988: Robert Mazur | How Money Laundering Works Part Two

28:01And a portion of this money, they wanted to get Colombian pesos. So now I've got to 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 is importers. Importers within the country where your supply client wants to get whatever it is. That 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. 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.

28:46So if they've got$100, they're only going to get$75 worth of dollars, if they've got$100 worth of pesos and they want to get dollars, they're going to give up 25%. So then now they're going to 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%. 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.

29:28That's why black money markets operate throughout the world so aggressively. 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 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 in a year. But they want to go to the black market. They're going to buy tens 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.

30:15You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Robert Mazur. We'll be right back. 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 at sixminutenetworking.com. 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-cringy.

30:44It is very practical. I've taught this to law enforcement. I've taught this to intelligence agencies. I've taught this to folks like Robert Mazur for their work undercover. And six minutes a day is all it takes. Many of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course. So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at sixminutenetworking.com. Now, back to Robert Mazur. I did an episode about this. The money launderer, 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.

31:22And then that person's laying out, I've seen the photos of the bus, they're laying out duffel 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 amazing. There are a couple of reasons beyond just that capital restriction. 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.

32:03Because they can bring those back to Colombia. They can sell them. They can say, hey, I got a legitimate business. I got this appliance store and blah, blah, blah, blah. So there's free trade zones. But most importantly, especially in an area, a town called Guangzhou, they are experts in creating counterfeit goods. So now not only can you get goods, but you can get counterfeit goods. And If you're a bad guy, there was a case called the Guangzhou Enterprise case,$5 billion in counterfeit goods brought into Latin America. You don't have any legitimate businessmen were knocked out of business because of their counterfeit goods.

32:44But then there's also unregulated pharmaceutical companies in China. They are selling precursors for methamphetamine. 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. And so that's another reason for China to become so involved. But they're also, it's impossible for you to serve a subpoena on an institution in China. The People's Republic of China is not going to honor due process from the U.S. 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.

33:32Can we do like a brief trace of the path of money from a drug buyer on the street and then through the money laundering process? So a user buys a baggie on the corner, then what? I mean, they got to aggregate this. You're not laundering 50 bucks at a time, right? No, no. 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 at a time. That's done through codes. The money broker in Medellin, who was a real bad guy that I dealt with 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.

34:22Here's the cell phone number. The code is that the money is for Pacho to be paid to Isabella. So now that gets passed to my partner. 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, our private jet from the jet company. So 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. 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.

35:07a 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 usually it's a beat-up ratty looking old car 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 put anything on there in order to follow the car, a monitor of some sort, that's a problem. 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.

35:59They offload the$2 million. They bring back the car. He meets the guy, gives the guy his keys. We've now got the money. I talked them into, they want all the money right away. And I said to him, 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. They're usually bound in rubber bands in blocks of$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 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 other stuff that we needed to do.

36:52The 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. 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 going to pick up the phone and call the cops and say, you're not going to believe what just happened.

37:44That did not happen. Then 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. I'm sorry, but that's unfortunately how that went down. That's insane, right? 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 ice for when this guy gets back. That's what we should do about this. There's more where that came from. And double his fuel bill.

38:19He's not going to bat an eye. Do you see how much cash that guy brought on that plane? That's, man, 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? Like, I guess I, going back to my earlier question, how long would it take to launder$100 million, for example? Okay, well, first of all, we're not going to want to do that. You're going to have to realize that by laundering money, we're facilitating their criminal organization. Our position always was, if we're laundering for the same people and we're not getting any new information, new intelligence, with respect to what they're up to, we need to find a way not to pick up money from them anymore.

39:00You 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. We laundered$400 million. Banco shares was one of the first major FBI money laundering on 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. The name of the game is launder the minimum amount you can and get the maximum amount of information that you can.

39:43Because otherwise, you're just helping them. Right. Okay. 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. 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 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.

40:20Basically, all you did is help criminals at that point by working 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 want to learn how to launder money, to be clear. How do you particularly learn money laundering? I know you've got a degree in business administration, but I'm guessing that 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 the head and then you're like, all right, I'm a money launderer undercover.

40:50Well, there's training in that area in basic training, 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 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. 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.

41:41Now, you got to watch how they cook the books because when a bank pays a$19 billion fine, they structure that as a forfeiture and it makes the numbers look so much better. I'm talking about real bad guy money. So if they're only getting a billion and 400 billion is made, do the math, one fourth of one percent. 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, but I was at a social gathering.

42:30I was one of the other social clubs I belonged to was Renee's. Renee's had locations in every major city and it was like where all the beautiful people went 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 you know I've got my sickness my heroin I'm going to get more information this is going to 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 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.

43:17At the Bank of the Republic in Colombia, there is an arrangement called the Sinister Window. Some called it the Anonymous Window. Your listeners can just Google Sinister Window Colombia. They'll read the whole story. So if you had the right connections in Colombia, 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. Why was that happening? Well, because at that time, the inflation rate per year in Colombia 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 than it was before.

44:07Wow. So the central bank doesn't want to be holding all those Colombian paces. But, oh, guess what? It's illegal at that time for any Colombian to have a U.S. 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? They put it on pallets, they shrink wrap it, and they send it to the Federal Reserve. 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.

44:50So they want to get that money into their U.S. dollar bank balance. Wow. They don't want to hold it in currency. 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 U.S. dollars are coming in from Colombia, 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. It's all a joke, Bob. And it was quite an eye opener for me. Man, I can only imagine. I just Googled Rene's Social Club. I don't think it exists anymore.

45:31Is that 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. But what if it's not your fault? I mean, do they care at all? Because look, yes, these are like heartless sociopaths that lack compassion, but they still theoretically want to 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. Or am I giving him too much credit? 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, that there was a seizure warrant.

46:20Maybe there was an affidavit. and they wanted to look at the affidavit for the search warrant, 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, were not allowed to go to Colombia. It wasn't until the second undercover operation by then that I was able to do that. This infiltrator story, the undercover operation started about 18 months after Enrique Kiki Camarena, the DEA agent, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.

47:08Colombia and Mexico were off limits for being able to do that. And the Colombian traffickers knew that, which is why they kept inviting you to come there because they know, oh, he's not going to come. He can't come. Why? Because he's a DEA agent. That's why he's not going to come. Yeah. So they want to 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. You're not going to get your cut and you're going to continue to do this until your portion of this is repaid.

47:49And 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, his favorite horse. And 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. Man. Yeah. It seems like, I mean, obviously you take the work it off thing rather than the getting killed thing.

48:28I 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 guessing that's against policy slash the law. Yeah. Well, Well, closest we came to that, we had a seizure. If you read The Betrayal, the second book 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 clearinghouse, where law enforcement tells each other on the day of or a day before what they're going to be doing because we don't want to have cops arresting cops.

49:10And so he didn't go through the clearinghouse. Our guy shows up to pick up the money and they're ahead of us and they're going to seize$4 million that's sitting inside the house. But our guy's there. Oh, no. And we're going to be suspected, undoubtedly. And it really wasn't our fault, but it sure did appear to be our fault. 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, 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 who was involved in that operation.

50:04So we shared some of the truth. And unfortunately, 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 a cop, one or the other. So I think the smarter thing would have been to come back and go, you got to have a scenario where they think I died because I just I'm not going to do this anymore. But he didn't unfortunately take that route. You wrote in one of your books that money laundering enables cartels to produce their most lethal product, which is corruption.

50:45And I thought it was interesting because my reading of that was that you think the corruption is worse than the drugs. Is that accurate? 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 subject of Manuel Noriega, the ruler of Panama at the time, came up, and it was very clear. Don't worry about any of your accounts getting tagged by the government. He's on our side. We pay him. We move drugs through there. He has his people turn the other way. We own him. So that became a method by which the cartel was able to facilitate massive, massive amounts of movements of illegal drugs.

51:33You 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 DEA case where DEA had determined that there was this very mysterious person, always referred to by the traffickers as El Patron, the godfather, 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 Sinfuegos Zepeda, who was the minister of defense for all of Mexico from 2012 to 2018.

52:27Wow. They arrested him and they held him. No bond. And it became a big political problem. And Attorney General Barr decided that, okay, we're going to give him back. 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 Sinfuegos was completely innocent. He never did anything wrong. As a matter of fact, this year, I think it was this year, he received one of the highest awards from the president of Mexico for his tremendous service to Mexico. We've now convicted this year in February, the recently former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez.

53:20I saw that. He was in the pocket of the cartel. His brother is 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. they had a general who's pled guilty or the head of their uh excuse me their narcotics their military he's pled guilty he's facing life in prison he was going to testify against juan orlando hernandez in the february trial of this year they owned honduras and they could do anything there that they wanted and the rule of law was stolen from the people of honduras and I just don't think that the average American recognizes how many journalists, how many, hey, it could be podcasters who are trying to get the free word out there who wind up missing.

54:22Yeah. And become part of the missing. So it's happening in many of these countries. This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Robert Mazur. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find the code, just email me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you.

54:54Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Robert Mazur. We have journalists who listen to the 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'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. I listen to your podcast. So some of these very same people who are outing narcos and 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.

55:35I mean, it's a thing. 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. It's too dangerous, which is insane. Insane. It's amazing to think that the people who were in charge of the Honduran government operated clandestine cocaine labs in Colombia and Honduras, provided a gateway for hundreds of tons of cocaine to the US and Canada, put millions of dollars in political figures, killed hundreds of people involved in human rights defenders, environmental defenders, competing traffickers.

56:15They 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 drugs. And this was going on just under the nose of all of us, and has been, and continues to, and will continue to. It's not going to stop. What made you finally get out of 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.

57:12And it was time for some young up and comings to pick up the baton. 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 shadow of the threat. you're concerned enough to take precautions. 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 have been in 2016, there were threats that came in, I expected it from drug traffickers, but there are 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.

58:12some people from Pakistan believe that a combination of the western banks you know the city banks and of the world and the CIA 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 become the major financial player that BCCI was most certainly going to become they had I think 1 ,200 branches. They were in 72 countries. They were massive. I read your resume and it's case after case of 10 million seized, yachts seized, hotels seized, shares in this company seized, 20 million in assets,$100 million in product.

58:57Those kinds of numbers are going to sting a little if you're on the other end of that. So I'm guessing at some point there's probably a contract out on you, at least after the first couple of years, or are they kind of like what's done is done. We're not going after a cop. Within 30 days after the end of the infiltrator story, the undercover portion of it, within 30 days, two law enforcement agencies and an intelligence agency reported that there was a half million dollar contract on my life. You got to take that serious. I was a very, very important witness. Among the defendants charged that we were going to try to get our hands on and we never did was Pablo Escobar's most important lawyer.

59:39There 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. And so as far as product goes, that doesn't really bother them. When I was in the game, It cost about$250 to make a kilo of Coke, and it cost maybe$2 ,500 prorated to transport that kilo to the United States, so a$3 ,000 investment. Most of the transportation was done by giving a portion of the load to the transporter. So if the load got seized, they lost$500 a kilo, 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 i think there were 62 000 pounds seized in la that's a lot of backpacks and that's enough to get everybody on the planet high twice.

1:00:58So these are very sophisticated. They have what they call pipelines. Roberto gave me his entire pipeline. It was pretty simple. A lab in Bolivia producing about 6 ,000 kilograms. I got to look back whether that was a month or a week and maybe it was a month, but anyway, 6 ,000 kilograms. They had a remote airstrip there. so small planes would come in. They'd fly out like 500, 600 kilos at a time. Land in north of Argentina. They would take it in vans to Buenos Aires where he had a seafood packing plant. It would get packed. If you had a 40 ,000 pound shipment of anchovies in commercial cans, There might be 2 ,000, 3 ,000 pounds of Coke in some of the commercially sealed cans.

1:01:52They 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. They would put in half kilo bricks of Coke, lead ingots, sand, get it exactly the same, seal it commercially, and then pack it. There was a very low-key secret way. The name of the company was Dipes. So the dot in the eye of the box that had two 23-pound cans, the eye had a pinhole in the dot of the eye. Oh, my God. 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.

1:02:46And then they take it over because they want a company that has a track record. They know we can't possibly screen all the containers that come across our border. It's impossible. Man, the methods now must be even more. now they're probably using like RFID and when the barcode number ends in an odd number and then another odd number, it's like, I mean, there's just unlimited ways you can do this kind of thing with the whole digital footprint stuff and the way that shipping works now. It's just absolutely nuts. How much money is laundered 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.

1:03:39They estimate that to be roughly$2 trillion a year. That's somehow way more than I thought, but I guess it all adds up fast. Wow. And what percentage has to do with the United States? I guess that's probably really hard to break out by country, with the human trafficking drugs and arms in the United States. Is that something you happen to know? The UNDOC, United Nations on Drugs and Crime, periodically puts out the information that they get from all of the country members. 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.

1:04:22You know, Europe was a funny thing when, back in the day when I was there doing it with Roberto Alcano 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. So it was very, very lucrative. business in that area, but you weren't seeing huge seizures. Now, 6 ,000 kilos, 8 ,000 kilos. Now, the nations of Africa, mostly West Africa, but a lot of the African nations have become corrupted and have become the transshipment point for the drugs that go up into Europe.

1:05:11And so a lot of the money and a lot of the drugs is exchanged in those areas. Countries like Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Ghana, many of them, Senegal. A lot of these nations are completely riddled with drug trafficking. And another thing a lot of people don't realize is the most common currency that's dealt in African nations is the U.S. dollar. And so it's their currency. They've got a place to be able to place it. They can use it. I know that Europe's cocaine market has eclipsed that of the United States. If you're just talking about cocaine, I'm pretty sure, like you said, illegal drugs in total, we're talking about fentanyl, heroin, illegal marijuana.

1:05:54I think it all adds up towards the U.S. 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 surprise me, actually? But I guess it shouldn't. But if you go nation by nation, we're still head and shoulders above them. Oh, yeah. I mean, you got to take the whole continent of Europe and add it up to beat the U.S. in how much stuff they put up their nose. Yeah, for sure. So I know we're running out of time. I'm so curious. It seems like the deeper you get into this world, the better credibility you have, right?

1:06:27You'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? 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's shoes and you got to be this normal guy instead of a normal guy with like 10 % criminal scumbag DNA sprinkled on your personality. Hmm. Well, the undercover agent's probably the last one to recognize that.

1:07:06But I guess I've got to 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 bringing back in. And I overheard my sister-in-law go, he's starting to look like them. He's starting to even act like them. You got to realize, too, that my shtick was being aligned with an Italian-American mob family. Right. And I grew up in a community where that was very prevalent.

1:07:55And I worked a lot of organized crime cases when I was in law enforcement. 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. You've got to use parts of your real experiences in life. Now, it doesn't sound like it when you hear me now 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. And I started talking to people about, hey, how are you guys doing?

1:08:47And they're going, you guys? What are you talking about? 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. I mean, as far as being a person who speaks like they're from New York and speaks and sounds like and thinks like people who live in that other world. Well, you've certainly had an interesting career. And I mean, it's still cranking along.

1:09:29You're just maybe less likely to get killed in what you're doing now. I guess you can say you never got bored. At least you got that going for you. Yeah, that's true. You know, and I wrote an article that's going to be in the 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. 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.

1:10:17I approached it every way, the same way that I would doing an undercover operation. 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 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 hopefully make that journey for them a little bit easier because there's unfortunately a lot of people who face that.

1:10:55Bob Mazur, thank you very much. You've got to 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 really, really appreciate it. My pleasure, Jordan. I appreciate it. I appreciate being on your show and getting a chance to talk to your listeners. And there are a lot of people, and 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.

1:11:27They have some good things to think about because there are a lot of people out there fighting for them every single day. now i've 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 manhattan bank robbery i'm a second negotiator on the phone hugh mcgallon is a 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 going to take over the phone say you're talking to me and we're going to do it really abruptly my point is to get a hostage out which is what the hostage negotiator is supposed to do.

1:12:03And somebody hands me a note and says, ask him if he wants to come out. That was somebody that was listening. My friend, Jamie, Jamie Cedeno. 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. I see a note popping in front of my face. So I go, do you want to come out? And there's a long silence on the other end of 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.

1:12:38I'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. I don't know where it's from. As it turns out, it's from Jamie again. And the note says, tell him you'll meet him outside. And I say to him, how about this? How about if we 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 say, hi, it's Chris, 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.

1:13:21So 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 going to react. We don't know how they're going to start shooting. We don't know what the hell's going to happen. He comes to the door. Oh, God. That was because he rattles the door. And he's like, ah! He's nervous, right? I mean, no crap. I'm trapped in here now. Yeah, and on the outside, we're going, nah, what do we do? We forgot to unlock the door.

1:13:47And our bad guy is kind of like, oh, you want to play games with me, huh? For more from FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, including negotiation and persuasion tips, along with a few crazy stories, check out episode 165 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. A fascinating story. I'm so glad we got extra time with Robert. 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 Bryan Cranston. And apparently they're doing a sequel.

1:14:21I don't know much more than that. 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. 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 in 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.

1:14:49After the mics were off, I asked Robert if he thought new laws and efforts around AML, so anti-money laundering, if those were successful in his opinion, and he was unequivocal that they were not. 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 problem 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 going to do that. 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 Medellin cartel's funds.

1:15:26But I don't know what's going to 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. I mean, they had a big old office. There were a lot of them 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.

1:16:01And it seems like the banks that were down there, some of their primary lines of business were illicit. 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. I mean, it's 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. 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.

1:16:33And it was just 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. 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 in 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-terror task force, but we have nothing of the sort for anti-money laundering.

1:17:03The problem is, of course, that where terror can be funded, there's going to be terror. There's going to be crime. Where there's funds, there's guns. Where There's bucks, there's bombs. Yes, I made that up. Had self on back. But we're not going to stem this thing until we find real consequences for people involved 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 Mazur will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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1:18:04I think you're gonna like the new direction. And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well. It's over at 6MinuteNetworking.com. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. I love hearing from you there. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

1:18:35The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's, I don't want to say interested in money laundering, but perhaps interested in organized crime or how it's funded, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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