From 1986-88, customs agent Robert Mazur hopped private jets, partied in the finest nightclubs and wore thousand-dollar threads — all to infiltrate Pablo Escobar’s powerful Colombian drug cartel.
Mazur led a literal double life. One as Robert Musella, a made-up money launderer who convinced cocaine-dealing power players to place millions of their dirty dollars in his hands, all while sharing damning information that he caught on tape. The other, a Florida father who took his neglected family on vacations in a beat-up station wagon. He had to change his appearance for his safety, and his own kids often didn’t even recognize him.
There are plenty of close calls. After a target he was taping unexpectedly comes home, Mazur hides in a closet for hours where he relieved himself in aluminum cans. Another time, he fights off the aggressive advances of a gay cartel middleman, who, Mazur initially thought, was touching him in search of a wire.
Finally, Mazur gathered enough evidence, and at a phony wedding staged for Musella and his agent “fiancée,” the Feds took the leaders down. The arrests shook the whole cartel, from two-bit deliverymen on the streets of Chicago, LA and Miami, to the powerful, politically-connected banks that backed the operation.
Even though the operation was successful, Mazur felt torn.
He cried after his first undercover job, and wrote in his book, “I had tricked myself into thinking I liked them, and I was paying the emotional price for it. But I was just doing my job.”
The Infiltrator
My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks
Behind Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel
by Robert Mazur
Little, Brown