Ex-federal agent Robert Mazur shares his experiences working undercover to infiltrate drug cartels, offering insights into the challenges involved. Pt 2/2. [Pt 1 can be found here!]
What We Discuss with Robert Mazur:
- How Robert, working undercover for US Customs and the DEA, posed as a money launderer to infiltrate Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel and other criminal organizations.
- Money laundering enables cartels to produce their most lethal product: corruption. Corrupt officials and governments facilitate drug trafficking operations.
- Money laundering methods are highly sophisticated, involving legitimate businesses, secret codes, and multi-national operations to evade detection.
- Banks and the global financial system need to change to combat money laundering effectively, with severe penalties for those involved in facilitating the flow of illicit funds.
- Despite the risks and close calls, Robert continued his undercover work to gather intelligence and evidence against drug cartels until it became clear that the price his family was paying was not worth continuing.
- And much more…
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On this second part of our two-part conversation [catch part one here], former federal agent and author of The Betrayal: The True Story of My Brush with Death in the World of Narcos and Launderers Robert Mazur explains how money laundering enables cartels to produce their most lethal product: corruption, which facilitates drug trafficking operations. We discuss the sophisticated methods used by criminals to launder money, including legitimate businesses, secret codes, and multi-national operations to evade detection. Robert also highlights the United States’ insatiable appetite for illegal drugs, which drives the drug trade, and the need for banks and the global financial system to combat money laundering effectively with severe penalties for those involved.
Throughout his undercover work, Robert faced numerous close calls and risks, including a half-million-dollar contract on his life. He emphasizes the importance of gathering intelligence and evidence against drug cartels while minimizing the amount of money laundered to avoid facilitating criminal organizations. Despite the personal toll on his family, Robert continued his work until it became clear that the price they were paying was no longer worth it. He now advocates for increased public awareness and systemic changes to combat the flow of illicit funds in the global economy. Listen, learn, and enjoy!
Please Scroll Down for Featured Resources and Transcript!
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Resources from This Episode:
- The Betrayal: The True Story of My Brush with Death in the World of Narcos and Launderers by Robert Mazur | Amazon
- The Infiltrator | Prime Video
- Robert Mazur | Website
- Robert Mazur | Facebook
- Robert Mazur | LinkedIn
- Robert Mazur | Twitter
- The Man Behind the Mystery | Wagner Magazine
- ‘I Went Undercover to Stop Pablo Escobar’s Drugs Money Laundering but Cartels Still Get away with It Now’ | iNews UK
- The True Story Behind The Infiltrator — Robert Mazur Interview | Men’s Journal
- Organized Crime Module 8 Key Issues: Special Investigative Techniques — Undercover Operations | UNODC
- An Investigation Into the Psychological Effects of Undercover Policing | Channels
- How to Demonstrate Adaptability and Flexibility at Work | Indeed
- Joshua Fruth | The War on Money Laundering and Why You Should Care | Jordan Harbinger
- What Is Money Laundering? | Investopedia
- Money Laundering Overview | UNODC
- Frequently Asked Questions | The Financial Action Task Force (FATF)
- The Panama Papers: Exposing the Rogue Offshore Finance Industry | ICIJ
- The War against Money-Laundering Is Being Lost | The Economist
- Money to Launder? Here’s How (Hint: Find a Bank) | Bloomberg
- How Britain Can Help You Get away with Stealing Millions: A Five-Step Guide | The Guardian
- Trade-Related Illicit Financial Flows in 135 Developing Countries: 2008-2017 | Global Financial Integrity
988: Robert Mazur | How Money Laundering Works Part Two
This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!
[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show.
[00:00:03] Robert Mazur: His eyes keep flashing toward the briefcase, like he almost knows that there's a recorder in it or something. He just keeps looking at it and looking at it. I open my briefcase and sure enough the Nara falls out of the secret compartment into the briefcase with a nest of wires.
[00:00:21] And this guy's on the other side of the briefcase, and I'm trying to put this thing together without looking like I'm putting something together. I got it done two seconds before he came around the to the other side.
[00:00:35] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional tech luminary, extreme athlete or correspondent or neuroscientist.
[00:01:02] And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that. Our episode starter packs are a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, AI crime, and cults, and more.
[00:01:18] It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. Part two, with Robert Maer on money laundering and financial crime. If you haven't heard part one, definitely go back and listen to that.
[00:01:33] It came out just a little bit ago. I don't know what else there is to say. Let's jump right back in with Robert Maser.
[00:01:44] People are gonna wonder why change clothes if they're watching on YouTube, but hey, the magic of part two. So I appreciate you, uh, doing this part two with us. There's, there's so much I, Bob, honestly, when I started to prepare this, I was like, oh man, you know, this guy's so interesting, but I really hope we can fill an hour with this money laundering thing.
[00:02:03] And now it's like we're gonna be doing like three hours or something and trimming it down. No problem. Apparently that wasn't the issue. Okay. As you mentioned before, active listening and drawing people out, and you had a lot of really smart psychology with that. Tell me how you almost got yourself in trouble.
[00:02:19] You actually told me this before we started recording, that you really wanted to show this guy your office and it didn't smell right to him.
[00:02:26] Robert Mazur: Yeah. This was a guy who very, very high up in the Medellin cartel. He worked for Pablo Escobar and most everybody who reported to him, he was a former Avianca Pilot, 7 47 pilot, and he was responsible for collecting the Air Force for the Medellin cartel.
[00:02:47] He sought out certain types of aircraft, mostly Rockwell one thousands because of the specifications that they have. And so he was sent to meet with me in Paris when I met with Pablo Escobar's main attorney to explain how we laundered money and in the process of it, everything went really, really well.
[00:03:09] And he then made a surprise visit to Tampa and. I said, well, you know, we really, I'd really like to make sure that I take you to the brokerage firm and give you the opportunity to see how effectively we work financially And Mm-Hmm. We talked about it and I kept talking about bells and whistles and why I was good and, and he just looked at me.
[00:03:34] It got quiet and he said, why do I sense that it's so important for you to take me to your office? Uh, I realized I had gotten too pushy. I had gotten too cocky. I had forgotten some of my own fundamentals. Mm-Hmm. It really could have created a major, major problem. He was a very perceptive guy.
[00:04:00] Jordan Harbinger: You said you forgot some of your own fundamentals.
[00:04:01] What are the fundamentals like act as if you're really, maybe a criminal, doesn't have some sort of desire to really expose their business to other criminals. Right. Is that kind of what you're aiming at?
[00:04:13] Robert Mazur: Yeah, in a sense, and I mean, these were outwardly legitimate appearing businesses.
[00:04:17] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:18] Robert Mazur: So, I mean, it wasn't as though I was gonna take him to a safe house where we had millions of dollars in currency.
[00:04:24] But I think that he recognized the fact that it was, there was some ulterior motive on my part to try to get him there. I was working too hard at it when it's something very important. Like it was very important for me to get people to presume that I was part of an Italian American organized crime family.
[00:04:47] Mm-Hmm. The fundamental is, you never say it, the fundamental is you actually, as I did, deny it, deny that it even exists. But you give them all of the passive reinforcements that cause them to look at you and they say to themselves, oh, this guy's a mobster.
[00:05:03] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:05:04] Robert Mazur: It's far, far less persuasive and it's actually undermining for me to try to convince someone.
[00:05:12] That I am a member of the Italian American Mafia.
[00:05:16] Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned that you are, well, of course you're laundering the money and it puts you in contact with people. Like what was the guy, the guy who was, you said the Air Force. So basically this guy gets airplanes for the cartel. Are these guys generally presentable as professionals, semi corporate types, or are they kind of like 50 50 scumbag off the street and then another guy's a, a corporate type?
[00:05:37] It seems like you're dealing with people who, if you saw them at a restaurant, you wouldn't be like, what's that guy doing here? You, you would just think he's a lawyer. And then he talks about how Pablo Escobar wants 50 airplanes. Right.
[00:05:48] Robert Mazur: That guy in particular, he had gone to medical school, decided he didn't wanna become a doctor after a while, and became, um, a pilot for Avianca.
[00:05:56] Mm-Hmm. Which is the Columbian airline. An extremely bright guy. Very, very well read. Yes. He would fit in just about anywhere, as would most of the people that I dealt with. If you were a person. Who looked like a bad guy. Mm-Hmm. You were not gonna be in meetings that were related to the sophisticated aspects of moving literally hundreds of millions of dollars.
[00:06:23] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:06:23] Robert Mazur: And the same thing pretty much goes, you know, Roberto El Caino, major distributor and transporter, he was a very smart man who had a, a high-end jewelry store and dealt in real estate and in other businesses, and was extraordinarily bright. So there were people at times that were not professional.
[00:06:46] Mm-Hmm. Best example of how that gets received in the upper circles of the cartel. This guy that came to a meeting in France, he had been drinking, he was loud, he. He was also drawing attention.
[00:07:05] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:07:06] Robert Mazur: And before those series of four day meetings concluded Pablo Escobar's, principal Consigliere, his main lawyer, approached me and my partner and said, he's a liability.
[00:07:20] We need him to be killed. Would you handle that for us? And you know, they asked you to do it. Well, they first brought it up with my partner and they knew that my partner isn't gonna do anything. 'cause I'm like his Mr. Big. So then they brought me in on a conversation, and as my partner said to them, you control all of Medellin.
[00:07:38] Just send them back to Medellin and do whatever it is that you need to do to 'em. We're not gonna kill 'em here in France, in freaking Paris. We're out of our turf. But that's how they deal with people, not just because they may be, oh, if you're disloyal, you're dead. But not just disloyal, but if you are an individual who they feel could potentially draw the attention of others.
[00:08:01] They are not going to either allow you to get involved in very important stuff or they're going to eliminate the
[00:08:08] Jordan Harbinger: problem. So if you're laundering the money and it puts you in contact with other key men in the cartel, like the airplane guy, I assume this is like just gold for law enforcement, right?
[00:08:19] Because it lets you paint a really good picture of how the cartel is spending its money. You're not just washing the money and you're like, alright, we're at a hundred million dollars. You're like, it's a hundred million and 20 million went to airplanes and then 10 million went to fuel and parts, and then this one went to this operation over there and then we met in France and then they bought this piece of real estate.
[00:08:35] Like you're just getting, you're really in the inner circle looking at what they are doing with the money, which makes it a hell of a lot harder for them to be like, Hey, maybe we're guilty of money laundering, but nothing else.
[00:08:45] Robert Mazur: Yeah. I got those meetings because of a technique that I used with the money broker who became a partner of mine, a Colombian money broker who had an import export business in me.
[00:08:57] That was that I told him, you've gotta recognize that we don't want to get caught, buddy, and you're gonna get me caught. You want to give me a million dollars on Monday and on Friday, you want me to wire out less my fee, the money to some Panamanian bank? I can't do that. I have to be a person clearly seen and supported by records to be an investment advisor.
[00:09:23] So you need to convince these guys that I need to hold some of this money for a period of time, and I need to have the opportunity to have some of my businesses in play. Like if they're gonna buy a plane, give me the cash, I'll get it into my mortgage brokerage business. We'll issue a loan and then you guys can use the loan proceeds to buy the plane.
[00:09:45] But I need cover. I can't be having money coming in and, and going out. That's what the feds look for all the time. And so he came back to me and said, well, I've told them about this, but you know, they're not convinced that mm-hmm. It's something that they should do. And at that point I said, well, listen, here's one of two things that's gonna happen.
[00:10:01] You're gonna give me the opportunity to sit down with them and convince them about this, or we're not gonna do any more business because I'm not gonna get myself caught. I've told you all along, you're the cherry on the top of the cake. My main job is to take care of my family here in New York, and there's no way in hell that I'm gonna put them at risk.
[00:10:21] Jordan Harbinger: There's a lot of seemingly close calls, like people threatening to kill you if they find out, you know, if there, there's a seizure. And it's like, if I find out this is your fault, how does the DEA or any law enforcement agency make it seem like the seizure is random or accidental and not tie you to that stuff?
[00:10:37] Like if you're like, Hey, a hundred kilos of cocaine on this dock and you know about it and people know you know about it, how do they make it not obviously your your fault.
[00:10:45] Robert Mazur: Well, you know, each situation as it evolves, you've gotta look for an opportunity to try to Mm-Hmm. Find a way to get, you know, and we oftentimes would have someone provide reliable information to another agency or a local law enforcement agency about where certain people might have stashes of cocaine and that type of thing.
[00:11:08] But unfortunately, I wish I could say that people were always looking out for me in that regard. Yeah. But they weren't. And matter of fact, in, in one instance, in my own agency in Detroit, they filed an affidavit, they, um, you know, said under seal, that means it goes into the safe in the judge's office and people don't get it in the public record.
[00:11:32] Mm-Hmm. But they filed an affidavit, I would say probably four months before the planned end of the operation. They filed an affidavit that spelled everything out who I was. Oh man. That it was an undercover operation, the whole bit. And they never told me, oh, that's even worse 'cause you didn't even know.
[00:11:51] Oh yeah, I
[00:11:53] Jordan Harbinger: didn't even know. So you're just walking around with a potential target on your back for months?
[00:11:57] Robert Mazur: Well, you gotta play each scenario out to the best you know that you can like that. When it was suspected because of the seizure, and it's the same seizure, there was a seizure of like 109 kilos of Coke.
[00:12:13] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.
[00:12:13] Robert Mazur: In Detroit. And Wow. This was a period of time when Gerald Geraldo Manata, who was Pablo Escobar's, right hand man, this was his operation, and he gets in touch with the plane guy and also with the money broker down there and says that he's convinced that I must be a DEA undercover agent because.
[00:12:40] There's no other way that the feds could have known A, B, C, and D. Mm. So now I gotta figure out how do I try to talk my way out of that thing. I had become a friend in the mind of the, the airplane guy, and I called him, he was in Miami, and I said, listen, I'm hearing some bad rumors. I wanna meet you alone so that we can talk about something.
[00:13:06] And another reason that this happened was a lot of times we try to get to seize cash. And so surveillance teams in some cities get a little bit more aggressive than others in New York. This is right after Paris, right after I get a mm-Hmm. Verbal contract to do a hundred million dollars in business.
[00:13:28] It's mostly gonna be picked up in Manhattan, like a million in the morning, 2 million in the afternoon. And I talked to the surveillance people and I said, Hey, listen, we really gotta try to be as light as we can on the surveillance. Following these guys away and seizing money from them is gonna get a little bit too risky.
[00:13:50] And I said, by the way, and this is before I actually met them, I said, I learned from Roberto El Volcano. Roberto goes to me, Hey, listen, they're gonna be, make sure your people look for these people. They're gonna be gringos white guys. They're gonna be in their twenties, early thirties. They'll have blue jeans, they'll have pullover shirts with collars, fanny packs, jogging shoes.
[00:14:10] That's what you look for. And I walk into the New York office, which I hardly ever went near a federal building. Yeah. During this. I walk in there and here's a room full of guys who are like, between their late twenties and early thirties, they're all white guys with jeans on and pullover solid color shirts, Fanny Pax and jogging shoes.
[00:14:28] And I, I tell 'em, you know, you guys need to try to mix it up and it Yeah. Everybody's heard of the term in New York attitude.
[00:14:35] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And
[00:14:35] Robert Mazur: that's what they had. It's like, Hey, listen, you're not from here. We know what the hell we're doing. We're professionals, blah, blah, blah. Well, guess what? The Colombians had counter surveillance Sure.
[00:14:45] Out there. They identified every surveillance agent in every car. And then that's when my partner got a call with Herro Ada in the background screaming that I had to be a Fed because the feds were out there surveilling during that timeframe. Mm. That's when I asked for the meeting with Rudy, who was the plane guy.
[00:15:06] Uh, one-on-one alone, and I begged my office, my contact agent in Miami, please no surveillance, because if they pick up on surveillance with me going to this hotel. I'm gonna be a dead man and all you're gonna be able to do is find my body. So they agreed they wouldn't do any surveillance. I went there. I had no idea whether he was gonna be alone.
[00:15:26] He promised me he would, and we were in pretty good terms. And lo and behold, when I went in the room, he was alone, thankfully. And so we started talking about these issues and I started explaining to him what I thought. Now I gotta think like a bad guy. If I think like a cop, I'm liable to say something like, well, you know, your people are probably the ones who got the feds on us.
[00:15:50] Yeah. You know, we know what they were doing. No, I didn't say that. I said to Rudy, I said, listen, the information you people have is extremely valuable to me, number one. I know we haven't just started on the a hundred million, but I don't want another nickel.
[00:16:04] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:16:05] Robert Mazur: Not until we resolve this problem. So find somebody else to handle the rest of that.
[00:16:09] How many cops are gonna say, take your other 95 million and, and go away? Right. No, that's not typical. Then I said to him, now I need you to share with me all the details. I need you to see for sure. If you have any question about the loyalties of anybody on your team, I'll do the same. If I identify a problem on my side, I assure you the problem will be eliminated.
[00:16:35] I need your assurance that you're gonna do the same thing. And Rudy was kind of like, well, you know, I'll tell them, you know what you're saying and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But that was the same meeting where I. A piece of equipment failed and my briefcase recorder was almost Oh. Discovered. Oh man.
[00:16:54] Jordan Harbinger: That's terrifying. And I just, I wanna say, I think it's quite funny in a sort of sad way that the feds are all at the top of the show. I said something like, you can't just walk into a bar wearing a Hawaiian shirt and be like, Hey, I'd sure like to meet that Pablo Escobar fellow. Meanwhile, the feds are like, don't worry, we would never do that.
[00:17:11] We wear polos and fanny packs. No one's gonna spot us. It's like, have you guys, have you looked, it's like a frat. Like you guys are all dressed the same. No, we're not. His polos blue mine's pink. Whatcha talking about like it's you guys all look the same, what are you doing? Yeah. It's just like even you telling them, Hey, they know what your uniform looks like.
[00:17:29] You just think they would go, oh, okay, well we should switch it up. But instead it's like, we know what's best, even though a criminal literally told you how they were gonna spot us, we're gonna do it anyway. It's mind blowing arrogance, really.
[00:17:39] Robert Mazur: Yeah, there were unfortunately more times. Then I would like to remember where that type of machismo on the law enforcement side basically overrode the common sense of those who had the illness of macho Geez.
[00:17:55] And who also forgot the most important thing that you should never forget, which is the bad guy is smarter than me.
[00:18:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[00:18:04] Robert Mazur: And I need to be prepared for that. I need to approach every single thing that I do and say with a clear remembrance that he's got a lot more brains than I do. Mm-Hmm. When it comes to this type of stuff.
[00:18:17] So, you know, and on the briefcase thing, I, I was afraid I was gonna get shaken down in that, that hotel for a recorder. So I left my briefcase outside, which had a concealed recorder inside a thick lid. To the top of it, but I was supposed to bring the guy some foreign bank account records. So we're into the meeting and he goes, you know, Hey, did you bring those records?
[00:18:39] And I go, oh shoot, they're in the car in the briefcase, so let me go get my briefcase. So I go and I get the briefcase, I throw it on the bid and continue talking about what we were talking about. And as we're talking, his eyes keep flashing toward the briefcase. Like he almost knows that there's a recorder in it or something.
[00:18:59] Mm-Hmm. He just keeps looking at it and looking at it. And finally I take it we're sitting opposite one another at a table. And so when I open the briefcase, the lid goes toward him and he can't see what's in the briefcase. Mm-Hmm. When I opened it, I had told the techs that the Velcro that was holding the secret compartment that had a recorder in it, it's a Nira recorder, used a lot in the movie industry.
[00:19:23] It's a heavy recorder. I said, you know, the Velcro is letting go sometimes. We need to get that fixed. Oh yeah. We got it fixed. Mm-Hmm. You can use that briefcase again. Okay. So I open my briefcase and sure enough, the Nira falls out of the secret compartment. Oh man. Into the briefcase with a nest of wires.
[00:19:42] And this guy's on the other side of the briefcase, and I'm trying to put this thing together without looking like I'm putting something together. Right. And he begins to get impatient just as I get it back together. He stands up and comes around to get the records. Oh my God. God, it was two seconds. I had maybe two seconds.
[00:20:02] I got it done two seconds before he came around the to the other side.
[00:20:06] Jordan Harbinger: And you gotta be calm. Like you're like a kid whose mom walks in when he is looking at Playboy magazine and you're just like, I need to shove this under my bed as fast as I can without looking like I'm shoving this under my bed as fast as I can.
[00:20:16] It's crazy. Oh my God. Ah. Meanwhile, you're like clenching up every sphincter in your body because you're like, this guy's gonna kill me. And you're like, but I'm just, lemme just shuffle up my papers. And he comes up like,
[00:20:29] Robert Mazur: all right, let's see it. Oh my God, these people have a sixth sense and they can pick up Mm-Hmm.
[00:20:34] On fear. And so I knew that if I outwardly showed fear and if I outwardly showed nervousness, I would become my own worst enemy. And so that's why I had to have the two brains operating. I would be getting virtually coached by myself about, you know, no shit, you better not do that. Gotta handle it this way.
[00:20:57] And so you've gotta keep both those brains, uh, actively moving. There was another
[00:21:01] Jordan Harbinger: close call that I read in the book that I thought was interesting, and also I was a little confused. You mentioned that you were in a hotel and you're in a meeting with guys who are already suspicious a little bit. And this guy walks by and is like, Hey Bob, and it's some guy that you had already busted before.
[00:21:17] Am I getting that right? 'cause I don't understand how you got through that one in one piece.
[00:21:21] Robert Mazur: Yeah, it's a little different. Here's the thing, I'm with Roberto Ano. He has his bodyguard who's armed outside in the car waiting for us and we're waiting for the female agent to come down. And so we're in the lobby.
[00:21:36] It was, I think it was the Helmsley Palace. Yes. I had done previously, one prior, I would call it a midterm, mid-level, uh, uc operation. It lasted six months. It would be a thing where for a week or 10 days I would be undercover and then I'd be back out and, you know, back in my office for a week or two weeks and, you know, it was in and out kind of thing.
[00:22:00] Yeah. And it was a group, a Thai marijuana and Columbian marijuana group. Huge. One of the biggest in the United States run by a guy by the name of Bruce Perlow and P-E-R-L-O-W-I-N. People should look him up. What a story. He had an accountant and an attorney who were laundering for him. I had infiltrated the accountant in the attorney, and I became the main witness.
[00:22:22] Mm-Hmm. Against them. They pled guilty. The accountant, his name is Charlie, he decided to cooperate, and I even testified on his behalf at his sentencing. He got a very favorable sentence of like only five years. So while in prison, he happens to be in the same prison with one of the Watergate guys, Chuck Colson, who wrote a book about being born again.
[00:22:45] And so Charlie became born again. I hadn't seen him in eight years plus, and we're in the Helmsley Palace and I'm there standing next to Roberto, and I hear from the other side of the lobby, Bob and I look over and it's Charlie Bruin, and he's walking fast toward me. So I turn to Roberto and I go, oh, Roberto an old friend.
[00:23:11] Wait here, I'll be right back. So now I'm walking over to Charlie as he's coming to me. Little did I know until a few seconds later, Roberto was shadowing me. So I get to Charlie and I hug him and I whispered in his ear, Charlie, I'm under play along, and I stepped back. I literally felt a bead of sweat. Go right down the middle of my back.
[00:23:40] I bet. And Charlie, who had a lot of Las Vegas connections, that's, we put him away because he was laundering through a casino out there. Mm-Hmm. I wound up becoming the courier, taking the money to the casino. Charlie goes, uh, Bob, man, you are working too hard. The boys in Vegas haven't seen you in a long time.
[00:23:58] Why don't you come out? I'll get you comped, you know, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, and he just plays along the whole thing. And so the next morning I met with him and he actually wound up helping us in this case later, but. Roberto never heard Charlie say anything about the real truth about the relationship between uh, me and him.
[00:24:20] Luckily that
[00:24:20] Jordan Harbinger: is such a, so he played along 'cause he's like a man of God now. 'cause it seems like he could have been like, this guy put me in jail and then you're just dead. That's it.
[00:24:28] Robert Mazur: Yeah. You know, I remember a scene from um, Joe Pistone's movie, Donny Brasco, where a prosecutor was coming up an escalator.
[00:24:36] He was with bad guys and the guy went, came right up to him. And in that case, at least according to the film, Pistone knocked him out. That would've been my next move that I would've had to have done with Charlie. And when Pistone did that, he said, oh, that guy grabbed me. He's coming after me, or blah blah, blah, blah Uhhuh.
[00:24:54] And so that explained why he knocked the guy out. Everybody left and then they moved on. So yeah, if Charlie hadn't played along, I would've had to do something to shut him up. Oh my gosh.
[00:25:04] Jordan Harbinger: I bet you're glad you didn't have to do that. I am. That could have just gone so poorly. How long? Does it take to launder a hundred million dollars?
[00:25:12] Your cut is 15%. Is that how it usually works or is it five?
[00:25:15] Robert Mazur: It's gonna vary based upon how high up the food chain you are dealing closest to the owner.
[00:25:21] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.
[00:25:22] Robert Mazur: At that timeframe, the owner's gonna expect to lose about 15% of the value of the money. But I always tell people there are as many different methods of laundering as there are different forms of snowflakes, an infinite number of different ways.
[00:25:37] In this particular case, we were dealing money through the black money market. So when you're a black money market operator, as I was. You have supply and demand clients. I went to college in New York and my economics 1 0 1 professor, the only thing I ever remembered from economics was supply and demand.
[00:25:59] Keep it equal. You'll have lots of profit. You're not gonna have clients that you're not able to get your supplies to, and you won't have excess supplies sitting there when you don't have enough clients. So we had supply clients of money dollars, and these are drug traffickers.
[00:26:17] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:17] Robert Mazur: So they've got all this and they want to get something else.
[00:26:22] So now I need to find demand clients that possess what the supply clients want, and a portion of this money, they wanted to get Colombian pesos. So now I've gotta find people who possess Colombian pesos and want dollars. Well, anybody who's been operating in the black money markets know that the best place to go for that.
[00:26:45] Importers, importers within the country where your supply client wants to get whatever it is. It could be Mexican pesos, Colombian pesos. It depends on who you're dealing with. But the bottom line is, now I've got importers who want dollars. Mm-Hmm. If they wanted at that time to get dollars, they had to go through the official channels and they had to prepay like 25% in taxes duties.
[00:27:12] So if they've got a hundred dollars, they're only gonna get $75 worth of dollars. If they've got a hundred dollars worth of pesos and they want to get dollars, they're gonna give up 25%. So then now they're gonna have 75 bucks. Well, you come to me in the black money market, I'll sell it to you for 10%. So in theory, bottom line, the supply client is willing to give up 15%.
[00:27:37] The demand client who wants to get what the supply client's got is willing to pay you 10% to get the dollars. I arrange a swap. So on a million dollar swap, I'm making 15% on one side, 10% on the other. It's a quarter of a million bucks. Oh, wow. That's why black money markets operate throughout the world so aggressively.
[00:27:59] Wow. In order to get around official channels, anytime a government creates capital restriction, back then that was a capital restriction based upon importers. Now, China, yeah, becomes a major player because they have a capital restriction. Can't invest more than $50,000 worth outside the borders of the People's Republic of China.
[00:28:23] In a year, well, they want to go to the black market. They're gonna buy tens of of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in order to do it. And people who run the black money markets know geographically where it is that they can get the clientele that they need on both sides.
[00:28:42] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Robert Mazer.
[00:28:45] We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Better Help Ever feel like you're walking through a maze, bumping into one wall after another. As you navigate the twists and turns of daily stress, we've all been there getting turned around and feeling stuck. That's exactly where therapy can be a beacon guiding you through to clearer paths.
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[00:30:56] Jordan Harbinger: There's no safe like SimpliSafe. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, it is because of my network, the circle of people that I know, like, and trust, and I'm teaching you how to do the same thing for yourself for free over@sixminutenetworking.com.
[00:31:09] This is not for booking show guests on a podcast. Obviously, you can see how trust comes into play if you are, I don't know, an undercover agent working for the feds against the mafia. This course is about improving those relationship building skills and it is non cringey. It is very practical. I've taught this to law enforcement.
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[00:31:42] Now back to Robert Maer. I did an episode about this it the money launder or the capital flight from China. It's crazy. They'll drop off $50 million. To somebody in China who basically calls like a laundromat or dry cleaner in Vancouver, and then that person's laying out. I've seen the photos of the bus.
[00:32:03] They're laying out duffle bags full of cash locally, so no money has to actually cross the border. It's just like a sort of weird banking system that they can do, and then they'll use it to buy like three houses in Vancouver or something like that to park their cash. It's really
[00:32:18] Robert Mazur: amazing. There are a couple of reasons beyond just that capital restriction.
[00:32:22] First of all, there are massive free trade zones in China, and so a lot of times these traffickers want to get goods. It's called trade-based money laundering. So if they can exchange lockers full of cash and they can get container loads full of refrigerators, that's a deal.
[00:32:41] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:32:41] Robert Mazur: Because they can bring them those back to Columbia.
[00:32:44] They can sell 'em. They can say, Hey, I got a legitimate business. I got this appliance store and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's free trade zones, but most importantly. Especially in an area, a town called Guang Cho, they are experts in creating counterfeit goods. So now not only can you get goods, but you can get counterfeit goods.
[00:33:06] And if you're a bad guy, in the, there was a case called the Guang Cho Enterprise case, $5 billion in counterfeit goods. Wow. Brought into Latin America, you know, how many legitimate businessmen were knocked outta business because of their counterfeit goods. But then there's also unregulated pharmaceutical companies in China.
[00:33:28] They are selling precursors for methamphetamine. Mm-Hmm. They're selling fentanyl. If I can give the Chinese $10 million in Vancouver and they can make arrangements for me to get a shipment of methamphetamine precursors, I'm doing great. Mm-Hmm. And so that's another reason for China to become so involved, but also.
[00:33:51] It's impossible for you to serve a subpoena on an institution in China. Right. The People's Republic of China is not going to honor due process from the US courts. So you got another layer. So, I mean, there's a ton of different reasons why China has become the gorilla in the money laundering world. Can we do like a brief
[00:34:11] Jordan Harbinger: trace of the path of money from a drug buyer on the street and then through the money laundering process?
[00:34:17] Like what? So user buys a baggie on the corner then What? I mean, they gotta aggregate this. You're not laundering 50 bucks at a time, right?
[00:34:25] Robert Mazur: No, no. I, I get into the process when the courier that is responsible to the cartel has a reasonable amount to be turned over. Normally we would get quarter of a million, half a million mm-Hmm.
[00:34:42] At a time that's done through codes. The. Money broker in Medellin, who was a real bad guy that I dealt with Mm-Hmm. Who had the import export company. The representative of the cartel leader would come to him and go, okay, we've got $2 million in Detroit.
[00:35:00] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:35:00] Robert Mazur: Here's the cell phone number. The code is that the money is for Pacho to be paid to Isabella.
[00:35:07] So now that gets passed to my partner. Mm-Hmm. And then my partner or one of the undercover agents that's working in given cities would go pick it up. Now my partner at times would use our jet or private jet from the jet company, so I'll, I'll use that one as an example. He would go to Houston. Before he left, he would be on the phone, he'd talk to that phone number, talk to the person.
[00:35:32] They would confirm codes, and then they would work out where it was that they were going to meet in order to pass the money on. Most often they want, and we want to meet in a public place. McDonald's. So you show up at the McDonald's, the guy's inside and my partner goes over, the guy says little if anything, and shoves keys over to my partner and says the white Chevy out there.
[00:36:04] And usually it's a beat up, ratty looking old car.
[00:36:07] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:36:07] Robert Mazur: It's in the trunk because they're gonna get rid of the car, right? Yeah. Single use. So now my partner takes the car making sure he's not followed. Of course, if they've put anything on there in order to follow the car, a monitor of some sort, that's a problem.
[00:36:27] Uh, we weren't too crazy about taking their cars because we don't know whether or not they're wired up. But anyway, just in this example, I can tell you that. Okay, so he goes to another location, they offload the 2 million, they bring back the car, he meets the guy, gives the guy his keys. We've now got the money.
[00:36:44] I talked them into, they want all the money right away. And I said to 'em, okay, listen, I got the government to give me $5 million in recoverable funds and my position to my superiors was if we're picking up a million dollars, I think we could quickly tell whether or not there's at least 750,000 there.
[00:37:07] Mm-Hmm. They're usually bound in rubber bands in blocks of five or 10 and $20,000. So I paid within 24 hours, 75% of what we picked up, and about eight days later, they'd get the rest that would come in through a wire transfer after we were able to count, verify, and do all the the other stuff that we needed to do.
[00:37:30] The reason I wanted to tell you the story on the private jet and my partner picking it up is, so my partner's out there and he picks up 2 million bucks. He comes back to the air charter service. And I had given him a credit card to pay for the gas. He had outspent the limit. So he's there with the fixed base operator who says, dude, you owe me 2,500 bucks.
[00:37:56] And he goes, okay, wait a minute. Puts one of the suitcases down, unzips it. It's a suitcase full of cash. He takes out 2,500, counts it out of one of the bundles and gives it to the guy and then he gets on the plane. So you would think that the guy who runs the fixed base operation is gonna pick up the phone and call the cops?
[00:38:19] Yeah. And say, you're not gonna believe what just happened. Yeah, that did not happen. The next time my partner comes back on the jet to the same fixed base operator, they rolled out a red carpet. They brought him a tray of fruit and champagne and they did everything they could to cater to him. That's American greed.
[00:38:41] I'm sorry, but that, that's unfortunately, uh, how that went down.
[00:38:44] Jordan Harbinger: That's insane, right? Yeah. Hey, should we do something about this? Yes, we absolutely should do something about this. Go to the store and get some Dom Perignon and put it on the ice for when this guy gets back. That's what we should do about this.
[00:38:55] There's more where that came from. And double his fuel bill. He's not gonna bat an eye. Do you see how much cash that guy brought on that plane? That's, man, yeah. You're laundering this amount of money. It sounds like you're doing what, like a million bucks a week. But you could probably do more than that, right?
[00:39:08] Like I, I guess I, going back to my earlier question, how long would it take to launder a hundred million dollars, for example?
[00:39:14] Robert Mazur: Okay, well first of all, we're not gonna wanna do that. You're gonna have to realize that by laundering money, we're facilitating their criminal organization, right? Our position always was if we're laundering for the same people.
[00:39:28] We're not getting any new information. New intelligence. Yeah. With respect to what they're up to. We need to find a way not to pick up money from them anymore. You know? It could be, Hey, they're sloppy. We don't want to deal with them. We thought we saw eyes, you name it. Now, unfortunately, getting back to that machismo law enforcement angle, a lot of cops go like, Hey, we had this really big money laundering case.
[00:39:55] We laundered $400 million. Bank of Shares was one of the first major FBI money laundering stings, and they did launder about $400 million in this operation. The first one that we're talking about that the infiltrator film was made on, it may not sound like a lot. We only laundered 32 million. mm-Hmm. The name of the game is launder.
[00:40:17] The minimum amount you can and get the maximum amount of information that you can. Because otherwise you're just helping them.
[00:40:23] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay.
[00:40:24] Robert Mazur: Make sure you've got a plan to get them arrested and not have to worry about them being in a country where they can't be extradited. And because there have been prior cases where that unfortunately has been the case.
[00:40:37] Sure. Where the major bad guys, they couldn't get collared. So really you have a pretty piece of paper. You've laundered a lot of money. To me, that's not a big case. To me, that's a travesty. Right. Because then you,
[00:40:50] Jordan Harbinger: all you've done is supply them with tons of money to continue criminal operations and corruption around the globe, but you didn't really get anything in return.
[00:40:58] You know? Basically all you did is help criminals at that point. By working for For free For your fees. Yeah. For your fees. Yeah. For your fees. How do you learn money laundering in the first place? Not like for people who are listening that wanna learn how to launder money. To be clear, how do you particularly learn money laundering?
[00:41:13] Because I know you've got a degree in business administration, but I'm guessing. Money laundering is not a course at most universities, so does the DEA or customs or whatever be like, okay, here's how money laundering works. You kind of get a crash course in that, and then you're like, all right, I'm a money launderer undercover.
[00:41:28] Robert Mazur: Well, there's training in that area in basic training. In your intermediate training, there's advanced training in money laundering, but I have to say that I learned tenfold about money laundering from real bad guys. Yeah. More so than I did from people who were involved in law enforcement. It's amazing to me the unfortunate, sad truth, and that is that the United Nations on drugs and crime estimates that roughly $400 billion a year is generated from the sale of illegal drugs.
[00:42:04] Wow. On its best day ever. The Department of Justice can only take credit for probably less than, but let's say. A billion dollars in bad guy money. Mm-Hmm. Now you gotta watch how they cook the books because when a bank pays a $19 billion fine, they structure that as a forfeiture. Mm-Hmm. And it makes the numbers look so much better.
[00:42:32] I'm talking about real bad guy money. So if they're only getting 1,000,000,400 billion is made, do the math. One fourth of 1%. Yeah. We're not even scratching their coffers. Not even coming close. Gosh. And what we sometimes don't recognize is nations are involved in this. Sure. When I was undercover in the Infiltrator case, now we haven't talked much about the other side of the case, which is by infiltration of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
[00:43:05] But I was at a social gathering. Um, I was, one of the other social clubs I belong to was Renee's. Renee's had locations in every major city, and it was like where all the beautiful people went. Mm-Hmm. Back during that timeframe. So I'm at Renee's in Miami and, um, with this guy, and he goes to me, you know, the biggest money launderer in the United States is, and I'm the eager agent, uh, you know, I've got my sickness, my heroin, I'm gonna get more information.
[00:43:36] This is gonna be fantastic. And he goes, well, it's the Federal Reserve, of course. And I said, what? He goes, Bob, how naive are you? This is all hypocrisy. Mm-Hmm. Here's the bottom line at the bank. And this was true at the time of the conversation, and it continued on for a few years after that. At the Bank of the Republic in Columbia, there is an arrangement called the sinister window.
[00:44:02] Some called it the anonymous window. Your listeners can just Google Sinister Window Columbia. They'll read the whole story. So if you had the right connections. In Columbia, you could go to the Bank of the Republic with all the cash you had, and you would get a very quick exchange into Colombian pesos, and it would happen fast, and then the central bank would get the dollars.
[00:44:28] Why was that happening? Well, because at that time, the inflation rate per year in Columbia was 28%. So if you held your assets in pesos at the end of the year, no matter what you put in your mattress, it was worth 28% less. Mm-Hmm. Than it was before. Wow. So the Central Bank doesn't want to be holding all those Colombian paces, but oh, guess what?
[00:44:52] It's illegal at that time for any Colombian to have a US dollar account. Period. Totally illegal. So now, as the banker said to me, well, what do you think the Bank of the Republic does with those dollars after they get them from these anonymous people?
[00:45:10] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:45:11] Robert Mazur: They put it on pallets, they shrink wrap it and they send it to the Federal Reserve.
[00:45:16] They fly it in and then what happens? It is counted and it's put because every Central bank and many other banks, major, major banks, they are members. They've got their accounts with the Federal Reserve, so they wanna get that money into their US dollar bank balance. Wow. They don't wanna hold it in currency.
[00:45:36] So now he goes to me, don't you think that there's somebody with enough brains at the Federal Reserve when these pallets of hundreds of millions of dollars of US dollars are coming in from Columbia where it's illegal for anybody to have a dollar account? Where the heck do you think they got? Obviously they know where this money's coming from.
[00:46:00] Mm-Hmm. It's all a joke, Bob, and it was quite an eye-opener for me.
[00:46:06] Jordan Harbinger: Man, I can only imagine. I just Googled Renee's social club. I don't think it exists anymore. Is that no possible? No, it does not. What happens if you lose money that you're supposed to launder or move for the cartel? Because the obvious answer is, oh, they just kill you.
[00:46:18] But what if it's not your fault? I mean, do they care at all? 'cause look, yes. These are like heartless sociopaths that lack compassion, but they still theoretically wanna find out where the real problem is in their business and organization as opposed to just like killing the last guy who touched the money.
[00:46:34] Or am I giving 'em too much credit?
[00:46:35] Robert Mazur: No, you're spot on. It was extraordinarily important for the cartel to demand from whoever had the money last for them to get documents that proved that in fact, the money had been lawfully seized. Mm-Hmm. That there was a seizure warrant, maybe there was an affidavit and they wanted to look at the affidavit for the search warrant.
[00:47:05] If it was public, most times it was to be able to see who's responsible. They would immediately say to anybody who was likely to be responsible, get your butt down here to Columbia and answer questions. Federal agents at that time, despite the fact that I begged to be able to go, we're not allowed to go to Columbia.
[00:47:30] It wasn't until the second undercover operation by then that I was able to do that. I, this infiltrator story, the undercover operation started about 18 months after Enrique, Kiki, Caina, the DEA agent was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. Columbia and Mexico were off limits for being able to do that, and the Colombian traffickers knew that, which is why they kept inviting me.
[00:47:57] To come there because they know, oh, he's not gonna come. He can't come. Why? Because he's a DEA agent. That's why he is not gonna come. Ah, yeah. So they wanna get that. Now, if you can prove that it was not your fault, but you were in the mix, you would be expected to participate in paying back. Sometimes what they would allow you to do would be work for free.
[00:48:20] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:48:21] Robert Mazur: You're not gonna get your cut and you're gonna continue to do this until your portion of this is repaid. And if you didn't do that, like one of the Colombian money launderers that I dealt with, he had horses. He was a big horse fan. Bottom line is they were expensive horses. And what they did is they poisoned his horse, one of his horses' favorite horse.
[00:48:43] Uh, then they came, they took all of his furniture out, they came and they forced him to sign documents to turn over all of his properties. And they told him, you better find a way to pay the rest of this, or you're dead. So, I mean, it depends upon how deep your responsibility is for what it is that occurred,
[00:49:01] Jordan Harbinger: man.
[00:49:02] Yeah. It seems like, I mean, obviously you take the work it off thing rather than the getting killed thing. I assume you cannot just throw other criminals under the bus. That's probably not allowed since you know that those people are likely to get killed if you do that. I'm, I'm guessing that's against policy slash the law.
[00:49:17] Robert Mazur: Yeah. Well, closest we came to that, we had a seizure. If, if you read The Betrayal, the second book Mm-Hmm. In Houston. And the money was actually, we went there for the purposes of picking it up. The DEA agent who was there was supposed to have gotten in touch with, you would call it a clearing house, where law enforcement tells each other on the day of, or a day before what they're gonna be doing, because we don't wanna have cops arresting cops.
[00:49:48] And so he didn't go through the clearing house. Our guy shows up to pick up the money. And they're ahead of us and they're gonna seize $4 million that's sitting inside the house. But our guy's there, oh no. And we're gonna be suspected undoubtedly. And it really wasn't our fault, but it sure did appear to be our fault.
[00:50:13] And we wound up getting authorization to turn over a report as though we had somebody on the inside that threw blame in another direction. I'm not sure that they actually bought it.
[00:50:27] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:50:28] Robert Mazur: But we had to do something in order to be able to get out of it. And actually the real truth of it is the place was under surveillance because they had been for years investigating the person Mm-Hmm.
[00:50:41] Who was involved in that operation. So we shared some of the truth and unfortunately, uh, it really did rattle the undercover agent. That's the guy who ultimately. Wound up compromising me and going to prison for 11 years. But he was scared to death after that it happened because they thought that he was either an informant or, or a cop, one or the other.
[00:51:04] So I think the smarter thing would've been mm-hmm. Been to come back and go, uh, you gotta have a scenario where they think I died because, uh, I, I just, I'm not gonna do this anymore. But he didn't unfortunately take that, uh, route.
[00:51:17] Jordan Harbinger: You wrote in one of your books that money laundering enables cartels to produce their most lethal product, which is corruption.
[00:51:24] And I thought it was interesting 'cause it, my reading of that was that you think the corruption is worse than the drugs. Is that accurate?
[00:51:31] Robert Mazur: Absolutely. I can give you an example. Well, during my time, I'm sitting around with the guys high up in the cartel, and somehow or another, the, the subject of Manuel Noriega, the ruler of Panama at the time came up and, you know, it was very clear.
[00:51:51] Don't worry about any of your accounts getting. Tagged by the government. Mm-Hmm. He's on our side, WePay him. We move drugs through there. He has his people turned the other way, we own him. That became a math, a method by which the cartel was able to facilitate massive, massive amounts of movements of illegal drugs.
[00:52:11] You can fast forward until just a year or so ago, there's a case, I've written articles about it and all the articles that I've written are on my website under publications. There was a A DE, A case where DEA had determined that there was this very mysterious person always referred to by the traffickers, is El Patron the Godfather?
[00:52:34] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[00:52:34] Robert Mazur: Who was providing information about what was going on within law enforcement, helping them to avoid seizures, helping them to basically beat anything that law enforcement was trying to do. Eventually DEA identified who El Padron was, and he was actually General Salvador Sin Fuegos Zepeda, who was the Minister of Defense for all of Mexico from 2012 to 2018.
[00:53:05] Wow. They arrested him and they held him a no bond and, um, it became a big political problem and Attorney General Barr decided that, okay, we're gonna give him back. Mm-Hmm. It took the Mexicans 30 days, somehow in 30 days they were able to go through thousands of text messages and wire intercepts, and they determined in 30 days that General syn Fuegos was completely innocent.
[00:53:34] Mm-Hmm. He never did anything wrong. As a matter of fact, this year, I think it was this year, he received, you know, one of the highest awards from a. The president of Mexico for his tremendous service to Mexico. We've now convicted this year in February. The former, recently former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez.
[00:53:59] Nice to know that. Yeah. Who was in the pocket? He was in the pocket of the cartel. His brothers doing life in prison. He's yet to be sentenced. There's a room full of senators from Honduras. They owned Honduras. The Honduran government, anybody who tried to stand up to them and to try to do anything about this, wound up getting whacked by their leaders.
[00:54:21] They had a general who's pled guilty or the head of their, uh, excuse me, their narcotics, uh, their mil military. He's pled guilty. He's facing life in prison. He was gonna testify against Juan Orlando Hernandez in the February trial of this year. They owned. Honduras and they could do anything there that they wanted.
[00:54:41] And the rule of law was stolen from the people of Honduras. And I just don't think that the average American recognizes Mm-Hmm. How many journalists, how many, Hey, it could be podcasters who are trying to get the free word out there who, uh, wind up missing Yeah. And become part of the missing. So, uh, it's happening in many of these countries.
[00:55:07] Jordan Harbinger: This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Robert Maser. We'll be right back. I've got homes.com as the sponsor for this episode. homes.com knows what, when it comes to home shopping. It's never just about the house of the condo, it's about the homes. And what makes a home is more than just the house or property.
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[00:58:23] Now, for the rest of my conversation with Robert Maser, we have journalists who, who listen to this show that run accounts and things like that under basically like pseudonyms, right? So they'll release a story online and they publish things online under fake names. And I, I've read this stuff and I remember mentioning it once on a show and I got a DM from them and they're like, I heard you mention me on the show.
[00:58:48] I listen to your podcast. So some of these very same people who are outing narcos. Things like that in Mexico or other countries and writing the real news who are living in fear. They're listening to this right now. I mean, that's the thing, it's, it's terrifying that these people can't do anything in public because half their colleagues are dead or more, or at least just no longer writing about anything narco related.
[00:59:12] Too dangerous, which is, yeah,
[00:59:14] Robert Mazur: insane. It's amazing to think that the people who were in charge of the Honduran government operated clandestine cocaine labs in Columbia and Honduras provided a gateway for hundreds of tons of cocaine to the US and Canada. Mm-Hmm. Put millions of dollars million in political figures, killed hundreds of people involved in human rights defenders, environmental defenders competing traffickers.
[00:59:41] They conspired with corrupt senior military and law enforcement leaders. They sold military grade weapons to the cartels, and they provided military escorts. For caravans of of drugs, and this was going on just under the nose of all of us and has been and continues to and will continue to that it's not gonna stop.
[01:00:06] What made you finally get outta the undercover game? When it became very clear to me that in the second operation, the one I wrote the book, the Betrayal about that I came within three minutes of being murdered after the operation was over. I didn't pull out then, but after the operation was over, it was clear to me that the price that my family was paying was not worth my continuing and it was time for.
[01:00:38] Some yuck. Young up and comings to pick up the baton.
[01:00:42] Jordan Harbinger: Are you still worried at all about these guys coming after you? I should probably mention for the listeners that your face is darkened here, so we can't see it. I assume that's because there's an active threat, or at least the, the shadow of the threats.
[01:00:54] You're concerned enough to take precautions.
[01:00:56] Robert Mazur: Yeah. You know, in today's world where it's so easy for people to communicate with you via the internet, and at times, especially when the film came out, that would've been in 2016 mm-Hmm. There were threats that came in. I expected it from drug traffickers, but they're also people who are of the belief, and this is not true, but they are of the belief that the bank of credit and commerce International BCCI, which was not just the seventh largest privately held bank in the world, but the largest Arab bank in the world, which was on the way to becoming a major player in the western banking world.
[01:01:37] Some people from Pakistan believe that a combination of the western banks, you know, the city banks and Mm-hmm. Of the world and the ccia were the orchestrators of what became the prosecution of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, because they didn't want to see the Arab world. Mm-hmm. Become the major financial player that BCCI was most certainly going to become.
[01:02:04] They had, I think, 1200 branches I, they were in. Wow. That's like Chase. 72 countries. They were massive. I read your
[01:02:13] Jordan Harbinger: resume and it's case after case of 10 million seized yacht seized hotels, seized shares in this company, seized 20 million in assets, a hundred million dollars in product. Those kinds of numbers are gonna sting a little if you're on the other end of that.
[01:02:25] So I, I'm guessing at some point there's probably a contract out on you at least after the first couple years, or are they kind of like, what's done is done? We're not going after a cop.
[01:02:34] Robert Mazur: Within 30 days after the end of the Infiltrator story, the undercover portion of it, within 30 days, two law enforcement agencies and a, an intelligence agency reported that there was a half million dollar contract on my life.
[01:02:50] You gotta take that serious. Uh, I was a very, very important witness among the defendants charged that we were gonna try to get our hands on and we never did. Was Pablo Escobar's most important lawyer?
[01:03:04] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[01:03:05] Robert Mazur: There was also Pablo Escobar's, right hand man, the manager of 60% of his operations, who ultimately Pablo tortured and killed, had him tortured and killed.
[01:03:15] Mm-Hmm. And so, as far as product goes, that doesn't really bother them. When I was in the game, it cost about 250 bucks to make a kilo of Coke, and it cost maybe $2,500. Prorated to transport that kilo to the United States. Mm-Hmm. So a $3,000 investment, most of the transportation was done by giving a portion of the load to the transporter.
[01:03:43] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[01:03:44] Robert Mazur: So if the load got seized right, you didn't pay, they lost $500 a kilo. Right. And that's it. So, hey, no big deal. They've got loads coming constantly in semi-submersible submarines in containers and you name it. It kind of bothers me that a lot of people have this suspicion that people who run across the border and jump over a fence are, you know, the way that we're getting fentanyl into this country.
[01:04:14] I think there were 62,000 pounds seized in la That's a lot of backpacks.
[01:04:19] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[01:04:20] Robert Mazur: Yeah. And that's enough to get everybody on the planet high twice. So these are very sophisticated. They have what they call pipelines. You know, Roberto gave me his entire pipeline. It was pretty simple. A lab in Bolivia producing about 6,000 kilograms.
[01:04:36] I gotta look back whether that was a month or a week, and maybe it was a month. But anyway, 6,000 kilograms. They had, uh, remote airstrip there. So small planes would come in. They'd fly out like 500, 600 kilos at a time.
[01:04:52] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[01:04:53] Robert Mazur: Land in, uh, north of Argentina. They would take it in vans to Buenos Aires where he had a seafood packing plant.
[01:05:03] It would get packed. If you had a 40,000 pound shipment of anchovies in commercial cans, there might be 2000, 3000 pounds of coke in some of the commercially sealed cans. They were very, very sophisticated. They would have electric scales. For the real can, which was 23 pounds. They'd have an open can with the lid on the other electric scale.
[01:05:30] They would put in half kilo bricks of Coke letting its sand, get it exactly the same. Mm-Hmm. Seal it commercially and then pack it. There was a very low key secret way. The name of the company was Diaz, so the.in the I of the box that had 2 23 pound cans, the, I had a pinhole in the dot of the I. Oh my God.
[01:05:58] So that they knew that that was the box that needed to be pulled. That's how they operate. They operate with very sophisticated and they buy companies that have operated for five, 10 years in a very legitimate way, and then they take it over because they want a company that has a track record. They know we can't possibly.
[01:06:18] Screen all the containers that come across our border. It's impossible,
[01:06:23] Jordan Harbinger: man. The methods now must be even more, and now they're probably using like RFID, and when the barcode number ends in a odd number and then another odd number, it's like what? I mean, there's just unlimited ways you can do this kind of thing.
[01:06:35] With the whole digital footprint stuff and the way the shipping works now, it's just absolutely nuts. How much money is laundered
[01:06:42] Robert Mazur: globally, do you think? Well, according to the United Nations on drugs and crime, that number, it comes from many different sources. Not just drug trafficking, illegal arms dealing, pilfering treasuries, which is a sport in African nations, white collar crime hacking, all that.
[01:07:04] They estimate that to be roughly $2 trillion a year. That's
[01:07:11] Jordan Harbinger: somehow way more than I thought, but I guess it all adds up fast. Mm-Hmm. Wow. And what percentage has to do with the United States? I guess that's probably really hard to break out by country, right? With the, the human trafficking drugs and arms in the United States.
[01:07:23] Is, is that something you happen to
[01:07:25] Robert Mazur: know? The U-N-D-O-C United Nations own drugs and crime periodically puts out the information that they get from all of the country members. Mm-Hmm. And so those numbers are out there. I don't remember them off the top of my head, but the US by far has the most insatiable appetite in the world for illegal drugs.
[01:07:47] You know, Europe was a funny thing when back in the day when I was there doing it with Roberto Alcaino and Pablo Escobar and those people you could actually get, and it's still not quite this big, but it is something similar. You could get three times the amount of money for a kilo of Coke. As you could in Europe, as you could in the United States.
[01:08:10] So it was very, very lucrative business in that area. But you weren't seeing huge seizures now. 6,000 kilos. Yeah, 8,000 kilos. Now the nations of Africa, mostly West Africa, but a lot of the African nations have become corrupted.
[01:08:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.
[01:08:31] Robert Mazur: And have become the transshipment point for the drugs that go up into Europe.
[01:08:36] And so a lot of the money and a lot of the drugs is exchanged in those areas. Countries like Guinea, basal, uh, Mali, Ghana, many of them, Senegal. A lot of these nations are completely riddled with drug trafficking. And another thing that a lot of people don't realize is the most common currency that's dealt in African nations is the US dollar.
[01:09:04] So it's their currency. They've got a place to be able to place it. They can
[01:09:09] Jordan Harbinger: use it. I know that Europe's cocaine market has eclipsed outta the United States. If you're just talking about cocaine, I'm, I'm pretty sure like you said, illegal drugs. In total, we're talking about fentanyl, heroin, illegal marijuana.
[01:09:19] I think it all adds up in towards the us. But for cocaine itself, Europe has finally eclipsed the United States in consumption of cocaine, which I heard from somebody who covers the crime beat in Europe. Cocaine specifically, would That surprised me actually. But I guess it shouldn't.
[01:09:33] Robert Mazur: But if you go nation by nation, we're still head and shoulders above them.
[01:09:37] Jordan Harbinger: Oh yeah. I mean, you gotta take the whole continent of Europe and add it up to hit the united to, to beat the US and how much stuff they put up their nose. Yeah, for sure. So, I know we're running outta time. I'm so curious. It seems like the deeper you get into this world, the better credibility you have.
[01:09:52] Right? You're hanging out with drug traffickers, doing the money laundering thing. There's spies, there's corrupt bankers, corrupt politicians, and the whole time. You are essentially acting as if you're one of them, right? That's the job. So I wonder, did any of their characteristics ever seep into the real you?
[01:10:09] It just seems like it would be very, very hard to be around people like that 24 7 ish and then go back home and you put on your dad shoes and you gotta be this normal guy instead of a normal guy with like 10% criminal scumbag, DNA sprinkled on your personality.
[01:10:26] Robert Mazur: Hmm. Well the undercover agent's probably the last one to recognize that.
[01:10:32] But I guess I've gotta say that in some senses there must be some truth to that because I remember I was away for like a month or so and came back and I was spending a couple of days at home and my brother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law from Connecticut had come down to spend time with me and my wife. And I remember I was getting the bags, their bags out of the car and him back in.
[01:10:57] I overheard my sister-in-Law go, he's starting to look like them. Oh. He's starting to like even act like them. You, you gotta realize too, that my shtick was being aligned with an Italian American mop family. Right. And you know, I grew up in a community where that was very prevalent and I worked a lot of organized crime cases when I was in law enforcement.
[01:11:25] So I knew how those people act and carry themselves. And so that was part of my cover. But like I've said before, a good undercover agent isn't going to put themselves in a position where they become an actor.
[01:11:44] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.
[01:11:45] Robert Mazur: You've got to use parts of your real experiences in life now. It doesn't sound like it when you hear me now.
[01:11:53] No. That I'm from Staten Island. But I can tell you why that happened and that's when I started my college career. I went to Carbondale, Southern Illinois University, Illinois. People don't have an accent.
[01:12:07] Jordan Harbinger: Hmm.
[01:12:08] Robert Mazur: And I started talking to people about, Hey, how are you guys doing? And, and they're going, you guys, what are you talking about?
[01:12:15] So now the peer pressure of this guy talks like an idiot started to really cause me to watch how I spoke. And so I dropped a lot of it, but promise you one ride on the Staten Island Ferry. And I'm back to saying forget about it and all that other stuff. And it's natural. It's a part of me. And that's what I'm saying is it's who I am.
[01:12:39] I mean, as far as being a person who speaks like they're from New York and, and speaks and sounds like. Thinks like people who
[01:12:49] Jordan Harbinger: live in that other world. Well, you've certainly had an interesting career, and I mean, it's still cranking along. You're just, uh, maybe less likely to get killed in what you're doing now.
[01:12:57] I guess you can say you never got bored. At least you got that going for you.
[01:13:01] Robert Mazur: Yeah, that's true. You know, and I wrote an article that's gonna be in a Tampa Bay Times this Sunday talking about threats. And I started the article by saying that from a very reliable source, I found out that I was being hunted again.
[01:13:18] And I got that information just a year ago, but it came from my urologist. He identified the fact that I have cancer and I've been through treatment and all signs are extraordinarily good. And I wrote this article basically to say, you know, as a patient and a friend, if you run into this, I've done so much research on this, I, I approached it every way the same way that I would doing an undercover operation.
[01:13:46] I even went to three cancer centers and I interviewed the radiation oncologists and their teams before I ultimately decided that the right place for me to go is MD Anderson. And so that's where I went in Houston. And so yeah, I'm still facing death, but it's in, in the same way that we all are. And I really do hope that people who read that article take me up on reaching out and giving me the opportunity to be a tiny little piece of sharing with them the research that I did and, and hopefully make that journey for them a little bit easier.
[01:14:16] 'cause there's unfortunately a lot of people who, uh, who face that.
[01:14:20] Jordan Harbinger: Bob Maer, thank you very much. I'm, you gotta come back at some point because you're doing so much. This has been super interesting and you've been very generous with your time. I've really, really appreciate it.
[01:14:30] Robert Mazur: My pleasure, Jordan. I appreciate it.
[01:14:31] I appreciate being on your show and getting a chance to talk to your, your listeners and, um, there are a lot of people I. This is an important thing for them to know. There are countless people who are public servants who are trying to do the right thing for them. Hey, I'm no superstar, and I'm no different than the greatest majority of the people that I met in that walk of life.
[01:14:52] They have some good things to think about because they are a lot of people out there fighting for them every single day. Now, I've
[01:15:01] Jordan Harbinger: got some thoughts in this episode, but before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Chase
[01:15:08] Chris Voss: Manhattan Bank robbery. I'm the second negotiator on the phone.
[01:15:11] Hugh McGowan is the commander of the NYPD team. He puts me on the phone, he takes this guy off. He says, you're up, you're next. This is what I want you to do. You're just gonna take over the phone and say you're talking to me and we're gonna do it really abruptly. My point is to get a hostage out, which is what the hostage negotiator is supposed to do.
[01:15:27] Mm-Hmm. And somebody hands me a note and says, uh, ask him if he wants to come out. That was somebody that was listening. My friend Jamie, Jamie Seno. Jamie's sitting there and something in Jamie's instincts is telling him that this guy wants to come out more than anything else. He just hears it and he writes, ask him if he wants to come out.
[01:15:46] I see a note popping in front of my face. So I go, um, do you wanna come out? And there's a long silence on the end, the line. And the guy says, I don't know how I do that. Which is a great big giant. Yes. Yeah. Everybody goes like, holy cow, okay, get him out of there. I'm talking, I'm talking, I'm talking again probably about, I don't know, maybe half an hour later, another note comes in my hand.
[01:16:09] I dunno where it's from. As it turns out, it's from Jamie again. And the note says, tell him you meet him outside. And I say to him, how about this? How about if I meet you out in front of the bank? And he goes, yeah, I'm ready to end this shit. I get out there, I get on the pa, I start talking to him. So I said, hi, it's Chris.
[01:16:30] I'm out here. Standard operating procedure is to barricade the exit from the outside. So a bad guy suddenly doesn't run away. So SWAT has barricaded the bank from the outside, which everyone has forgotten. So I'm trying to talk this guy out the door. We don't know how many bad guys are inside. We don't know how they're gonna react.
[01:16:52] We know they're gonna start shooting. We know what the hell's gonna happen. He comes to the door, get out. Oh God, I that would, he rattles the door and everybody's like, ah, he's nervous, right? I mean, no crap. I'm trapped in here now. Yeah, on the opposite we go, nah, what do we do? We forgot to unlock the door
[01:17:12] and our bad guy is kinda like, oh, you wanna play games with me? Huh?
[01:17:18] Jordan Harbinger: For more from FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, including negotiation and persuasion tips, along with a few crazy stories. Check out episode 1 65 of the Jordan Harbinger show. A fascinating story. I'm so glad we got extra time with Robert.
[01:17:34] This was originally gonna be like an hour and then it turned into three hours edited down to whatever we are now. I'm not the only one who thought the story was fascinating. There's actually a movie based on him called The Infiltrator with Brian Cranston, and apparently they're doing a sequel. I don't know much more than that.
[01:17:48] I don't even know if I was supposed to say that. So there it is. Thanks to Robert for coming on the show and telling his story and being so generous with his time, especially because he just finished cancer treatments a couple of weeks prior and there's a lot more in Robert's books, which we'll link in the show notes about how money laundering works.
[01:18:04] Turns out there's a lot of ways to go about it. I guess that's not really surprising because you can spend money in a lot of ways. You can move money a lot of ways. You can hide money in a lot of ways, so of course you can launder money in a lot of ways. After the mics were off, I asked Robert if he thought new laws and efforts around a ML, so anti-money laundering, if those were successful in his opinion, and he was unequivocal that they were not.
[01:18:25] The stream of illicit funds has barely slowed. It's barely a dent Banks and the financial system is what needs to change here. But the problems is the incentives are all wrong. Banks want as much money in them as possible. If they can get away with having criminal proceeds in the bank, they're gonna do that.
[01:18:41] Compliance really needs to get in the same room with sales and say, Hey, we know you're making commissions off this, but this is Al-Qaeda's money, or This is the Meine cartel's funds. But I don't know what's gonna happen until there are ridiculously severe penalties that go towards putting people in jail, not just fining the faceless corporation off of their top line revenue When it comes to this, I worked at an embassy back in Panama and oh gosh, over 20 years ago now, and I remember the DEA guys there were really preoccupied with all the drug and financial traffic going through that place.
[01:19:15] I mean, they had a big old office. There were a lot of 'em working on stuff, and there was just a ton of drug money and just other illicit funds going through Panama. It's one of the HQs of that in the Western Hemisphere, and it seems like. The banks that were down there, some of their primary lines of business were illicit.
[01:19:31] You couldn't even go into some of these places. There was no reason to. They didn't take consumers from outside. They were really working with shell companies almost exclusively. And this is just so obvious that they were mostly illicit funds. There were a couple skyscrapers near where I lived and everybody called them the cocaine towers.
[01:19:48] There'd be like three lights on and these massive, massive buildings. And those were maybe the only occupied offices there. Everything else was basically money laundering and it was just the, the whole thing was built and the suspicion was they built those things and said they cost, I don't know, whatever skyscrapers cost $10 billion and then they really cost, you know, two and the rest of the money was laundered through fake construction.
[01:20:11] I don't even know if those things are still there. I don't even know if those are full. I would love if somebody's at Panama. Are the cocaine towers still there? I can imagine they're still there. Does anybody live or work in those things? What we need is a task force. We have a joint anti-terrorist task force, but we have nothing of the sort for anti-money laundering.
[01:20:28] The problem is, of course, that where terror can be funded, there's gonna be terror, there's gonna be crime where there's funds, there's guns, where there's bucks, there's bombs. I, yes, I made that up hat self on back, but we're not gonna stem this thing until we find real consequences for people involved.
[01:20:44] And we can stop the money. That's one reason that sanctions, although they're not the whole story, they've been working pretty well against places like Iran. Although, you know, time will tell. I might eat those words any day. Now, all things Robert Maser will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.
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