The Underworld Podcast - The Cartel World's Donnie Brasco w/ Ian Frisch

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Starting at the tail end of the wild cowboy days of 1980's Miami, undercover FBI agent Martin Suarez didn’t just infiltrate a cartel...he nearly rose to the top. As a smuggler, he helped move a billion dollars worth of product while rising through the ranks of the Medellin cartel before moving into the secretive world of elite money launderers for cocaine kingpins. For years, he lived a double life inside the most dangerous syndicates, surviving hits, betrayals, and near-death missions. And he did it all longer than any agent ever had before...or since. He's the narco world's Donnie Brasco. Journalist Ian Frisch, who co-wrote Suarez's story with him in the newly released Inside the Cartel, joins us for this episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. August 1994, San Juan Puerto Rico, 8 a.m. in the morning. Martin Suarez has had a busy half a decade. After six years in the drug game, operating at the highest echelons in the U.S., he's made the kind of enemies that could cause someone to grow past. paranoid, always looking over their shoulder. You know, the big players, Colombian cartels, Caribbean narco traffickers, and top-level Monday launders with brutal enforcers ready to do their bidding.

He got his start in the late 80s in Miami, and he's helped them move a billion dollars worth of drugs as a smuggler. We are talking the tail end of the Wild West days, Grizelda, the Cowboys, Los Mucachos, Speedboats, and nightclubs and Ferraris. planes dropping hundreds of kilos in the ocean. Suarez was damn good too, putting in the work for the boys in Medellín, at one point even bringing in a massive $500 million load. Let's just say he's a guy who knows how to get things done.

Soon enough, though, he burns out on smuggling, burns out on Miami, and moves with his family to Puerto Rico, where he grew up. He also moves into money laundering after getting tutored by a real slick operator who knows how to work the system. Cashier's checks, putting it through legitimate businesses, import, export, everything above board. They call it the black market peso exchange.

And through it, Suarez helps a top-level narco everyone calls the snail, clean tens of millions of dollars, bouncing around the Caribbean, meeting with bankers and business leaders. The thing is, though, he does it all as an undercover agent for the FBI. In fact, he's the first undercover agent to ever infiltrate the drug world like this, the Donnie Brasco of the Colombian cartels. No one had even attempted it before. No one in the FBI or the DEA had any real grasp of the inner working to the cartels or how things work.

That is, until Martin Suarez comes along, or Manny, as he comes to be known among the Colombian and Puerto Rican players. So when he hears the whispering of the Sicario behind him, outside his home. Right after he gets back from a morning jog, you can make the argument that some part of him, maybe just a little, was expecting it. Right away though, one thing he does know

is that the person who most likely sent the hitman is El Toro Negro, the Black Bull, money boss of the North Coast cartel in Colombia. And it probably had something to do with the massive 50-person indictment that the feds are about to drop on him and his associates. But here's the craziest thing about all of this. Suarez, through sheer grit and quick thinking, is going to be able to break away from the Sicario

who has a gun pointed at his head. And afterward, instead of giving up the life of an undercover, he's going to dive right back into it, getting more undercover assignments for another 15 years. In fact, he still holds the FBI record for the longest time spent continuously undercover. And now, for the first, time, he started telling his story. This is the underworld podcast. Welcome back to the

underworld podcast, an audio visual program that takes you, our beloved listener on a journey through the world of organized crime from past, present, and future, hosted by two journalists who have done this kind of thing all over the globe. Myself, Danny Gold, and my co, Sean Williams, who was actually not here. He's been in Japan for a while, just got his pinky finger taken off, had to go to the hospital, is getting it reattached. We'll catch up with him. A little bit more about that later. But as always, you can find our bonus episodes at patreon.com slash the underworld podcast or right here on Spotify.

We're in their studios. Go to the top of like the little page on Spotify. When you click on it, you'll see sign up for bonuses there. Or on an Apple podcast, $5 a month. I think we have like one bonus every week these days. So definitely worth your money and time. What else? What else?

Tips, comments. And if you want to send us, you know, free stuff or advertise, That's the Underworld Podcast at gmail.com. Merch at Underworldpod. com. And now I'm actually joined in the studio today, replacing Sean by journalist, writer, author, and sometimes magician,

Ian Frisch, co-author of this absolutely insane new book. You can see it right here. It's called Inside the Cartel. I mean, the best way I can describe it is like, if you did Donnie Brasco for the cartel, except the numbers for drugs in the years he was undercover, it's just, it's completely insane. Thank you so much for joining us, Ian.

And can you kind of just give us like right off the bat so these people know how crazy the story is? Like how many millions of drugs he sort of helped smuggle on with the country? Millions of dollars. Like how many years he was undercover, all that? Right. So, uh, thanks for having me. Uh, inside the cartel follows, uh, FBI agent Martin Suarez, who is the only FBI agent in history to go undercover and infiltrate a Colombian drug cartel. He began his career in 1988.

He worked continuously undercover for about 23 years. Jesus, more than I thought. But the book covers the first six years of his career working undercover where he pose as a smuggler for the Median cartel and helped smuggle $1 billion worth of cocaine into United States, all of which was eventually seized. And then he transitioned into becoming a money launderer for the North Coast cartel where he helped launder over $50 million. And at the end of the book, dismantle. a Colombian narco empire. Yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty insane.

I'm kind of shocked that I had never heard the story before. Well, that's the thing about Martin's story is that no one has. And I think that's what makes the book so special is that Martin's humility kept his story out of the limelight. To him, he was doing his job. And also too, Martin's role of the FBI was so singular and so important that the FBI as an institution couldn't afford to let the public know what Martin was doing. So unless he walked into a courtroom and took his oath and testified, none of it was ever made public until now.

Yeah. And we'll get into it a bit later. But the fact that he was able to keep organizing this stuff and the loads would keep getting seized, some of the money would like the fact that he's able to still maintain his level of being undercover after all this happens for decades, uh, kind of blew my mind. It required the most intricate choreography that from a psychological. perspective, the planning, and all of the kind of teamwork required between the case agents and Martin and setting all this stuff up to make sure that his cover stayed intact was just remarkable. The way I put it in the book, and now you mentioned, I do have a history as being a little part-time magician. The way I put it in the book is when Martin went undercover, he was performing a magic trick for a spectator that didn't know they were on a stage.

And that was the kind of thesis of his undercover career. Yeah, for those who don't know, Ian's first book was about going undercover in the world of like top, top notch magicians and it's very cool as well. So check that out if that's your interest. But, okay, Martin Suarez becomes an FBI agent in 1980s, 33 years old. It seems like almost immediately he's basically undercover and able to get himself involved in the drug smuggling world. We're talking like Miami, late 80s, early 90s, still kind of the cocaine cowboys era. Can you kind of like, how does that happen so quickly? So you have to think, you have to really understand the context of this book in terms of big picture politics, right?

The war on drugs is in full swing. It's the Reagan years. It is like the number one priority. It's been the number one priority since Nixon, right? Who declared drugs public enemy number one. But it really was turbocharged on the federal level when Reagan became president because he gave the FBI and a lot of federal agencies a lot of leeway to conduct higher end operations against core groups they called them, which were the cartel. They understood that the importation of drugs was a huge problem in addition to regional distribution, as you know, like the three strike law and all that stuff started happening on the state and local level. But federally, the FBI realized we have to thwart the core groups.

The dudes bringing this stuff in. We can't just keep arresting piecemeal dealers in Miami and Houston and New York. Like we need to really take down the guys who are doing the mass importation because every year there were tens of billions of dollars worth of COVID. cocaine being imported into the United States, like more than, more than any law enforcement agency could really handle. So they wanted to kind of break the bottleneck, right? So anyway, Martin becomes an FBI agent in 1988. And previously, he was a Navy officer. So he had all the technical skills of charting ships, flying planes. He was a man at sea for almost a decade. And that was kind of the foundational skill set that he brought into the FBI. And that's one of the reasons why they hired him.

So he gets stationed in Miami. Martin originally is from Puerto Rico, fluent Spanish speaker. Speaks English as well, but Spanish was his first language. So, and he lived in Florida at the time. So they stationed him in Miami, and he was part of the drug squad in that field office. And almost immediately, his supervisors were like, yo, Suarez, like, would you want to try to go undercover? because Martin had all of the characteristics of a smuggler. Again, he could charter ship, fly a plane, spoke Spanish fluently, had Puerto Rican street smarts, didn't come from an upper crust, upper crust American suburb.

He was, you know, he grew up almost like a street kid like middle class in Puerto Rico. He had the sort of sociological background that way the aura, I think the kids call it. Right. The aura. He had aura, right. So they said, all right. let's see if this will actually work because what they really needed the FBI at the time understood is that they didn't really understand how the cartels operated internally. What they wanted was someone who would go on the inside, figure it out, and thwart it.

So they said, our best chance right now is Martin Suarez. So they said, all right, Martin, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to learn how to become a smuggler. And it just so happened at that time that the FBI had come into contact with a source who was a former pilot for Jose Gotcha, which is, one of the co-founders of the Medellin cartel with Pablo Escobar. And this pilot, Diego, he became a confidential source for the FBI, and he agreed to teach Martin all that he knew. So he sits Martin down. He says, I know that you know how to do all the technical aspects, which is great, but I'm going to teach you how to become a smuggler. I'm going to teach you how to act like one.

I'm going to teach you the customs of the cartel, how to interact with these people, how to negotiate with them. you're going to mirror their behavior so they believe that you are one of them. So, I mean, I hate to interrupt you because this is all fascinating stuff, but it's kind of like, you know, and I keep referencing Donnie Brasco because I think this is the best reference point. But it's Pacino explaining to him, you know, a friend of ours, friend of friend of yours, that sort of thing, except Pacino at this point already knows that he's, you know, in this world. It's a guy that they've already arrested who knows that he's like the guy. But it's like, I can see the montage in my head. Of course. And, you know, a couple of things.

It's like never wear resold shoes. You know, cartel men have the nicest shiny issues. If you go out with these guys and they're spending tons of money at a restaurant or nightclub or something, don't check the bill. Cartel guys don't check the bill. We know that the taxpayers are going to pay for this, but don't check the bill, you know, because you have to give the receipt to the field office. So he gave him a lot of like interesting tips on how to kind of fly under the radar. But again, this had never been done before. And so much of what Martin learned and so much of Martin's success.

really did come from just going out there and doing it, from kind of learning on the fly. So after Martin became Manny, his undercover alter ego, they got him a warehouse, the FBI, where he posed as a crooked import, export businessman, secret smuggler, they gave him an apartment, fancy cars, silk shirts, the jewelry, the whole nine yards. And then the source, the pilot, Diego, started introducing him to members of the car. And Martin would play hard to get another really great tactic with these guys. You know, I'm really busy. I've been doing this 20 years.

I don't really know you. I don't want to like, you know, get myself into hot water. Like I got a good thing going, you know. And then the cartel, the Medellian cartel would start to really want to work with them because they weren't given access to this new asset. Martin created scarcity with his skill by just basically fibbing to them that he was doing other stuff. And then over time, he started doing loads for them. And over the course of a few years, like I said, he smuggled a billion dollars worth of cocaine into Miami, all of which was seized. And there are many instances of how he was able to do this.

But, you know, overall, almost immediately Martin became a superstar in the FBI because his superiors and people in Washington, D.C., understood, holy shit, this guy's actually doing it. And no one has been able to do it before. Yeah, it sounds like he was also a superstar with the, with the cartel world as well. You know, I think, so he's with Medellin at this point. The guy he's working for El Viejo, right? The old man. So what's his story? What's his background?

So El Viejo, they called him the old man. He was a sort of deputy of sorts of the Medellin cartel. And the way the cartel was situated back then, you had the internal hierarchy with Escobar and gotcha and the Ochoa brothers. But they all had their own connection. with people who manufactured their own cocaine, who wanted the kind of operational support of a cartel to import. These were kind of one-off drug lords who were very powerful regionally and aligned themselves with a cartel. So this guy, El Viejo, he had his own operation and he could manufacture a lot of cocaine. You know, we're talking metric tons.

And he would align himself with the Medellian cartel so he could get their blessing, use their operational support to small the drugs into into the United States and Martin source Diego the pilot was buddies with these guys you know so he knew them from operating in the underworld of drug smuggling so it was kind of an easy introduction but again these aren't bit players like these are people that make up a large portion of the Medellin cartels overall sort of volume export volume and it was easy enough for Martin to you know, make friends with these people and to arrange deliveries. But El Viejo and his team, when they do big shipments, they're telling Escobar what's going on, you know, because everyone kind of

has a little bit of profit share as well back in Columbia once the money makes its way back. So it was easy for Martin to be able to ingratiate himself into that sort of subgroup of the Medellian cartel, which gave them valuable intelligence into how the Medellin cartel worked writ large, because the FBI realized, too, is that we want to stop the drugs coming in here. But our main goal really is to go after people and intelligence. Half of Martin's job was to do the smuggling and do the kind of tactile law enforcement undercover work. But the other half was almost intelligence gathering.

They would try to understand how these systems within the cartel works so they could use that against them later for different types of operations. So they really focused on this subgroup because it became a window into how the Medellian cartel operated throughout all the different connections that they employed, whether it's from manufacturing, packaging, distributing, smuggling, stateside connections, etc. Martin really went down this corridor because, again, it opened up the window into how the whole cartel worked. Yeah, I think people need to understand that, like, this is before all the documentaries,

all the TV shows, all the books. Like, this is early days. Escobar still alive for a couple more years. Like, he really did get in at a time where we just didn't understand. And law enforcement just didn't understand how the cartels worked, who they were, what they were really doing. And all they understood really at that time was what the drugs did once they were here. Yeah. Back then it was drugs are on our streets.

But no one understood what happened in Columbia and how it got to American shores. It was kind of a black box. And the FBI for many years before Martin went undercover tried various tactics to figure it out. Obviously, it didn't work. They said, okay, what we really need is a deep undercover agent. and Martin was that guy. Yeah. And to be clear, like he wasn't doing like a kilo over the border.

This wasn't like nickel and dime sort of shit, right? At one point, I think there's a $500 million drop. Right. So again, when Martin was able to integrate himself into these high level core groups, these aren't bit players who are putting a couple kilos in a backpack and smuggling it across the border. These guys are doing industrial level smuggling operations. You mentioned the $500 million drop and we can go through that. How do you get $500 million worth of cocaine into the United States?

Seems like a tall order. Our listeners want to know. One way you can do it is you take an airplane from Columbia. This is what Martin arranged with the cartel for one delivery. This is only one delivery. There are many more. you put $500 million with a cocaine, you know, hundreds, thousands of kilos of cocaine into a very large airplane with a cargo door.

And what Martin did was he coordinated an airdrop off the coast of Cuba in the middle of the Caribbean. And in the dead of night, cartel flew the plane over predetermined coordinates. and Martin is on a boat. And he has two motherships that are also in the general vicinity that are kind of the anchor points. He's on a smaller boat that can go between the pickup location and then the mothership. And cartel flies the plane over. It's 2 a.m. Martin's in this little boat. Sea is roiling.

Troughs and waves 12 feet high. water splashing over the boat, it's pitch black. And he sees the plane and they start dropping the bales. Boom, boom, boom. And this isn't like a small amount. Like a bale of cocaine of that size that hits the water. It's like a refrigerator being dropped out of an airplane. So Martin's calling them, don't hit our boat.

If you hit our boat, we're dead, the whole nine yards, right? It's very dangerous. And then one by one, he goes and picks up the bails. And these bales weigh hundreds of pounds. And him and a fellow agent were putting them on the little boat. They collect all the cocaine and they bring it to the big boat. Tired of trying to figure out what actually works for hair loss? Through Hymns, you get access to clear solutions, expert guidance,

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Now, traditionally, if Martin wasn't an FBI agent, the cartel would then try to take the boat into a remote location on the coast of Florida and just secretly get the drugs into the United States, which they did a lot. But since Martin was an FBI agent, he put together this whole ruse where he's like, I'm going to go to the Cayman Islands and hang out for a week so we can tamp down any suspicion and I can create a more secure this route with your product. Obviously, that gave the FBI some time to catalog the drugs and to create a chain of custody and a chain of title because when you prosecute, you have to prove that we arrested you because the drugs came from your airplane, hit the sea, it was all the same drugs. The drugs that we seized three weeks later is the same drugs that came out of the airplane.

So the chain of title thing was like a huge, a huge deal when doing undercover operation. So Martin gets the drugs into Miami because the FBI secretly brought them into the country while he was in the Kamens, you know. And then in order to substantiate the ruse of a of a raid, Martin had this ingenious idea where part of his procedure was to, to put the bales of cocaine into 55-gallon metal drums. That's how he would deliver it. But he would tack-weld the lids of the drums on top. So then you would need a plasma cutter to open them. And you might think, okay, who cares?

Well, you deliver 30, 55-gallon drums in the back of a box fan to cartels stateside distributors. And they don't realize that they need these tools to open the barrels to then break them down for the next phase of shipment. So they start calling their bosses. Hey, we need help. They call their whole crew. We need help.

We need help. You have to go get this and we need more help. So now you instead of six guys unloading the cocaine, you have 25 guys in one location. So once that happens, FBI is running surveillance the whole time. And it takes more time. You can't just get them out. It takes way more time, which gives the FBI on upper hand. And it's technically not his fault because he's already dropped off the drugs.

He's done his. So that's like part of the thing that that was, I think, the most shocking to me was that this wasn't like a one-time thing. He was able to arrange this multiple times with drugs and seized where some, because, you know, the understanding of the cartel world is that one screw up. And you're dead. Yeah. But that's not what happened with Martin because, for example, with this, this is just a good example as to how he, how he manipulated them so successfully. FBI raids the warehouse, right? Then Martin gets the call from the cartel.

Like, what the hell happened? We got raided? He's like, that's not my problem. I secured your drugs. The way I told you I was going to do it. I gave them to you at the time I said I was going to do it. I wasn't there. Like, my job is done?

Not only is it not my fault, you still have to pay me the money you owe me for smuggling it for you. I don't care if you weren't able to sell the drugs. You stole me that money. And then it's like the cartel's like, oh, I guess you're right. I guess you're right. And then the cartel is engaged in gambler's fallacy. You lost big on the roulette table, but if you bet again, you might get your money back.

Familiar. Familiar with it. The cycle starts where they keep coming back to Martin for the next shipment, the next shipment, the next shipment, the next shipment, you know? So for him, like all he had to do was not only deflect blame on himself, but also just blame them. Like, he would tell them, look, you guys keep getting the job. drug seized. I don't want that heat on me. Yeah. Yeah. I should stop working with you. Like, you guys are are heated up. You guys are messing up my vibe here, dude. Like, I don't want to work with you if this is this how it's going to go. And they're like, no, no, no, we're so sorry.

We're so sorry. Let's do another one. Let's do another one. So Martin, master manipulator, master manipulator in the moment on the phone with these guys, in these types of meetings, knowing full well that he's an undercover FBI agent. But the more he played the game, the more he played the character, the more aggressive, the more proactive, the more on offense he was against these guys, the more that they wanted to work with him, the deeper that he got them into his web.

And the more he was able to prove through evidence collected on his wire, his undercover recording device through surveillance, that these guys were some of the most prolific smugglers of cocaine in the late 1980s. And this went on. It wasn't like they did one drop and then they arrested these guys. He did controlled smuggling. The FBI, the FBI oversaw controlled smuggling of cocaine for a two and a half year period before they made arrest because they wanted to build out more and more and more people. They wanted all the smugglers.

They wanted all the state sites distributors. They wanted to completely crush this cell. in one shot and it took them over two years to do it. Yeah. And you kind of see how much respect the cartel had for him at one point. There's this incident where like a bunch of cartel guys get stuck in the U.S. after arranging, I think a shipment or a drop. And he's the one who has to organize like passports and getting them back home.

Yeah. And again, this is just indicative of how much the cartel trusted him, even though Martin was like kind of a dick to them when like stuff would go wrong that he orchestrated secretly. Right. So that's an interesting story because not only were cartels able to smuggle cocaine in the ways I just described via airplane, ships, whatever, but they also used a route called the Mexican trampoline. And the Mexican trampoline was a route where Colombian cartels would bring drugs into Mexico by airplane. Then they would transfer them into trucks and drive them across the border. And they used that in conjunction with airplanes and ships and all the rest. So they did a mat, they tried to do a massive delivery.

I think they had like six or seven airplanes and a whole host of top shelf cartel guys were in charge of bringing the shipment into United States via Mexico. So they fly the planes into Mexico. However, one of the Mexican cartels who has an alliance with local police, they say, we're going to steal these planes and all this in all this cocaine. So the Mexican police surround the planes. and confiscate the airplanes, confiscate all the drugs, and basically tell the Colombians,

you're either going to walk to the border of the United States and cross over and get out of Mexico, or we're going to kill you. Those are your two choices. So all the Colombians cross over into Texas, and they call Columbia. And they're like, dude, we just got robbed. Like, we are screwed.

We need help. Like, we're stranded in Texas. And we have no connections. We have no money. We have no cars. Our airplanes are stolen. The drugs are stolen. We're screwed.

No passports. No passports. Nothing. So they call the cartel calls Martin. Our guys are stuck in in Texas. Can you help us? He's like, no problem. So obviously the FBI is like, this is amazing.

Because when you do a favor for someone in the underground world of drug smuggling, they are forever in your debt, right? you have leverage over them forever. Not only that, the FBI, like I said, treated Martin's undercover operations as an intelligence gathering exercise. Holy shit. We got 25 of the most high-level cartel members

in the Medellin cartel all in one place. If we can get them all in one place and we can have surveillance on them, they talk amongst themselves or making phone calls, we'll have a treasure trove of intelligence as to how this operation works. So the FBI pulled out all the stops. They got the guys from Texas to Florida.

They put them in the warehouse. They put them in a couple safe houses. But they wanted them all in one location, like I said, so they could make phone calls to Columbia, and they could record those calls. They could talk to them on themselves, and they had the whole room wired up where these guys would hang out and talk.

They just let them chill in the warehouse for like a week, talking amongst themselves. They're like, this is great, because we have to, quote, plan their escape from the United States back to Columbia. They just let them sit there and talk amongst themselves so they could gather intelligence. Behind the scenes, the FBI was also figuring out, one, how can we increase our leverage with these guys? And two, how can we make it seem like we're going above and beyond to smuggle them back to Columbia when the United States government could just do it basically for free and it wouldn't be a problem anyways?

So first was that they said, we're going to charge you a lot of money to do this. They charge them like millions of dollars to help these guys escape back to Columbia, right? first part of the ruse. The second part was, in terms of people who had passports or not, the guys with the passports got back on, there were a couple guys with passports that they put on a commercial flight back to Medellin. And then the guys who didn't have passports, they kind of ramped up the kind of theatrics,

like, we're going to smuggle you out of Miami. And they set up this whole fake thing where they had like a secret airplane come in and bring these guys to a meeting, point on the Cayman Islands and a Colombian plane would grab them and bring them back to Columbia. Again, if these guys were caught in the United States without passports or without visas, the government would just deport them for free back to Columbia. But obviously, the Colombians didn't know that. So they paid all this money for Martin to, quote, smuggle them out of the country.

And again, this just this just be, this just continued to substantiate and to verify Martin's skills and connections as a prolific drug smuggler, when in reality, it was just the FBI pulling strings behind the scenes. Yeah. I mean, there's so much stuff in this book that are, so, okay, two questions before we switch up to the money laundering thing. One, I mean, that insane moment when he's with his wife, like off duty and he bumps into another trafficker, like how, what happens with that?

And then the second question is, have you guys sold the movie rights to the book? We haven't told the movie rights yet. It's out there. Come on. It's out there. Come on. Maybe we're waiting for a bidding war. Who knows?

Martin's wife, Maria. She's kind of the unsung hero of this book in that she was completely supportive of Martin throughout his time in the FBI. And being undercover, especially deep undercover working for a cartel, you become one of them. Martin was gone for weeks or months at the time and he couldn't tell his wife where he was. he was. But she understood that he was doing something noble, that he was having an impact, even if he couldn't tell her exactly what he was doing. But again, she did get a front row seat one time when they were on the beach together because they were walking down the beach and Martin hears a voice call out from behind him. Mani? And he knows. He can hear the accent. This guy's

Colombian turns around and it is a money launderer for the Medellian cartel that Martin had met here and there throughout his time as a smuggler and Maria hears his accent, sees his clothes, knows what Martin has been doing to a certain extent working under cover and it all clicks for her. Okay. This is what Martin's been doing. Sharp. But she knows to not say anything. Don't give yourself away.

Just follow Martin's lead. Be cool. Be cordial. and that's it. So they're chatting. And it's like, oh, I didn't know you had a girlfriend. And, you know, I didn't know you had a family. He's like, yeah, you know, blah, blah, blah, being, you know, just small talk, trying to like be cordial, not talk too much.

You know, don't give anything away. And then the money launderer who was in, he was with his girlfriend, they walk away. Have a good night. And Maria turns to Martin and says, don't worry, Martin. I know not to say a damn thing. And that was how they lose. left it. And that was just one close call. But as Martin goes deeper and deeper and deeper into this world, danger creeps even closer to his doorstep, which we do cover in the book as well. Yeah, the money changer thing. I mean, that's part of a money laundering. I mean, we have this big change up, right? It almost seems like, I don't know if he burns out a little bit or he's done all he can do with with drug smuggling or they want to expose it like one of the main facets of the cartel. That's not just product. Right. So he gives it up. I think what? He

moves to Miami. Does he move to Miami right away or my from Miami to San Juan Puerto Rico? San Juan Puerto Rico. So it's kind of a three-ponged decision. One, the Kate, like this big ass case against the Medellin cartel was kind of done like we don't need any more evidence. We can indict type of situation. Martin was a little burned out because of the demands of that role. And he wanted as well to move back to San Juan, Puerto Rico to be closer to his mother and father. They were getting older. And Martin had two sons at the time. And he wanted his to be able to get to know their grandparents. But he also pitched to the FBI, look, Puerto Rico is a major transshipment hub.

It's a, it is, it is a stop along the way for these guys. And Puerto Rico can be kind of like a new kind of home base for us. I can work out of the San Juan Field Office. We can collaborate with Miami. Our money will go further. And we can make bigger cases. And the FBI thought that that was a great idea. So they approved of his transfer.

and Martin went down there. And he did do some, you know, additional smuggling at first after kind of taking a short break from working undercover. He blamed it on the Medellin cartel. You guys are heated up. I need to go underground for a bit. I'm going to be gone for a little while, you know. Then he reemerges and he's, you know, starting to kind of work again and using Puerto Rico again as his sort of home base. At this time, too, we're going to zoom back out, 10,000 feet.

Federal government's like, great. We're making, like, amazing. seizures like, look at Martin Suarez and that team. Like, these guys are doing great. Like, we're learning so much more about the cartel. But they realized that like, we just seized a billion dollars worth of cocaine in one case over a two year period, barely made a dent. Did nothing. You know, there is a type of abstract futility to this job in that you're doing something that no one's ever done before and it still doesn't make a dent, right? It makes a dent in in some ways, but there's still drugs on the street.

So they think about cartels as a business. What is the business model of a cartel? You import product, you sell it, you use your profits to make more. Classic business structure. How do they get their profits back to Columbia? You have a couple million bucks. You want to get that back to Columbia. It's not crisp $100 bills from a bank.

It's dirty street money that you keep in where, warehouses in shipping containers. How are you going to get that back to Columbia? You can't. You can't move it. It's so much money. It can't be physically moved. You have to launder it.

And the FBI and U.S. Treasury and everyone else, they understood this, but they didn't know how the cartel laundered money. They thought maybe we should focus on that. If we follow the money as the mantra goes, follow the money. We might figure out exactly how the cartel sustains. their business model. So when Martin was living in San Juan, working undercover again, they, his case agents in the field office, they start to investigate what could be potentially a money laundering ring. They know nothing about it. It's like the early stages of the investigation.

It's like in the wire, the first couple episodes. It's like you get a little bit of things here and there and you're trying to piece the puzzles together. So they bust this guy and they call Martin. Like we have a money laundering custody. We do believe that it's cartel related. Can you come talk to him? Maybe he'll become a source. Martin goes down. He's in his smuggler garb.

You know, he's got his Rolex on and his silk shirt and his cowboy boots. His mullet and his mustache, right? And he tells the guy, like, I'm an FBI agent. And the guy doesn't believe him. He's like, you're an FBI agent. Just like those guys out there, you're an FBI agent? He's like, yeah, I work undercover. He's like, you have two options.

You can wear the white hat. You can work with me. I'll be your partner. You know, I'll be your handler. You just work with me. And we go back into the world as if nothing happened. Or you go to jail. And that guy said, all right, I'll become a source.

And this guy, much like Diego, who taught him how to be a smuggler, this guy, Tony, taught Martin how to be a money launderer. Yeah, it seems like he learns to do it in a couple weeks. And it also seems, I mean, this is just my impression from bringing the money. book like at first it seems simpler than i assumed like the whole smurfing thing which is just what like cashiers can you kind of go into that because it doesn't seem like you know now we think of laundering as this incredibly complicated probably complicated pro well maybe just crypto but an incredibly complicated process it seems relatively straightforward in the well the ground level mechanations of money laundering back in the early 90s were pretty straightforward um the the only hurdle that

organized crime of all stripes, mafia, cartels, whoever, the only hurdle that they had to overcome in the U.S. banking system was the Bank Secrecy Act, which was an anti-money laundering sort of regulation imposed where if anyone made a cash transaction of over $10,000, it would have to be reported. The way that cartels got around this was making transactions under that amount. It seems pretty simple. So the way that money laundering was, works, at least the initial stages where this guy, Tony, worked, and where Martin first got, you know, his kind of education into how cartels laundered money is that the money launderers pick up cash from smugglers who've made sales that work under the umbrella of the Medellian

cartel, let's say, or the North Coast cartel or the Cali cartel or whoever. They take this money. They bundle it into smaller increments, usually $9,000,000-ish. under 10,000. They go to banks. They exchange the bundle of money, cash, for a money order or a cashier's check. What if I told you the biggest crime story of our time is happening right under our noses? And we're all witnesses. Introducing Lawless Planet, the new podcast from Wondery that exposes the dark underbelly of the climate crisis. From the Amazon rainforests of small town America, host Zach Goldbaum uncover shocking tales of murder, corporate coverups and greed. You'll

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I'm going to hug you. I'm coming in for a hug. These money orders or cashier's checks are usually made out to a business, payable to X, Y, Z business. And the people that do this sort of grunt work are called Smurfs. They go around to all the banks. It takes a lot of time. It's just grunt work.

Then the cashier's checks are given to their boss. this case, Tony. Tony was kind of the regional boss of this money laundering apparatus. And then the cashiers checks leave Puerto Rico and they go to other parts of Latin America where they're then deposited into banks. Some banks are crooked, some banks are straight. It all kind of depends. In this instance, how this worked was that these cashier's checks were written out to shell companies that were controlled by Tony's boss, the villain of this book, whose name is El Toro Negro. Incredible nickname.

The Black Bull. Yeah. Colombian money launderer who orchestrated and built out one of the most successful money laundering apparatuses that serve the cartels. He was a money broker. Peso broker, they called them. Cartel would call them, I just made $100 million in U.S. currency. I need to get it back to Columbia in pesos.

Okay, here's the exchange rate. Here's my fee. I will be your currency broker in this sort of black market, right? And the cartel would pay the fee and he would say, your money will be in your bank account in two months, six weeks, four weeks, whatever. All you have to do is make sure that your smugglers give my people the money. And although El Toro Negro sits up here at the top of the pyramid in Colombia, basically working the phones, he has a whole team of launderers

throughout Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Miami, whatever. Different cells, we would call them. And Tony and Martin ran Puerto Rico for him. And once the U.S. currency, the hard cash was transferred into money orders, they would be given to a courier. This courier is the person that goes to all the banks in Panama,

Aruba, other parts of Latin America, where they had accounts for these businesses, which are just shell companies, their fake businesses. And they would deposit the money orders and cashiers checks into the individual accounts based on what is on the money order. And then that money, again, still controlled by El Toro Negro, was used to purchase above ground merchandise, legitimate merchandise, Advil, other types of medication, washing machines. dryers, car tires, cigarettes. These shell companies, quote, unquote, were import expert businesses. They would purchase above ground merchandise with legitimate funds now that it had been deposited. And they would have these, uh, this merchandise shipped to Columbia. Once it got to Columbia, it entered the above ground economy.

It was sold to legitimate distributors within Columbia for Colombian pesos. That money was controlled. by the import export companies controlled by El Torre Negro. And then that money, Colombian pesos, was transferred to the cartels. And that's how the money was laundered. And this system that Martin discovered, no one knew that this system existed before. As Martin's money laundering investigation continued, he revealed this system to the world. And they dubbed it the black market peso exchange.

Yeah. It actually intertwines, I think, with like legitimate companies a lot, right? We had Philip Morris on there. We had, it's pretty wild. It is wild. And the thing is is that a lot of these companies didn't know that their merchandise was being used in the narco trade. Some companies had inclinations. Did they turn a blind eye?

Maybe yes, maybe no. You know, the European Union did file a lawsuit against Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. There are definitely instances where back then, their accusations that they knew and they turned a blind eye, etc., etc., etc. But a lot of companies didn't even know. And they found out much later. So it was like the incestuousness of how the cartel moved their money. I mean, when the FBI figured this out and you know that it came from Martin because in 1994 after the money laundering investigation closed down, that's when you started getting like FINRA bulletins to banks. Yeah.

Here's a new way that criminals are laundering money. Please be aware. You know. And then like PBS Frontline even did a documentary about the black market. peso exchange in the late 90s. So it's like Martin discovered this system and he only was able to do so because he became a money launderer himself. But this system is still being used today.

And it is so difficult to trace, almost impossible to trace because money never crosses borders. It's all done through legitimate transactions. It's almost impossible to trace. because you're using legitimate currency to buy legitimate goods that are then sold for legitimate currency and someone's paid back. It is one of the most insidious systems that supports organized crime. And again, even though Martin discovered it, even though they thwarted a huge chunk of this system's economy through this case, still being.

use today because it's the perfect way to launder money. Yeah. And you have so many people that earn their living from these companies that have no idea probably that if like the drug trade or whatever else got shut down like they'd have no. Yeah. And it's like, you know, in the underground world of drug smuggling, this system of laundering isn't necessarily a secret. And there are many people who would love to become peso brokers because also to the underwall podcast. I mean, we're right here. We're right here. The thing is too is that. back then with the way the drug laws were were written um if you got caught with a million dollars in cash you might not even go to jail if you got caught with three kilos of coke you're

going to jail for the rest of your life yeah so the the the federal statute itself perpetuated people's ability to launder money because we didn't understand the importance of that system in conjunction with the drugs everyone says drugs drugs drug drugs. To the cartel, drugs are much less important than money. Money is the key to everything. And if you can stop money

from getting back to Columbia, you might have a chance at stopping the cartels. Speaking of the cartels, so we have El Torre Negros, who's the money launderer. He works for a guy, right? His boss is the snail. Is that correct? So... The snail's North Coast Cartel? So

El Torre Negro was kind of a freelancer, like to call him. A freelance money laundering baron he would launder money for whoever asked him he did some laundering for the cali cartel i believe the median cartel as well but his largest client was the north coast cartel which was led by a guy named the snail and which terrible terrible drug lord nickname too by the way right but not intimidating there's a um i think it's because of where he came from and there's like snails on the beach near his house or something like that and i like that i I don't know. The drug lord nicknames were like super random and like sometimes don't make sense.

But this dude was a really good drug board. And the North Coast cartel, especially around this time, again, let's zoom out 10,000 feet. What's going on in 1992? Paulo Escobar just got just got killed, you know, and the Medellan cartel is dismantled because Escobar is dead. And the Colombian authorities were like, we're done with you, dude. Like, we're going to find you. The DEA's operating out of Columbia in conjunction with Colombian authorities. You know, you watch narcos. You can see how it's done. They took down Escobarties. are, right? Then the Cali cartel is like, okay, power vacuum, we're going to go in. We're going to align other people again, like under our umbrella. And that's what the North Coast cartel did. The snail said, I will work with you, Cali Cartel. You can control all of Central Columbia. That's your zone. Cool. I want the whole North Coast. You can't come in my territory. I want all my

all my import export areas, you know, controlled exclusively by me, like, you know, I want the Caribbean routes. And Callie was like, great, no problem. So they formed an alliance, a handshake agreement. And with that came much more market share. The snail all of a sudden was like one of the most powerful drug lords in the whole country because he controlled the most profitable and most reliable smuggling route through the Caribbean. So he required an almost, you know, an almost exclusive relationship with a dedicated money launder. And that's what El Toro Negro did for him. And El Toro Negro was from Northern Columbia. So they knew the same people. They come from the same zone. You know, they spoke the same language, quote unquote. So they were, they were a good match in,

in that regard, in terms of this business relationship. But El Toro Negro had political clout. He was someone who had a lot of power regionally, but also had a lot of connections in Miami, San Juan, et cetera. We talked about that. So his system of laundering was great. It worked super well, and it was highly profitable for everyone involved. So as the snail's marketplace grew,

so did the business for El Torre Negro, which then trickled down to Martin and Tony, who are running the streets of Puerto Rico and doing deliveries and, and taking meetings with his other associates in Miami. Yeah, and he's kind of, you know, the Puerto Rico stuff. He's got the speedboats and the mansion. Like, he's having a, I mean, I'm sure he's stressed out of his mind, but he seems like he's having a good time.

Yeah, totally. But the thing is about money laundering is that, you know, as another saying goes, money doesn't sleep. So Martin was even more so than smuggling, Martin was dedicated to the cartels every whim day in, day out. You know, any time of day or night, he had, he had to be. be on call. And it wasn't like he had to have meetings with people to set up a load delivery. It's just his phone. If his phone rang and Columbia called, he had to do what he was told. And he did money pickups consistently. Every day, every other day, he's picking up millions of dollars from, you know, drug smugglers who are using Puerto Rico as a midpoint. And it just began to control his life,

you know? The thing is, though, with smuggling is that you may think, oh, smuggling's dangerous. It's like, but it's really not. It's very isolated in terms of like it's operational requirements. You're on your own program with your own equipment. You're out usually in a remote area doing this type of work. But with money laundering, you're on the streets. You're forced to interact with like dangerous drug lords day to day. You have money with you.

What happens if a, if a, uh, an enemy of the cartel says, oh, this guy's their launderer. Let's wait until he picks up two million bucks and then kill him. steal the money. You know? It's like it's a whole different game and a whole different set of obstacles when you become a money launderer because again, drugs are important, sure, but money is way more important. And if you have $2 million in the trunk, you don't even know what could happen to you. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, when you think of money launderers, I feel like the initial impression is like, you know, these are the office guys that kind of like, you know, the squares, like it's not that dangerous. But from the way you've been describing it, it really

seems like that's the scariest part. It is, especially if you're working. kind of on the street. Like if you're like the the main dude like, you know, El Toro Negro was, it's, it's easy for you to just be chilling and you're on the phone the whole time. There's a lot at stake for you. If you lose the cartels money, you're basically screwed. But again, like you're kind of running a stockbroker type of business, right? And then people on the street are kind of doing the kind of heavy lifting, which, which Martin did do. But, you know, to your point, yes, very dangerous because again, you're on the street. You're interacting. with all the different types of people.

You don't know who you're going to meet. You get a call. You have, you know, a place to be and a time to be there. And whoever shows up, you have to make sure that you're on your toes and you can interact with them and keep yourself out of danger. And, you know, Martin, you know, thankfully was very good at that. And it's also, too, not just street people, right? High society folks. Like, who are the, who is the Moore family?

So, as I explained at how money is laundered, right? the third step in this process is depositing money orders and cashier's checks into banks. A bank, in my opinion, a bank worth their salt probably is going to catch on that some of this money being deposited into these accounts is potentially maybe doesn't really all add up all that well. You know, you're depositing very round numbers on a very consistent schedule into these accounts, you know? but if the bankers are crooked and they're actively participating in the narco economy, you kind of have free reign to do whatever you want. And El Toro Negro had a very powerful partner in Aruba.

And the Moore family was that partner. They are legendary Arubans. They owned their own bank and they kind of owned and controlled a large portion of the economy on Aruba. They own casinos and other types of assets. But this bank allowed them to participate in the underground world of money laundering. They were accused of laundering money for the Sicilian mafia.

In this case, the FBI had overwhelming evidence that they were the main partners of El Tornegro's money laundering apparatus. And their role basically was just allowing the flow of funds to go through the bank. And they were compensated for doing. so. But it's really remarkable that the cartel was able to co-opt an entire bank. It wasn't a rogue employee. It wasn't some executive who was like building a secret account over here. It was like the family owned the bank and they knew. You know, there was two cousins who were indicted as part of this case. And according to the government, they knew that the cartel was using their bank to laundering money and they actively helped them do it. Yeah. I mean, that indictment too is what? I think

it drops in like 95, 96, 94. 94. Yeah. 52 people were indicted, um, including the two cousins who were executives at the bank. And, you know, it was a who's who of the cartel. And that indictment, jumping ahead a little bit, but that indictment became the foundation for dismantling the entire North Coast cartel because that indictment, um, provided the evidence required for the Columbia. and later the DEA was working with them a few years later for them to arrest the snail and extrad him to

Colombia from Colombia to the United States. And the snail's extradition many years later, again, the evidence of which was first formulated by Martin when he was posing as a money launderer, the extradition of the snail from Colombia to the United States was the first extradition in over a decade because political tensions between Columbia and the United States were, you know, were there. And they weren't really psyched on extraditing Colombian citizens to face justice in the U.S. legal system. But the snail was brought to the United States. And he was charged and convicted of the crimes against him. And it all started when Martin became a money longer.

What's his real name is now? Alberto Gamboa. And is he still locked up? Do we know what happened? I don't know. He might be dead. I have to look into that. I'm looking at what, 30 years, something like that. And he was an older gentleman when he was arrested. I think he was in his probably 50s or so. Yeah. So around the same time, I think that indictment drops, we also have the situation

where he's kind of found out, right? Like, the Sicario goes to his house. He gets into a shootout. I mean, I'll go into it in the cold open. But do we have any idea how that happened, like how he was actually found out? USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. The jurors sat in a dark room, hands resting on a Ouija board.

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So the thing about the cartel, and again, they were of a similar disposition to American law enforcement. Cartel loved information. They knew information and intelligence. would always keep them one step ahead of their opponent. So as this money laundering operation came to a close, you have to look at it from the perspective of the cartel.

Martin had done a couple pickups for the cartel and still had their money. He hadn't yet transferred it or given it to the cartels receivers, the couriers and whatnot. And he disappeared from the criminal underworld. The FBI was like, cases closed. You know, it's getting really hot. Like, we have enough and we just feel like now's the time to shut it down. So, Manny disappears and Martin is like back to Martin Svarez.

You know, he's no longer working undercover. All his stuff was destroyed. Like, all the trails were erased, et cetera. He's gone. And the cartel was like, okay, something's going on here. What the hell happened? So when the indictment was unsealed, there's 52 people listed. Who's the only person not listed?

Yeah. So they say, okay, this guy's either a snitch or he's a fed or something's wrong, but he still has some of our money and he betrayed us or we're going to kill him. Martin gained a little weight when he was operating as a smuggler and money launderer. So when he became Martin again, he started running and he would go on morning runs every morning. And one morning, he goes on a run, he comes home, enters his little patio at his family house and sits down. and then he hears from behind him and he turns around and there's a Sicario wearing a mask pointing a pistol at his face. And the guy says, get on your fucking knees. And Martin knew that this hitman was sent to kill him by the cartel.

It was random violence. If it was robbery, it would have been down different. But Martin really knew that this was a targeted attack because Socario was asking him, are you the owner of the house? Are you this? Are you that? Let's go inside the house. Blah, blah, blah. And Martin's deflecting. I don't own this house.

I'm just visiting. I'm just a friend. Whatever, whatever. He's trying to buy time. But the Sicario, under his breath, was saying, he has the same eyes. He has the same eyes. And Martin realized he has my picture. He was given a picture and he was told, this is the man you're supposed to kill.

He lives at this address. So once the cat was out of the bag in terms of the indictment, They figured out who this guy really was. Is he manny? Is he Martin? Who is he? Where is he live? He lives here.

You know, they sent this Sakhar to kill him. Is that a mistake on their part or is there like a way, is there a way around that you throw his name in the indictment? Somehow he just like doesn't. Like, how do you protect it? Something like that when it comes to these indictments. That's why when Martin was a smuggler, he always did his best to verbally distance himself from any law enforcement activity. Yeah. He would blame the other side.

It's your fault. I'm not hot. You're hot. So if anyone got indicted or arrested, he had a plausible deniability. In this case, these guys are a little smarter. They realized he was doing all the same sort of stuff. Like, he should have been implicated. There should have been something here.

Yeah. You know, like he wasn't that far away from the criminal activity to where this guy got arrested, but not him. Like, come on. Does that make sense? Where the cartel kind of got wise to be like there's something wrong here. And even if the cartel was wrong, it'd make them feel better if they killed him. because then he could say, I guess we were right. You know?

So even if they were wrong in the context of blaming someone in the eyes of the cartel doesn't really matter. Another dead guy, who cares? It, you know, in their mind, they did the right thing. It's kind of proving their own sort of theory of what happened. So in the context of Martin, they thought, even if he's not a snitch or a fed, he's a loose end. He's a witness. Maybe we should kill him.

You know, these are theories that could have been going through the cartel's mind. mind and El Toro Negro was the person obviously leading the charge on this sort of thing. So when Martin realized that this guy was there to kill him, he knew too the guy was a professional. So he was like, how am I going to get out of this? The guy is too far away for me to jump him, but he's too close for me to run. So how do I get out of this situation? Because if I don't figure something out soon, this guy is going to kill me. So the Sicario starts to pat him down after about 20 minutes.

and he finds the key to the front door in his sock. And the guy's like, you piece of shit, you lied to me. And Martin knew then that he was completely screwed. The guy brings him up to the front door, gun in his lower back. And right as Martin is going to open the gate, which opens out towards them, which makes Martin have to lean back against the guy. He's close enough now. He spins around, tries to hit the gun out of the guy's hand.

He misses. So he pushes the guy down. the steps, the guy's gun goes off, Martin dives into his house through the front door, Martin can feel blood on his face. He's checking himself, and I've been shot, have I been shot? He hasn't. He's safe. He got hit in the nose, blood is down his face. Now he knows that he has a chance, and he says to himself, I'm going to get this motherfucker, runs into his bedroom, grabs his service pistol out of the closet, and now he's in a standoff with this guy. Thankfully, his neighbor heard the gunshot. She called the cops. Cops show up a couple minutes later. You know,

Martin is trying to prevent this guy from ambushing him during, you know, in the interim. And then the guy runs away. And the cops eventually find him. But the guy never admitted that he was sent by El Torre Negro. His allegiance to silence was forever lasting. The guy was charged, put in jail. But Martin always knew deep down in his heart that El Toro Negro sent that man to kill him. And again, you have to realize that Martin never knew who El Taro Negro really was. Just a voice on the other end of the line. We kept calling him and calling him and telling him what to do. That was always something in this book that him and I, when we first started this process,

which began three years ago now, we talked about this story. Who the hell was this guy? Right. Because they never found him. They never arrested him. He was never extradited. He just disappeared. And the thing is, like I said earlier,

these guys all operated in Northern Columbia. And they had deep political connections, Northern Columbia. One of whom was a gentleman named Hector Lopez. Hector Lopez was a regional politician. He was a senator of this region. Held a lot of sway. A lot of friends in Medellin, a lot of friends in Cali. You know, think of him like a governor almost.

And it was said, because this guy came from an import export family that he was involved in drugs coming in and now, the merchandise that was, you know, you bought with laundered funds coming in. He made sure that everything went smoothly using his political connections and his, his history and import export. And Hector Lopez, whose moniker was the Marlborough man because he was known for his prolific importation of Marlboro cigarettes in the country. Columbia and kind of made Columbia a kind of epicenter of Marlborough's brand back in the day.

He was eventually, a few years later, he was eventually indicted for racketeering and money laundering and all the things that these cartel guys get charged with. And he was extradited and he was indicted in U.S. court and, you know, was convicted and went to jail. And this is all the sort of collateral damage from Martin's case. But again, like, when we started this book, it was like, but El Toro Negro, whatever happened to him? You know, like, never found that guy's crazy. So Martin's like, I'll do some research. So Martin, speak Spanish, starts reading Colombian newspapers, you know, poking around this and that.

And he found this one article that made a shocking claim that El Toro Negro and Hector Lopez, the politician, were the same person. and that the entire time that he's on the phone with this guy day and day out fielding orders to pick up millions of dollars and help launder it for the North Coast cartel that he was receiving orders from a duly elected high echelon Colombian politician and that like when he called me and told me that I was like wow that is a bomb to drop in this book and it's really remarkable because it took Mark. in 30 years to get closure on that point as to who this person really was. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of crazy things in this book that's up there. But I think for me, the craziest one is that after both these situations, first, the smuggling, then the money laundering, he goes back undercover. He does.

For like another 15 years. Right. So, Martin, right, when you go undercover, you create what's called a backstop or a legend. And this legend and all the assets that come along with it. this legend, the cars you drive, the apartments you bought, whatever. You're using the cartels money to build out this sort of character, right? So the FBI was able to buy and sustain a lot of really amazing assets that help bolster an undercover identity, starting with what Martin did in 1988, all the way through the,

the mid-90s. And these assets really helped allow Martin to continue to shape shift. Manny as an undercover alter ego was put to rest after the money laundering investigation. Martin being Manny as an underground figure wouldn't really fly anymore. He didn't think. But he could become Miguel, you know, he could become another type of character working with different types of groups. Social media didn't exist then. He had the same face, but he could have a completely different identity and no one would be the wiser.

So throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, Martin continued working undercover. He did cases in Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama. He started doing stuff in Europe and in East Asia, especially after 9-11 when terrorism became the focus of the Bureau versus cartels and organized crime. And Martin also, after building this vast network of reliable undercover covert assets, he became a coordinator for the FBI. He taught promising young recruits the tricks of the trade. You know, he would, he would bring them into seminars and tell them the stories of his time undercover and, you know, all the lessons he learned on the fly and all the policies and procedures

that are now in place because of what he did. He wrote the textbook on how to do this in a long-term capacity. And he, as he transferred into a coordinator position, he would help set up all the undercover case that the FBI did, all the high-level ones especially, he'd make sure that the agents going undercover were protected, that their backstops and their legends and their stories were airtight, that anything that they used couldn't be traced back, that VIN numbers wouldn't come back, that bank accounts were populated with, you know, histories and that, you know, as technology became more advanced, that any type of peeling back of the onion would not reveal that this person was a federal agent. He was in charge of protecting these guys.

Martin held that position and received many awards for the work he did, both as an undercover agent but also as a coordinator up until his retirement in 2011. But even in the late 2000s as he entered retirement or got close to retirement, he would still make undercover cameos in people's cases. You know, if you read some other undercover FBI memoirs, there's mention of like the drug boss makes a cameo appearance. That was Martin. He'd jump into people's cases and say, oh, I'll play that guy for you. You know, because as he became older, he could become, you know, he could become El Viejo himself. Yeah. You know, he wasn't the young gun anymore.

So as his age progressed, he could embody different characters. And with pride and pleasure, he made cameos. But his real legacy was helping develop, protect, and implement covert operations for the FBI in a managerial capacity. Damn. Yeah. I mean, I think that covers it. still a lot more stuff in the book. You guys should definitely get it. I'm going to grab it and holding in front of the camera in a second. Is there anything else you want to add about like the book,

the work that you were doing, Martin in general? I just, you know, every time I talk about the book, I just say how much of a pleasure it was to work with Martin on this. Martin was diagnosed with ALS about five years ago. And that is the main reason he wanted to write this book. His future is uncertain. And he knew he had one shot to tell his story, both for public consumption, because it's never been told, but also to create a legacy for his kids and his grandkids, stuff in this book, he never told his kids about. He never told his wife some of the stuff he was feeling terrified if they knew it when he was still active. So for him, it is a very kind of personal and emotional exercise. And for me, it was just a real privilege. And knowing Martin has really

changed my life. And I feel like he is one of the most noble people I have ever met. And it's remarkable because both of his sons have followed in his footsteps one's a DEA agent and one's an FBI agent to see the impact he's had on his family and all that he sacrificed for them just made made telling this story um with him just you know such a fulfilling experience and I just want everyone to know if you read the book um there's a lot of tears that went into it and you know a lot of Martin um a lot of Martin as a man in this book that he was brave enough to share I think that's a very special thing. Can you, can you hand to it?

Let me see if I can read it. Guys, inside the cartel, this is the book by Martin Suarez and Ian Frisch. I mean, if you listen to this podcast, like, come on. Like, how do you not go out there and buy this book, like immediately? Yeah, it's Martin on the cover. So that's Martin in the middle. And he's talking with, um, he's got the mullet. You were not lying.

Yep. And he's not sad. There's not designer shades on him that calls like $7,000 and are like the worst sunglasses you've ever seen. So the guy on the left is a smuggler for the Medellin cartel, and the guy on the right is his Sicario, his hitman, his muscle man. So that was a surveillance image from the FBI of them coordinating a shipment. Yeah. So the book is Inside the Cartel, how an undercover FBI agent smuggled cocaine, laundered cash, and dismantled a Colombian narco empire.

Pick it up. Our guest is Ian Frisch. Thank you, Ian, so much for stopping by. Thanks for having me. Yeah, that was awesome. Great. Cool. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

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