All Episodes
Previous Next
June 5, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:15:58
Edition 640 - Robert Mazur
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope that life is going pretty well for you, wherever you happen to be.
I think there's a strange confluence of planets that's happening that some of my astrology friends say is making a difference to the world.
I don't know whether that's the case, but I just think it's a bit of a roller coaster at the moment, isn't it?
With everything that's going on in government and world affairs and everything else, you know, and rising prices.
I can't believe the rising prices.
You know, I used to buy the three for seven pound deals at a local supermarket, a very well-known brand, and overnight they've gone up to three for eight pounds.
You know, that's bad enough.
But my favorite curry that I tend to eat maybe once every three weeks or so, maybe once every two weeks, to be honest with you, has gone from £3.75 to £4.75 literally in a couple of days.
And I don't think that is the rate of inflation, but that's what we're facing at the moment.
So if you're having problems with all of this like I am, I completely understand where you're coming from, all of this.
But there is still joy to be had in the world, and here in the UK, we're entering the summer, and that'll be good, I think.
Although it's going to make me another year older.
I don't even want to think about that.
Like I say, thank you very much for all of your communications, your emails, everything that you're saying.
I take on board everything that you do say.
And thank you for bearing with me with the TV show as I find my way and feel my way into and through a brand new medium.
You know, in some ways, it's exciting.
It's what we call here in the UK seat of your pants stuff.
You know, it's kind of learning to fly a plane, having never flown one before, I think, in some ways.
But that's a whole other thing for a whole other time.
But thank you for supporting me.
On this edition of The Unexplained, we're going to do something different.
Every so often, I think we have to go out of the box somewhat and just tell you a good story for the sake of it.
And there are many unexplained elements to this anyway.
We're going to tell you the story of a man who essentially worked, risked his life by going as an undercover agent.
And it's made two books and one movie for him.
His name is Robert Mazer.
You might be aware of him because you might have seen the film based on the first of the books, which was called The Infiltrator.
The one we're going to be mainly talking about at the moment is The Betrayal.
Essentially, this man has infiltrated crime syndicates, drug cartels, in order to bring people to justice and find out the truth of how money laundering and drug dealing and all these other nefarious things work in our world.
You know, people who do this kind of stuff have a special kind of bravery.
Anybody really who does a public service like that.
In Liverpool, my dad was a police officer.
He used to chase villains across rooftops even before his retirement.
You know, he was a little old to be doing that stuff, but it was part of the job.
And the crooks respected him because he was fair and they knew that he was good at his job.
And if he caught them, then they would accept what was coming their way in most cases.
You know, this is a different era we're talking about.
But my father would also do the other stuff that people didn't want to do normally and didn't want to think about.
That included dealing with murder victims, dealing with people who'd been the victims of terrible, awful accidents.
And my dad did all of that stuff.
So in this world, there are people who do those things.
And some of them, on a daily basis, take astonishing risks with their lives to get to justice and truth.
Robert Mazer is one such.
So we're going to be speaking with him from Florida very soon here on The Unexplained.
Thanks to Adam, my webmaster as ever, for his ongoing hard work.
And I told you a couple of podcasts ago a little bit, a little teaser about something that may be happening that will give you a chance to meet me and perhaps some of the guests who've appeared on The Unexplained.
You know, I'll tell you more about that as and when I am able to do so.
But it's still very much in play.
Whatever it may be, that's got you guessing, hasn't it?
All right.
Let's get to Robert Mazer.
Let me tell you something about him.
This is part of the publicity material for the book The Betrayal, the new one.
The riveting true story of how one undercover agent exposed the corruption at the heart of one of the most explosive missions of his career.
Three years after undercover agent Robert Mazer infiltrated Pablo Escobar's Medain drug cartel, he re-emerges, a half-million dollar bounty still on his head, with a new identity for a risky new sting.
He was now Robert Baldassar, money launderer and president of an international trade financing company.
That's just the beginning of the story.
His biography says that Robert Mazer served for nearly 30 years as a federal special agent for the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, the Customs Service of the United States, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
And he is, as I've just been saying, the best-selling author of the memoir The Infiltrator, which was adapted into a motion picture starring Brian Cranston.
You might even have seen it.
He's a court-certified expert in international drug trafficking and money laundering, and his writings about money laundering, international drug trafficking, and corruption have been published in many journals and media outlets, some of the great newspapers and broadcast outlets of this world.
Astonishing man, astonishing life story, and we're going to hear some of it in this edition of The Unexplained.
And I think it is unexplained, how people are able and willing to take such risks, whatever rewards may be involved.
Nevertheless, putting your life on the line in quite that way, where you don't know from one second to the next whether somebody's going to put a bullet in the back of your head, I think is extraordinary.
Okay, let's get him on.
Robert Mazer, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Thank you for the invitation.
Now, this is, and I gave my listener in the introduction to this, a flavor of your life, but I don't think any words really beyond your own can do it justice.
And this has been a hell of a life that you've lived.
Well, yeah, in a sense, in that, you know, at least I've gotten the opportunity to share this with the public, but I'm very proud to say that There are a lot of colleagues or former colleagues of mine who are still on the front lines, who do this type of work day in and day out, and who have a drive to be a part of making a difference.
And so, my hope is that I'm more of an example than an anomaly with respect to the devotion of law enforcement officers.
I think that's the case based on the greatest majority of them with whom I've had the pleasure of making contact.
Well, I tried to tell my listener in that introduction that, you know, look, my father was a cop working in Liverpool, and he had great times.
People loved him.
The villains loved him.
The crooks loved him.
But he used to do the stuff I was trying to explain by way of getting us into this.
He used to do the stuff that most of us can't and won't do so that we don't have to do it.
And it seems to me that that's exactly what you were doing.
Yeah, I got a very unique opportunity.
I was blessed with leadership that recognized that anybody who's going to do long-term undercover needs to first be trained.
And so it was a process, really.
And it wasn't that I had this great vision.
It all just kind of happened.
Frankly, I didn't even know until I graduated from college that I had an interest in law enforcement due to a summer job and sometime during my senior year that I worked for a law enforcement agency as a co-op.
But the law enforcement agencies that the first two that I was in recognized that putting yourself on the front line, dealing day in and day out with a double life, really requires a lot of aid and support.
And through training that was provided, not just by trainers, but by former long-term undercover agents and psychologists, I was given the tools that I think enhanced my abilities to be able to do the job that I did.
You can't be a long-term undercover agent and do anything from A to Z. You really need to focus your attention on those things that are naturally within your talents.
And my education was in business administration finance, and I was one degree, one class short of an accounting degree.
So I had a financial background.
We were interested in developing agents into what would appear to be corrupt businessmen who could launder drug proceeds for major criminal organizations.
And my background really lent itself to be able to do that.
And I think that there are some things from the walk of my life that prepared me, although I didn't realize it at the time.
My mom and dad were all about family and country.
My dad fought in World War II in many campaigns in Africa, in Italy, France.
Country meant a lot to him.
My mom was a civilian employee for the U.S. military.
My brother fought in Vietnam.
It almost seemed to me like, well, this was, it was my turn to give.
And so I think that made a difference in my chemistry as well.
Right.
And I totally understand that culture of service within the family there.
But there's giving and giving.
A lot of people who joined the service or services that you joined, you know, probably spent their careers making sure people didn't bring in too many cigars from their holiday or whatever.
You know, they did not put themselves, I mean, I shouldn't be laughing about it, but they did not put their necks on the block in the way that you did.
So there must have been something within the services.
And your biography says, you know, 30 years, federal special agent IRS, custom service drug enforcement administration.
There must have been something for your bosses that marked you out as somebody who could do this.
Yeah, well, part of it is a psychological profiling of people who want to volunteer because you can't force someone to do long-term undercover.
It has to be a volunteer.
And somehow or another, I squeaked through those tests.
But some psychologist who I got to know from Ottawa, who was very much involved in the undercover training, in the simplest of terms, said that what they were looking for in candidates were people who saw everything black and white, right and wrong, one, two.
There was nothing in between, no rationalization, no big gray areas of whether or not something was correct or not correct.
And he said that the score that I provided was like the highest that he had ever seen.
So I'm not so sure that's because my agency saw it, but it was definitely part of what the psychologist saw.
And looking back on that whole experience, I think he was, in a sense, he was right.
And your earlier comment about some people maybe using most of their career looking for cigars coming illegally through the border.
You know, we had an old saying in the government when I was there as a law enforcement officer, 20% of the people do 80% of the work.
And that's unfortunately the truth.
And it's the truth today.
Goes for broadcasting, too, I think.
But the degree of courage that you have to have and also the ability to take on board a story, it's like people who go into foreign countries, hostile countries in wartime as something else.
Like the people you mentioned, and my father, too, served in the war.
And there were people who went over there, Brits who spoke French or German, and they went behind the lines and did things that I couldn't do.
You have to be a special kind of person.
So as a kid, I guess you were always the one who could keep a secret.
I couldn't.
I was always thought to be the one with an imagination, I think.
You know, I think, yeah, I would look at something and see a lot different, see something very different than I think most people who looked at it.
So I was enthralled by the idea of how one could follow the money and it would take you to those people who were in command and control and enable you to gather the evidence against the people who were really pulling the strings that caused all the crime to occur.
And I saw that when I first, I took that summer job with an agency, and that was with what was then called the IRS.
Well, it's now the IRS criminal investigations.
They do the criminal tax cases.
And back then, there was a big focus on using those resources to go after organized crime and drug traffickers and corrupt politicians.
And they are, in fact, the agency that put together the case against Al Capone, which was the only way that the U.S. was able to put him in prison.
Yeah, I mean, most of the stuff that he did, they couldn't get him for.
They had to get him on the counting of the paperclips and the details of his tax affairs.
Yeah, well, you know, income is income as far as the U.S. is concerned.
It could be criminal or civil or non-criminal, but it's still taxable.
And so those big-time crooks who make crazy amounts of money and live a wonderful life sometimes don't realize that there are accounting methodologies by which one can, beyond a reasonable doubt, prove that they fail to report proceeds.
And then you bring in one or two witnesses to establish what type of proceeds they are.
And voila, you got a tax case.
So they were working on a case on a guy by the name of, I'll think of it in a second, but he was portrayed in American gangster by Denzel Washington.
He was the biggest heroin trafficker in New York at the time.
This was in the early 1970s.
Frank Lucas is his name.
And the IRS was handling the money side of it.
And part of what they were doing is the agents were going out.
Now, I heard about this as I was making coffee and copies for them because I wasn't out there, but I did know what they were doing.
And they would actually surveil and document the delivery of duffel bags of cash to a bank aptly called Chemical Bank in the United States that he was having a lot of this money deposited to.
And they were failing to file the currency transaction reports that were required by law under the Bank Secrecy Act for those cash deposits.
So they were making the case on the bank for their helping to launder the money.
And that really gripped my attention massively to think that, gosh, in those duffel bags were the lives of the destroyed lives of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of the United States.
And if you followed their money, you'd come to Frank Lucas, a chemical bank.
And to me, that was where I wanted to actually work.
And, you know, those who needed to be brought to justice in that case were brought to justice.
Yes, they were.
Okay.
When you're training for this, and I will get into the story of the new book mainly and just a little on the previous book because I think we have to to lay the foundations here.
Was there a training mission that you had to go on?
You know, they wouldn't just put you straight into the mediene drug cartel.
I guess you had to be put on a couple of things to find your feet and for your controllers to work out whether you were grade A, grade B?
Well, luckily for me, the first half of my career, I didn't do any long-term undercover.
It wasn't until about 14 years in when I was working on a task force that had been focused on trying to prosecute the launderers for the Medellin cartel.
And we were moderately successful that we realized we needed another tool in our toolbox.
And that was going to be the long-term undercover approach to attempting to make those cases.
So I knew the methodologies.
I knew the players.
It wasn't like I was walking into a totally new realm of criminality that I had to really learn about.
So that was already in place.
And then with respect to what degree that I could do it, that's what the long-term undercover school is all about, because during that process, those who are involved in the training and the psychological overview certify you as either, in their view, ready to do short-term, medium-term, or long-term undercover.
And without that certification, you can't do the long-term undercover.
That's interesting.
I would never have guessed it was worked out that way.
So you're assessed on your ability to keep your cover story going for the longest length of time.
Yeah, and other assessments that they make with respect to what you're doing.
I mean, there are very, very, there's a substantial number of things that are taught to agents about undercover.
And it's not just in the classroom as well.
I mean, they would also, this was done off-site.
So it was at a training center that had a bar downstairs.
And purposely, they told everybody about a week into it, hey, the bar is open.
You can drink as much as you want and enjoy yourselves.
Clearly, anybody who over-invied was nicked.
They knew that that was definitely a weakness that they needed to take advantage of.
So, I mean, you basically all lived together for several weeks during the process.
Bearing in mind what you were doing.
Sorry to jump in, but if I was on a training, if I was doing that line of work, which I couldn't do to save my life, literally, you know, my face would give me away every time.
But if I was doing training for that and the people employing me opened the bar and said, you know, you've all done a terribly good job.
We're going to open the bar for you tonight and have a good time.
I think I will probably work out that this was still part of the assessment.
So those who didn't work that out fell by the wayside.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those that didn't work it out definitely got a stronger look during the balance of the school.
But it was part of a, really, it was part of a test.
Okay.
Before we get into the big stuff, talk to me about the first time, and I'm not even going to say, have you felt this?
Because of course you have.
The first time that you felt real fear That your life was in danger.
Yeah.
The first time came after I had been in Paris for a week or so, and four days of that, I was sitting in a hotel room for hours and hours at a time.
We'd break sometimes and then come back.
A good portion of the hierarchy of the Medellin cartel were there present in Paris.
In the room with me was an attorney by the name of Santiago Uribe, who, unbeknownst to me at the moment of those meetings, turned out to be the consigliere, the principal attorney for Pablo Escobar.
And there were other members of Escobar's outfit who were there or represented to be there, who were major, major players.
And we were being assessed with respect to our money laundering methodologies.
It had always been my belief that if for whatever it was that I wasn't going to show about me, I had no credibility with the other side, the bad guys, that they should show me.
It's like if I didn't take them to my home, or if they didn't get to see where I lived and where my family was, I had no, you know, I had very little standing to be able to make a similar request.
So if I couldn't show them how I laundered, it would be challenge, a big challenge of credibility for me to suggest that I can impose terms on them, which I always did, that a portion of what we cleaned had to be invested for a period of time.
So it wasn't obvious that big amounts of money were coming in and going out of my companies.
A lot of my colleagues felt that, you know, I should just be kind of macho and say, you know, you don't need to know how I do it.
You just need to benefit from how I do it.
But I didn't believe that.
I really felt that the more they understood, the more they would open up, the more they would share secrets.
And I think time proved me right.
So we, at the end of those meetings, were given the authority to receive what would cumulatively be roughly $100 million in drug proceeds, mostly to be collected in New York, a million a day, $2 million a day.
And we were to put this in a nest egg.
I had been forewarned by many of the people in the cartel that I got close to of what they thought the federal agents, the feds, look like, and that I should have counter surveillance out there to make sure that if there were people who fit this profile, that we would cease and desist whatever we were doing until we did further analysis.
So they were warning you off people like you.
Yeah, what they said was the people who were on the street, the people who are agents who are out there that do this surveillance for the feds, they would always call them Los Feos, the ugly ones.
And because they knew there were many agencies, FBI, DEA, customs that was involved.
And so they would say, you know, Los Feos have a profile.
They are gringos.
They are in their late 20s to early 30s.
They are in very good shape.
They wear blue jeans, pullover shirts that are solid with collars.
They have fanny packs and they wear jogging shoes.
The fanny packs are where they hide their guns.
And so I was so concerned about the collection of this money in New York that I made an exception.
And I did go to the New York Office of Customs to speak with them about surveillance.
And I hardly ever went to a federal office during the time I was in deep cover, but I did.
That's a risk.
And I walked in.
Yeah.
And I walked in the room and there's everybody who looked, they were gringos in their late 20s, early 30s, in very good shape with jeans and pullover shirts that were solid and collars and fanny packs with jogging shoes.
And I said, you know, you guys are wearing a uniform for them.
You really need to mix it up now.
Oh, my God.
But if they stopped wearing those things, you know, if they stopped doing all of those things together all at once, then wouldn't that point the finger at you?
No, I don't think so.
It would just cause them to blend in the street a little more.
So you had to do something that was against your instinct.
You had to go and have that consultation.
Yeah.
Which must have put you at risk?
Well, it put me at risk twofold.
One, I should have realized having been born and raised in New York, but luckily for me, I went to college in Illinois and I was embarrassed out of my New York accent and some of my New York mannerisms.
But a lot of people from New York think that the sun rises and falls in New York and the rest of the world just exists.
True, somewhere near Queens, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So their theory was, you know, like, well, you don't know how to do this stuff.
We're from New York.
We know what we're doing.
You're overreacting, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so they didn't change.
And my partner, who played kind of my street manager, best undercover agent in the world, Amir Abrayo, just a natural, total natural.
I had to prepare for years to do what I did.
Amir could roll out of bed and he's ready to go.
So he got a phone call from a money broker in Medellin that we were dealing with.
And in the back, he could hear screaming.
And it was Gerodo Moncara, who was the principal manager of Pablo Escobar's routes during that timeframe.
Very few people knew who he was.
But for your listeners who might be Narcos fans, the last two episodes of year one of Narcos is the last two episodes, they profile my primary two clients during that timeframe, Gerardo Moncada and Fernando Galeano.
They were the two main managers for Pablo Escobar.
So Moncada is screaming that Musela, that was my undercover name, Musela has to be an undercover agent, DEA agent.
They saw the agents out there, they saw their cars, they know for a fact the feds were on the street.
And now I had to figure out a way to talk my way out of that.
And I had befriended a guy within the cartel who was an advisor.
He and another guy were principally providing all of the planes, boats, cars that the cartel controlled.
Basically, he helped them define all of the Rockwell 980s and Rockwell 1000s, which are unique planes that are able to take off and land on short runways, bumpy runways, carry large cargoes, have extended flight capabilities.
So this guy who it seemed to me kind of liked me, I asked him for a meeting and I met him at about one in the morning in Miami in a not too nice area, not very far from the runway of Miami International Airport.
And I called my contact agent in Miami and I said, Matt, you got to do me a favor.
I just, I can't have cover on me.
If they see surveillance and I show up, they're going to, you may never find me.
And I really need you to just let me do my thing.
And I've got my cell phone.
You can call me.
I can call you.
These are the codes we'll use if everything's fine.
This is the code I'll use if there's a problem.
And he went along with it.
And so I went to the meeting.
It was supposed to only be this one guy, Rudolf Armbrecht, in the room.
He was a German Colombian.
His parents, his father had migrated to Colombia shortly after World War II.
And so I came in the room.
I was supposed to be in a meeting.
Excuse me.
I was supposed to bring him bank records.
And the bank records were in my briefcase where my recorder was.
So I went in without the recorder and the briefcase because I didn't really know who would be in the room.
Luckily for me, it was only Rudolph.
We sat down.
We started talking.
He eventually asked where the records were.
I said, oh, gosh, they're in the briefcase.
I forgot it.
I brought the briefcase in.
I threw it on the bed.
And he kept looking, kept glancing like every 30 seconds at that briefcase.
I almost thought he was going to jump on it and tear it apart.
But eventually I took it.
I put it on the table.
I opened it up so that the lid opened toward him.
He couldn't see what was in the briefcase.
We on a relatively small circular table.
And when I opened it, it's a briefcase that had a larger recorder, heavyweight recorder called a NAGRA, used in Hollywood, high quality recordings, but it was big.
Yeah, no, it's kind of the size of a large paperback book kind of thing.
Very heavy, very well engineered.
I have no idea how you conceal one of them.
Yeah, it was in the lid of the briefcase.
And so now I opened the briefcase.
That briefcase I had used a number of times, and I let my office know that the Velcro holding the false lid together had slipped a few times and it needed to be replaced.
Apparently, that didn't happen.
So I opened it.
And when I did, the Niagara fell into the briefcase and a nest of wires as well.
Oh my God.
And yeah, that's what I was saying inside my, you know, my, my brain, my maser brain was, my hair was on fire.
My Macella brain was, all right, how do I put this out?
And so I kind of fidgeted a little bit and I put my hands in the briefcase.
I said, I know the records are here.
I got to find it.
And just as he got up and came around my side, I had gotten the lid back on.
And then I gave him the records, but it certainly raised his antennas some.
And I think one of the things that saved me in that meeting, saved me with respect to my credibility, was that I didn't do what a normal agent would do, which is one of the things I was taught in my undercover training.
I didn't, normally agents, when they get accused of being a cop, they might get chesty and say, you know, well, I don't think it's my people.
It's your people.
You guys don't know what you're doing.
I didn't say that.
What I said was, listen, the information that you have is extremely important to both of us.
And so we need to use that information to find out where the problem is.
If it's on my side, you have my total assurance.
I will completely eliminate the problem.
If it's on your side, I expect the same.
But there's definitely a problem here.
And I don't want to take any more money from you in New York until we get this resolved.
So I was walking away from about $97 million.
And I think that that had some power to it.
Oh, I think so.
Boy, but you were as close to disaster for you and exposing an operation as you could possibly have been.
I mean, we've got into the Medellin stuff and the degree of risk.
I mean, look, after that day when that happened, okay, when you were in that situation, what did you do?
Were you able at the end of a day to come out of character, go and have a beer and watch cheers on TV?
How would you reconcile, that's the word I'm looking for, what had just happened to yourself?
Yeah, well, getting upset about it wasn't going to get me anywhere because I couldn't change the core problem.
I basically used my time to analyze it and to figure out how it was that I could potentially use my remaining time to make the most of it.
Because by then I had been given a mandate by my office, which was very unusual.
Long-term undercover operations, as everyone knows who's been trained about managing them, you need to review the process about every, no less than every three months.
And you need to determine whether or not your operatives are meeting new people and uncovering new crime.
And if they're not, you need to find a way to end the operation as soon as possible because you're otherwise only facilitating criminal activity.
If I'm receiving money from the same people all the time in the same city and the money's going to the same accounts, what am I doing here?
You know, I need to be opening new doors.
And so, but I was told in and around the time of that meeting that it had been decided that the operation was going to end in October of that year.
It was then June.
And I couldn't quite understand in my own mind how they'd come up with that as the appropriate thing to do, but they were hell-bent to leather that they were going to do it.
And so my theory was I had a good two years of accomplishments to achieve.
So what I needed to do was I needed to stay in that world 24-7 for that four months to get two years worth of work done in four months.
And that was my goal.
And so I went harder nose to the grindstone than I ever did before, because I knew that this portal that I had climbed through the real world from and into the underworld was at such a high level in organized crime that in all likelihood, no one else would ever get that opportunity that I had.
I mean, I had the, this is what my typical day was.
I mean, I would have meetings with a guy by the name of Roberto Alcaeno, who was the principal, one of the main transporters of cocaine for the Medellin Cartel and a very big distributor in the United States.
And in five or six meetings, he disclosed to me a pipeline, we call it.
A pipeline is a series of legitimate and illegitimate businesses that create a corridor through which tons and tons of cocaine are moved multiple times a year.
And this pipeline started in the jungles of Bolivia, where they had a lab that was producing thousands of kilos a week.
They were flying it to northern Argentina to a remote airstrip.
They were trucking it into Buenos Aires.
They had an anchovy packing plant that sent out large containers of commercially packed anchovies to Italy, Spain, and the northeast part of the U.S. And in those shipments, there was 1,000 to 2,000 kilos in each shipment.
I had all that information and I provided it.
And that resulted in the identification of a load of more than a ton of cocaine that was sitting on the docks in Camden, New Jersey, and ultimately resulted in the seizure of that cocaine and the arrest of Alcano.
That was a month before the intended end of the operation.
And instead of thinking that I was the leak, through a message he sent from jail by his wife, he let me know that he felt I was the only one he could trust and he wanted me to take over his organization.
How did you feel then?
I felt like I felt very lucky and I felt that, you know, it was just another example of how foolish it was to pull the plug.
But again, I had no choice.
But I was also getting information during meetings at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International that were earth-shattering.
Details about where Manuel Noriega was hiding his illicit fortune, information about other world leaders who had secret accounts there that were holding Pilford funds, treasury funds,
three bank branches that were illegally owned by the Saudis who had nominees that were Americans who were making it appear that those branches were actually owned by those Americans.
That's the kind of information I got every day.
And basically, information became my heroine.
You were getting off on it.
You know, if I got a big piece of something that was phenomenal, and then it was my drive to get back in that world and find the next bigger piece.
Doesn't it get dangerous when you start enjoying it like that?
Yes, it does.
It's a good motivation that information becomes your heroine.
It's never good for your long-term undercover agent to have any dependency.
But if it's going to be anything, information is probably the best.
If you were hooked because you love that lifestyle and you wanted to take your next private jet ride and you were eager to go to your next best hotel in the world, and I mean, I was experiencing all those things.
That didn't mean anything to me.
Those were props that I used in order to get people to believe who I was.
Right.
But there was a lot of adrenaline involved in this.
And I know from my life, very small compared with your life, but my life doing broadcasting, you take risks with things.
You put yourself in situations where you may be not as prepared as you might be.
And you think, can I ad Lib my way through that?
And you feel great on the adrenaline when it works for you.
But the downside is that if you, you know, if you, one time you'll go and try and add Lib your way out of a situation, it's not going to work for you.
There's always a downside waiting for you when you're in that situation, even if you've got, as you had, nerves of steel.
Just before we end this segment, let me ask you this.
Did you ever, you know, presumably you had to, since you were living with them 24-7 all the time, they presumably, how do I put this?
They would party hard.
And I don't know whether any of them used the substances that they were trading in.
Perhaps they didn't.
But, you know, they would be involved in things that were on the frontiers and beyond the bounds of legality in order to appear to be the real thing.
And you don't have to answer this question if you don't want to, but in order to appear to be the real thing, you had to behave like them.
So did you indulge in the same things that they did?
No, I didn't.
And part of your training is to recognize that you are going to face circumstances where people are going to attempt to compromise you, whether that's with women or with drugs or with stealing or with anything.
And you always have to be thinking trial from day one.
But when it comes to the issue of getting out of being compromised, this was what I built into it.
First of all, they knew me to be a mob-connected money launderer.
They knew that my principal job was to work with, quote, my family to help to launder the money that they were generating for the family, that the family had given me authorization to explore the profits available by providing services to the Latin American world.
And that's the only reason that I even made the offer because I was given that permission.
But don't make any mistake about it, would be my discussion with them.
You're the cherry on the top of the cake.
I am not going to do anything that's going to cause the people I've known all my life to have any doubts about whether I can be trusted with their fortunes.
If I should show up in any way, drug dependent or compromised in any fashion, they'll kill me.
Right.
And it's not worth it.
You guys are nickel and dime.
They are my future.
I totally get it.
And it's fascinating because the reason that you're valuable to the launderers, the cartel, is the same reason that you're valuable to the people who employ you.
Yes.
It's your professionalism.
That's the word.
That's astonishing.
It really is.
And just in the last minute of this segment, were you ever tempted to go over to the other side?
No, not in the least.
I would never disrespect my mom and dad like that.
No way.
Just to ask you this, I interviewed, and I'm sure you're aware of him and the book that he wrote, Gianni Russo, the man they call the Hollywood Godfather.
Are you aware of him?
No.
Okay, well, Gianni Russo was in The Godfather, and he was a mafia associate, right?
Right from when he was like a kid, they adopted him.
They literally adopted him.
And, you know, he worked around them all of his life.
It was part of his existence.
One of the things, he had a venue, a nightclub, and I hope I'm telling this story right.
There was one of Escobar's heavies, one of his hit people in his club who was acting violently.
And Gianni shot him, which instantly put a price on his head.
And the story of how he got out of that was the fact that he had to go to Escobar and appeal for his life, essentially, which he did.
And the thing that saved him was that he'd been in the movie and Escobar liked the movie.
Okay?
It came down more or less to that.
So what I'm saying before we move on to the new book, which we must, is that these people did not mess about and they seemed to have radar that would penetrate any act and they were impervious to any subterfuge or pretense or anything like that.
So the fact that you survived in that is an absolute testament to you.
It's an absolute testament to the fact that you stuck to those principles that were inbaked in your family.
It's an astonishing thing.
And, you know, it's an amazing story.
I don't know what you, when you sit back and think about it all now, I don't know when you stopped doing this.
You'll tell me.
Do you ever think, my God, was that me?
Well, I also have had a lot of time to think about it, of course, writing two books.
And I really believe that absent the training that I got, I would have crashed and burned.
I would not have understood some of the red flags about losing your rooting.
I would not have probably recognized some of the signs of role reversal.
You've really got to get into this role, but you've got to never, ever forget who you are and why you're there.
Now, some people think that that's a conflict because you're going to act like an agent, but it's funny.
I had this capacity to be able to put that maser brain.
It was only on alert if I went outside the guardrails.
There were times when I was there as Musella and I felt the Character in me.
And I did what I thought that that character thought was right.
But there always had to be guardrails.
And that was the job of my maser brain was to kind of start beeping when, and if I got too close to making a decision that failed to take into consideration the maser defenses,
probably one of the ones that came close was a scene in the Infiltrator film where Brian Cranston says to them, and I did say to them, you know, we had terms under which we were going to do this.
I needed to become an investment advisor for some of your people.
I was not going to take money in, put it out without doing that.
And I'm telling you right now, if this doesn't change and I don't see it working the way that we all agreed it would, this is over.
No questions asked.
This is over.
So one of the guys was a practicing, he practiced Santaria.
It's a kind of a combination of witchcraft and Catholicism.
It comes from the Western nations of Africa, mostly from the migration.
That's such a nice way to say the horrific slavery trade that brought so many people from West Africa to the shores of the United States and elsewhere.
And people you can as well.
Yes.
Yeah.
But they had this, they believed in divine spirits and somehow mixed a little bit of Catholicism with that.
And so he wanted me to go with him to his priest so that his priest could assess my soul.
And depending upon the outcome, we would or would not do business.
And this was a guy who was a friend of people I was already doing business with.
And people in my office said, you're going to mess this whole thing up.
I mean, this is a 50-50 shot.
This guy's going to, his priest is going to either say yes or no.
He says, no, we're done.
What are you going to do?
And I said, you know, well, here's the deal.
We need to be climbing the ladder.
If we're not finding new people, dealing with new people, uncovering new crimes, we're wasting our time here.
So I think I should go.
So I went alone with him.
They knew the address I was going to be at.
It was in an area out in Miami, the Miami area called Sweetwater.
I think there were a lot of Hondurans who lived in that community, but it was a very modest little house that he took me to.
And we walked in.
And it wasn't until I got inside the house that I found out that inside the reflective windows, from the inside, you could see that there were burglar bars on every exit.
So once we were in and the door closed, it was a cage.
So he asked me to sit in the couch.
And then comes from around the corner, a very, a guy who doesn't look anything like the priest in the movie.
The guy who's the priest in the movie looks like a middle linebacker or a rugby player.
And the guy who really came around the corner looked like Tiny Tim.
He was like a little guy.
And there wasn't much to him.
But he was a Santerea priest.
And so we went in and you could see the blood and the altar and chicken heads and candles.
And the room was dark other than the candles.
And he just had me in the center of the room and he grabbed my shoulders and he looked into my eyes.
He said some stuff in a dialect that I have no idea what it means.
And he went back to praying at the altar.
Another guy came in.
He said, okay, you need to go outside now.
And they were in the room together and then he comes out and the drug trafficker says, this was wonderful.
Santa El Padrino, the godfather, says that you're an honest and honorable man.
So we will do business.
And in a sense, I think the priest was right.
I'm honest and honorable.
I'm just an honest and honorable undercover agent.
I'm not an honest and honorable money owner.
So I got the seal of approval.
God.
Okay, the betrayal, the book, the new one, the one that was out.
When was it out?
I think it was just a couple of weeks ago, wasn't it?
May 1st.
May 1st.
All right, so just three weeks back.
This is Operation Promo, and this is about the Kali cartel.
Now, first question to ask about this.
You were involved in the Medain investigations, and as we know, Pablo Escobar ended up in jail and still doing his business, though, from behind bars, but ultimately he dies in a shootout.
This is to do with the Kali cartel.
Aren't you, when you've been involved in one operation that big, aren't you a busted flush?
Is it possible to go into another operation?
It must have been because you did it.
Yeah, you know, when Operation Sea Chase, the first one, ended, I knew that my life was in danger.
They had witnesses and an intercept that suggested there was a contract on my life.
So I did a full makeover.
The beard came off.
My hair was made to look very curly.
I wore glasses that I didn't need.
I was sitting on the couch with my wife when my kids came in.
They walked past, didn't say a whole lot of anything.
They thought my wife was talking to somebody else.
They didn't recognize me.
So anybody who'd been involved in the world of that first operation, by the time you went into this operation that you're writing about now, chances are if your own family don't recognize you, then they wouldn't.
Yeah, and most of the people that I dealt with in the Medellin cartel were either behind bars, six feet under, or hiding somewhere.
Because what had happened after I left working with the Medellin cartel, my two principal clients, Gerardo Moncada and Fernando Galeano, were accused of thievery by Escobar, claimed to have kind of evaded some of the war taxes by putting aside some of the drug proceeds that his Sicarios had found.
So they were summoned to the cathedral, which was his self-made prison, ultimately hung by their feet.
Their clothes were stripped off.
Their bodies were burned with torches and their skin melted off.
And then they were chopped up and turned to ashes.
And nobody's ever found them.
And then everybody who worked for Moncada became a target.
A lot of them got caught and killed.
A lot of them were the people that I dealt with.
Same thing with Kaleano.
So a lot of the people that I dealt with were eliminated from that process.
And the Cali Cartel was actually somewhat behind the scenes working with Los Petes, the vigilante group that was portions of Pero de Moncado Fernando Meliano's family and workers who decided that they would be the people persecuted by Pablo is roughly the translation,
but they had a plan, and their plan was to kidnap anybody who was close to Escobar, give him a choice.
Either you help us to find him or we kill you.
And they killed a lot of people.
They ultimately worked with the Cali cartel that was in part financing them and some of the people allegedly within the Colombian National Police.
And that led to Escobar being hunted down and killed.
So a lot of the people I dealt with were out of the picture.
And a lot of the people I was going to be dealing with were not part of that organization.
There was a, it's like working for two Italian-American organized crime families.
You're not a made guy in both families.
You're either in one or you're in another.
I get the picture.
So safe is not the word to use, but you were relatively safe going into this new investigation.
I felt I was, yes.
Okay.
One question that it is difficult to ask, and again, this is another one that you don't have to answer.
But what I know about all of this is what I read in fiction and see in the movies and on TV.
Often there's a case where the good guy who's infiltrating a bad organization has to immerse himself into it so much that perhaps somebody he gets to know within that organization and maybe ain't so bad, but often pays a terrible price and ends up dying for it.
Maybe that person is executed or whatever.
Were you ever in a situation where anybody who you might have begun to care around or about died?
Or anybody, in fact, were you ever there a party to an execution?
Not a party to an execution because that would have ended the operation.
So thankfully I wasn't.
In the story of the betrayal, I was introduced to a fellow who was, I thought, brilliant.
He spoke six or seven languages.
He was a pilot.
He owned a business that was an international distributor of goods for major manufacturers.
And that was his cover for laundering money for members of the Cali cartel.
And it wasn't long after I got to spend time with him that he went missing.
And ultimately, because of the fact that some local law enforcement authorities took note of a massive flock of vultures that were covering a burned high-end, I think it was a BMW, BMW vehicle, which was his car.
They found his remains, which were his skull had been crushed in, and they doused him with gas and they burned him to nothing.
And then the vultures took care of the rest.
That guy was a guy that I, I mean, he got kidnapped the day after I met with him at a time when I was with him.
And I noticed that there were two guys who were at the same restaurant who were spending more time than they should looking toward our table.
And I thought that they were maybe his bodyguards.
And I said to him, you know, you can trust me.
Why did you, you know, you didn't have to bring anybody else?
He goes, Bob, they're not with me.
I trust you.
It's not a problem.
And so I got to think that those guys had something to do with his disappearance.
It took people about 10 days to find him.
His car was on the side of a portion of the Panama Canal that was in a cemetery, an American cemetery.
So and I'm trying to think about other people who were killed, none that close in time that I can think of off the top of my head.
And I suppose when death is around you, you become inured to it.
You know, it becomes part of the landscape along with the other horrors that are happening.
And there are stories of risk in this new book, aren't there?
And another one is about the nearness of discovery that you discovered.
And this time it was not to do with a briefcase, was it?
It was to do with something in a spectacle case.
And that very nearly got you found out again.
Yeah, but there were even closer calls.
I firmly believe in hindsight that a higher power was looking out for me in this second operation, probably the first as well.
That and the support I got from my wife are probably the two most important things that I think that got me through those two journeys.
And in the betrayal, I suspected that there was a chance that one of my colleagues was on the take.
He was highly, highly respected within the law enforcement community.
And as a result of what he had done, which I didn't realize until later through witnesses, he had outed me as a DEA undercover agent to some very high-level money launderers in the Cali cartel that I was dealing with.
And after he had done that, first I arranged a meeting with one of those people in Panama at an office that I had in Panama.
And what I found out from witnesses later is that there was a hit squad that he had in a vehicle outside.
He had told them, if I don't come out of that office 35 minutes after I walk in that building, you need to come in and blow away everybody who's in there.
And they had high-powered weaponry.
And he hadn't come out quite in time because I always have a way to make meetings go longer than they should.
And as he was exiting the building, they were entering fully armed and ready to go up.
They knew the suite to go to and they were going to kill me.
Thankfully, that never happened.
And then with that same guy, I was doing undercover in Colombia and I was in Bogota having meetings with mostly money launderers.
And he tried so hard to keep me from leaving when I had planned on leaving.
And he gave me the bait of, you know, let me tell you, my client is with me.
He's so impressed with you.
He wants to meet you.
At that particular time, that guy who was trying to get me to stay there had a price tag on his head by the Cali cartel for losses, millions and millions and losses that had occurred as a result of his poor judgment.
And there's no doubt in my mind that his efforts to try to keep me in Bogota were motivated by an effort to kidnap me.
Thankfully, my boss, who was with me, very tactical guy, said, you know, Mazer, we're here until this hour, and we ain't staying a second later.
You get your butt out of here.
And, you know, I flew back from Bogota to Dominican Republic and then on to Puerto Rico.
But in hindsight, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that was the beginning of trying to set me up for a kidnap.
And that was essentially to offer you up if you were kidnapped as a sacrifice in a way.
Yeah, because at the time, well, I mean, Pablo Escobar had put a $300,000 bounty on any DEA agent working in Colombia whose head could be grabbed by anybody.
And this guy, if he could lure me, could then give me to the people who he had lost nearly $2 million for.
And I think that they were pretty confident that they'd get the $2 million.
I don't think they would have gotten a nickel.
Nobody, you know, that's not a part of how people deal with agents that are kidnapped.
It wasn't that long after we had lost an agent in Mexico who had been kidnapped and tortured and his body recovered.
And there was no way in hell that anybody was going to negotiate anything.
They would have just come with as much firepower as they could to get me unkidnapped.
So the operation that's at the heart of the betrayal, the new book, is that the operation that persuaded you that your shelf life doing this was probably coming to an end and it was time to do something else?
Yes.
Yeah.
When it got to the point where I was willing to risk it all, but I had people within my own agency who were working for the other side.
That took risk to a level that I was not prepared to continue to deal with.
And I don't think anybody at that stage would have really wanted me to do another long-term.
You know, I confess in my book that one of the betrayals, I mean, the obvious betrayal is the betrayal of a colleague.
But one of the other betrayals is a betrayal to my own common sense where I was so hunting that heroine of new information that I was willing.
I wanted to prove to the world something that I know I found in the first operation.
And that was that there's a segment of the international banking and business community.
I'm talking bankers, businessmen, attorneys, financial service providers who smile at us in our world as pillars of the community, who are in fact critical assets of the underworld,
converting the $2 trillion a year that's related to illicit activity and basically taking that money, seeking secrecy from governments and building veils of secrecy around it and enabling those Criminals.
I mean, it could be Putin.
It could be a country leader in Africa who's pilfering treasuries.
Or indeed, whoever.
So the web is enormous.
Did you ever feel then when you left it, when you came out of it after that operation, that this stuff is always going on.
It's always going to go on.
There's nothing much that can be done about it.
And I did my bit, but it will only ever be a tip of an iceberg or a pinprick?
Well, I'm pretty stubborn.
So now I find myself in a world with an opportunity to at times speak to thousands of people at a time who are in the private sector and who have a responsibility of attempting to enable their companies and their banks to adhere to policies and procedures that relate to anti-money laundering compliance.
It makes me go crazy to watch what's going on in the private sector and in the law enforcement sector.
It's basically what I know Albert Einstein was given credit for this claim, this statement, but others probably before him.
But insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
And the private sector, the law enforcement sector, the regulatory sector, they're doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting to come up with an answer to this problem.
And the answer, in my view, is much more easily achieved if you follow the fundamentals.
I wrote a white paper in 2019 on what I think would be the most effective way globally for the law enforcement, regulatory, and private sector to share their resources and identify the biggest money launderers on the planet and go after them.
We waste so much time.
I hate to say it, but it's become, it's a money generator.
Nobody who runs an anti-money laundering compliance conference can afford to say that there's nothing new, that there isn't some new magic bullet, there isn't some new technique, there isn't some new software, because they can't sell anything unless it's new.
But what they fail to do is they fail to study history.
And what the mistake they make every single time is, well, you know, that's the way things may have been done years ago.
But what's happening today?
Well, I can tell you what's happening today.
It's the tried and true methodologies that have been used for decades by the major money launderers.
Do we want to spend all of our time trying to identify and pick the low-hanging fruit on the tree, or do we want to zero in on the biggest fruit on the tree and go after it and take it down?
Of course.
And that's what we should be doing.
Of course, it's always more comfortable in any field of criminality that people know about to turn away and turn a blind eye because the stakes of doing something different.
You did something different, but the stakes of doing something different are too great.
But at least it seems to me that in this day and age now, you're doing your bit to help by pointing organizations and governments and others and people like me listening, pointing out that if you have codes and if your watchword is probity, then these things can be dealt with.
But you've got to want to do it.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I see through some critical reviews of some of my writing about, I had this author who wrote, you know, some of this stuff may have relevance, but it happened so long ago.
If you want to read about current methodologies, read such and such a book about Deutsche Bank's mirror trades.
Well, if you read my book, The Infiltrator, you'll see that BCCI taught me how to do mirror trades 30-some years ago.
And I've been trying to tell everybody why it is that that's so easy to identify and what it is that that's made of.
So, you know, please, if you're going to be critical, at least take the time to read what I've talked about and recognize that what I'm trying to tell everybody on the planet is you don't have to come up with the newest new.
You don't have to do anything other than that.
That's why we have, well, you know, that's why at war schools, we study what it is that generals of the past did and we learn from them.
Right.
And people still talk about what Napoleon did and what Hitler did and what various leaders and dictators and good and bad people of the past did.
An astonishing life story.
I know that we probably could have talked for four or five hours about this.
Last question.
I don't know.
Are you happy with me saying what state you're in?
I mean, you're in Florida, yeah.
Yes, I am.
Now, I would have thought having stepped away from a lot of this, Florida's not a good place to be.
I would have thought maybe the best and safest place for you to be, bearing in mind, I assume that there will still be people who are ill-intentioned towards you, that you'd be better off in, you know, in Ireland or Alaska or Oregon.
Not Florida.
Yeah, well, my view is that we do certain things that we feel enhances our security.
I used to run after I left the federal government, I ran an investigative agency.
I had a staff of 10 former U.S. federal agents, and we had a network of another 50 or so former law enforcement officers in foreign countries.
And I can tell you that we used to do enhanced due diligence and research for companies.
I'd oftentimes get assignments to try to find people that nobody else could find.
On a good day, I might find them by the end of the day.
There are a lot of resources that are out there.
If you own a cell phone, I'll find you.
If I know the number you're using, there are many other resources that are out there.
So, you know, for really, really bad guys who really want to get to you, I don't care if you're living in Antarctica, they're going to find you.
I think it's more of a circumstance where, and I am so ashamed of the state of affairs in my country.
We have horrific violence.
We have such divisive, polarized political parties.
I've never experienced this in my life before.
But studying history, it looks to me, it's just a resurgence of what occurred during the Civil War.
So I...
I don't know.
But I think, yes, you're right about the lessons of history.
Robert, we're out of time, I'm afraid.
But if you have a concluding remark, please make it.
Well, my remark to anybody who's involved in this field, whether it's in the private or the public sector, is that I think it's so important for them to realize that their individual voice can, in fact, make a difference.
That if they really want to take things to the highest level within their capacity, and they do that, they will definitely achieve things that are going to make a difference.
And if everybody who's part of this effort took that position, I think we'd have a great world for all of us to watch our children and our grandchildren grow up in.
So I'm hoping that they recognize that it's not feudal.
They are difference makers.
And as they say in the U.S., amen to that.
Robert Meser, thank you very much indeed.
Very, very last question.
Having been through all of this adrenaline stuff, what do you do for fun and excitement?
Because your whole life must be, well, large parts of your life now must be a landscape of anticlimax.
I don't know.
I get pretty excited about sharing time with live audiences on these issues, especially when I get feedback, even if it's only from a small portion of a group, about how I have motivated them to look closer at those things that will enhance their ability to be a part of making a difference.
And I've very thankfully heard that from a lot of people.
And recently, I just got the opportunity to be selected to become part of the instructor group of the Homeland Security Investigations Undercover School.
So being able to share these experiences with young agents who are now deciding that it's going to be their turn in the cage is important to me.
I think that not everything that I did is going to be of value to them.
Some of the things that I did may be of value to them.
But if I can save one of them, I've done a lot.
Great thought to leave it on.
Robert Maser, thank you very much.
Please stay safe.
And, you know, those words I say at the end of my podcast to everybody, but, you know, they have special meaning for you.
Take care.
Thank you.
Boy, anything I say after that story is going to sound trite and pretty redundant, so I'm not going to say anything.
Your thoughts, please, on Robert Maser and his astonishing story.
A series of stories, really.
More great guests in the pipeline at the Home of the Unexplained.
Please, if you can make a donation to the running continued, especially in these difficult and straightened times of the website and the podcast, go to the website theunexplained.tv and you can follow a link for that there.
And you can also send me messages, guest suggestions, whatever you want to do.
Please know that I do get to see all of the emails as they come in.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
Above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection