs. You know, Europe was a funny thing when back in the day when I was there doing it with Roberto Alcano and Pablo Escobar and those people, you could actually get, and it's still not quite this big, but it is something similar. You could get three times the amount of money for a kilo of Coke as you could in Europe, as you could in the United States. So it was very, very lucrative business in that area.

But you weren't seeing huge seizures. Now, 6,000 kilos, 8,000 kilos. Now, the nations of Africa, mostly West Africa, but a lot of the African nations have become corrupted and have become the transshipment point for the drugs that go up into Europe. And so a lot of the money and a lot of the drugs is exchanged in those areas.

Countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Ghana, many of them, Senegal, a lot of these nations are completely riddled with drug trafficking. And another thing that a lot of people don't realize is the most common currency that's dealt in African nations is the U.S. dollar. And so it's their currency. They've got a place to be able to place it. They can use it. I know that Europe's cocaine market has eclipsed that of the United States. if you're just talking about cocaine. I'm pretty sure, like you said, illegal drugs in total.

We're talking about fentanyl heroin, illegal marijuana. I think it all adds up towards the U.S. But for cocaine itself, Europe has finally eclipsed the United States in consumption of cocaine, which I heard from somebody who covers the crime beat in Europe, cocaine specifically. Would that surprise me, actually? But I guess it shouldn't. But if you go nation by nation, we're still heading the shoulders above them. Oh, yeah. I mean, you've got to take the whole continent of Europe and add it up to beat the U.S. and how much stuff they put up their nose, yeah, for sure. So I know we're running out of time.

I'm so curious, it seems like the deeper you get into this world, the better credibility you have, right? You're hanging out with drug traffickers, doing the money laundering thing. There's spies, there's corrupt bankers, corrupt politicians. And the whole time, you are essentially acting as if you're one of them, right? That's the job. So I wonder, did any of their characteristics ever seep into the real you?

It just seems like it would be very, very hard to be around people like that, 24-7-ish, and then go back home and you put on your dad's shoes and you've got to be this normal guy instead of a normal guy with like 10% criminal scumbag DNA sprinkled on your personality. Well, the undercover agent's probably the last one to recognize that. But I guess I've got to say that in some senses there must be some truth to that because I remember I was away for like a month or so and came back and I was spending a couple of days at home. And my brother-in-law and sister-in-law from Connecticut had come down to spend time with me and my wife. And I remember I was getting their bags out of the car and pregnant back in. And I overheard my sister-in-law go,

he's starting to look like them. He's starting to like even act like them. You got to realize too that my schick was being aligned with an Italian-American mob family. Right. And, you know, I grew up in a community where that was very prevalent. And I worked a lot of organized crime cases when I was in law enforcement. So I knew how those people act and carry themselves. And so that was part of my cover. But like I've said before, a good undercover agent.

isn't going to put themselves in a position where they become an actor. You've got to use parts of your real experiences in life. Now, it doesn't sound like it when you hear me now. No. That I'm from Staten Island. But I can tell you why that happened. And that's, when I started my college career, I went to Carbondale, Southern Illinois University. Illinois, people don't have an accent. And I started talking to people about, hey, how are you guys doing? And they're going, use guys, what are you talking about? So now the peer pressure of this guy talks like an idiot started to really cause me to watch

how I spoke. And so I dropped a lot of it. But promise you, one ride on the Staten Island ferry, and I'm back to saying forget about it and all that other stuff. And it's natural. It's a part of me. And that's what I'm saying is it's who I am. I mean, as far as being a person who speaks like they're from New York and speaks and sounds like and thinks like people who live in that other world. Well, you've certainly had an interesting career. And I mean, it's still crank it along. You're just maybe less likely to get killed in what you're doing now. I guess you can say you never got bored. At least you got that going for you. Yeah, that's true. You know, and I wrote an article that's going to be in a Tampa Bay Times this Sunday talking about threats. And I started the article by saying that from a very reliable source, I found out that I was being hunted again. And I got that information just a year ago. But it came from my urologist. He identified the fact that I have cancer. And I've been through treatment and all signs of are extraordinarily good. And I wrote this article basically to say, you know, as a patient and a

friend, if you run into this, I've done so much research on this. I approached it every way, the same way that I would doing an undercover operation. I even went to three cancer centers and I interviewed the radiation oncologists and their teams before I ultimately decided that the right place for me to go is M.D. Anderson. And so that's where I went in Houston. And so, yeah, I'm still facing death, but it's in the same way that we all are. And I really do hope that people who read that article take me up on reaching out and giving me the opportunity to be a tiny little piece of sharing with them the research that I did and hopefully make that journey for them a little bit easier because there's, unfortunately, a lot of people who face that. Bob Mazur, thank you very much. You've got to come back at some point because you're doing so much.

This has been super interesting and you've been very generous with your time. I've really, really appreciate it. My pleasure, Jordan. I appreciate it. I appreciate being on your show and getting a chance to talk to your listeners. And there are a lot of people. And this is an important thing for them to know. There are countless people who are public servants who are trying to do the right thing for them. Hey, I'm no superstar and I'm no different than the greatest majority of the people that I met in that walk of life. They have some good things to think about because There are a lot of people out there fighting for them every single day. Now, I've got some thoughts in this episode, but before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show.

Chase Manhattan bank robbery. I'm a second negotiator on the phone. Hugh McGowan is a commander of the NYPD team. He puts me on a phone and he takes this guy off. He says, you're up. You're next. This is what I want you to do. You're just going to take over the phone and say you're talking to me now.

And we're going to do it really abruptly. My point is to get a hostage out, which is what the hostess negotiator is supposed to do. and somebody hands me a note and says, ask him if he wants to come out. That was somebody that was listening. My friend, Jamie, Jamie Sedanio. Jamie's sitting there, and something in Jamie's instincts

is telling him that this guy wants to come out more than anything else. He just hears it, and he writes, ask him if he wants to come out. I see a no pop in front of my face. So I go, do you want to come out? And there's a long silence on the other end of the line,

and the guy says, I don't know how I do that. which is a great big giant yes yeah everybody goes like holy cow okay get him out of there i'm talking i'm talking i'm talking again probably about i don't know maybe half an hour later another note comes in my hand i don't know where's from as it turns out it's from jamie again and the note says tell me to meet him outside and i say to him how about this how about if i meet you out front of the bank and he goes yeah i'm ready to do in the shit i get out there I get on the PA, I start talking to him.

So I said, hi, it's Chris, I'm out here. Standard operating procedure is to barricade the exit from the outside, so bad guy suddenly doesn't run away. So SWAT has barricaded the bank from the outside, which everyone has forgotten. So I'm trying to talk this guy out the door. We don't know how many bad guys are inside. We don't know how they're going to react. We don't know what the hell's going to happen.

He comes to the door. Can't get out. Oh, God. That would be rattles the door. He was like, ah. He's nervous, right? I mean, no crap. I'm trapped in here now.

Yeah, and on the outside, we're going, nah, what do we do? We forgot to unlock the door. And our bad guy is kind of like, oh, I'm going to play games with me, huh? For more from FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, including negotiation and persuasion tips, along with a few crazy stories, check out episode 165 of the Jordan Harbinger show. A fascinating story. I'm so glad we got extra time with Robert. This was originally going to be like an hour, and then it turned into three hours edited down to whatever we are now. I'm not the only one who thought the story was fascinating.

There's actually a movie based on him called The Infiltrator with Brian Cranston, and apparently they're doing a sequel. I don't know much more than that. I don't even know if I was supposed to say that, so there it is. Thanks to Robert for coming on the show and telling his story and being so generous with his time, especially because he just finished cancer treatments a couple of weeks prior. and there's a lot more in Robert's books, which we'll link in the show notes about how money laundering works. Turns out there's a lot of ways to go about it. I guess that's not really surprising because you can spend money in a lot of ways. You can move money in a lot of ways. You can hide money in a lot of ways. So, of course, you can launder money in a lot of ways.

After the mics were off, I asked Robert if he thought new laws and efforts around AML, so anti-money laundering, if those were successful in his opinion, and he was unequivocal that they were not. The stream of illicit funds has barely slowed. It's barely. a dent. Banks in the financial system is what needs to change here. But the problems is the incentives are all wrong. Banks want as much money in them as possible. If they can get away with having criminal proceeds in the bank, they're going to do that. Compliance really needs to get in the same room with sales and say, hey, we know you're making commissions off this, but this is Al-Qaeda's money or this is the Medellin cartels funds. But I don't know what's going to happen until there are ridiculously severe penalties that go towards putting people in jail, not just finding the faceless

corporation off of their top line revenue when it comes to this. I worked at an embassy back in Panama and, oh gosh, over 20 years ago now, and I remember the DEA guys there were really preoccupied with all the drug and financial traffic going through that place. I mean, they had a big old office. There were a lot of them working on stuff. And there was just a ton of drug money and just other illicit funds going through Panama. It's one of the HQs of that in the Western Hemisphere. And it seems like the banks that were down there, some of their primary lines of business were illicit. You couldn't even go into some of these places. There was no reason to. They didn't take consumers from outside. They were really working with shell companies almost exclusively. It was just so obvious that they were

mostly illicit funds. There were a couple skyscrapers near where I lived, and everybody called them the cocaine towers. There'd be like three lights on and these massive, massive, massive, buildings and those were maybe the only occupied offices there. Everything else was basically money laundering. And it was just the whole thing was built. And the suspicion was they built those things and said they cost, I don't know, whatever skyscrapers cost $10 billion. And then they really cost, you know, two. And the rest of the money was laundered through fake construction. I don't even know if those things are still there. I don't even know if those are full. I would love, if somebody's in Panama, are the cocaine tower still there? I can imagine they're still there. Does anybody live or work in those

things. What we need is a task force. We have a joint anti-terror task force, but we have nothing of the sort for anti-money laundering. The problem is, of course, that where terror can be funded, there's going to be terror. There's going to be crime. Where there's funds, there's guns. Where there's bucks, there's bombs. Yes, I made that up. Pat Self on back. But we're not going to stem this thing until we find real consequences for people involved, and we can stop the money. That's one reason that sanctions, although they're not the whole story, they've been working pretty well against places like Iran, although, you know, time will tell.

I might eat those words any day now. All things Robert Mazur will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, we've just revamped our newsletter We Bit Wiser, so we don't do summaries of past episodes. We've reoriented the newsletter around one super brief practical takeaway,

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I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you there. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

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