鲍鱼tv

“I can only play one role. I'm the little mobster money launderer from New York.”

Robert Mazur is a great actor. An actor who had to maintain his role for years, because letting it slip would have cost him his life.

The now-retired special agent spent five years undercover for the US government in two of Colombia’s most dangerous drug cartels - Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel and the Cali cartel, leading to one of the largest money laundering convictions in history.

Robert joined Nicky Campbell for his podcast, Different, to discuss life undercover, fear and making friends with dangerous criminals. “I wanted them to trust me, to like me.

The first thing I needed to do is to figure out what are they all about? You can't just talk about doing crime, 24/7”.

Mazur was a traditional US law enforcement agent for a decade before he was assigned to a case looking at the billions of dollars being laundered; but it was impossible to prosecute without someone embedded in the cartel.

Robert had worked both at a bank and a brokerage so he was the ideal candidate. He was sent for undercover training and evaluation and then spent two years crafting his undercover persona, Bob Musella; an identity close enough to Robert’s own to remain convincing.

He began laying the groundwork to persuade some of the world’s most prolific drug dealers that he could launder millions of dollars for them, and soon he was invited into their world.

Bob’s primary target was Roberto Alcaino, a partner of Pablo Escobar’s and a transporter for the cartel. Bob became close with Roberto - “frankly, if he wasn't a drug trafficker, we probably would have been friends”.

Mazur speaks often of the toll of the work he did, gaining the hard-earned trust from men he would so publicly betray.

“The gravity of interacting with them so closely made me susceptible to their pain. To some degree, I did care about them. You can't fake that. Not for months or years.”

For the next two years, Bob lived an extravagant lifestyle of champagne, private jets, supercars and secret tape recordings.

Robert was recording everything, something significantly more logistically challenging in the 1980s than it would be today, and Robert’s cover was nearly blown when the tape recorder disguised in a secret compartment of his briefcase fell out.

“The velcro hiding the compartment totally malfunctioned, the recorder fell into my briefcase in a nest of wires…thankfully, the person I was meeting with was on the other side of the table”.

Two years of work had got Robert all the evidence he needed, but how to get the perpetrators onto US soil for an arrest?

A plan was hatched. Robert had a “fiancée” who was in fact another agent working alongside him, and it was time for a wedding. All of Bob’s contacts and friends in the world of the cartel were gathered together, the bankers who allowed the illegal money to flow from the US to Colombia, and the mobsters sending it to them, and the night before the big day they put on a party.

As the evening drew on, the intended targets were approached and told of a secret bachelor party happening across town… “The limos drove to a high rise in downtown Tampa, a 10-level parking garage. And then they got on the elevators and went to different floors and when they got off on those floors, they were arrested and they were in disbelief.

One of the guys came off the elevator, and one of the arrest team was two female uniformed officers, and the guy kept laughing, and he goes ‘well, I've been to a bachelor party like this before, where the women dress up as cops…’. Ultimately, they did convince him they were real cops.”

The set up was a triumph. 85 people associated with the cartels in Medellin were arrested and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, then the seventh largest bank in the world, was shut down.

But to Robert, the arrest of 85 of his apparent friends and colleagues felt complicated. “Everybody was high-fiving and happy…I wanted nothing to do with celebrating whatsoever. I wanted to just go home, and I did, and I slept for almost a full day.”

Robert is circumspect about the work he’s done, telling Nicky that if he was approached by a family member of one of the men he had arrested he would apologise. “I know the pain they've been through. These weren't people who were killing people.”

Robert’s time undercover didn’t end there. He returned to the cartel one more time, where he was sold out by a corrupt DEA agent working for the Cali cartel - overnight he became a man with a price on his head and went underground for the final time.

Since then he has written two books on his time undercover, The Infiltrator and The Betrayal. And in 2016, one was adapted into a film starring Brian Cranston as Robert.

But Robert still lives at least partly in the shadows, not showing his face on camera in interviews and following complicated safety procedures to keep him and his family safe, and he does not take lightly the impact his extraordinary career has had.

“It puts a hole in your heart that will never ever be filled, there is a price to pay for doing this kind of work.”