I don’t know what Bob Mazur looks like. When we spoke earlier this week, it was by phone. The former federal agent doesn’t allow photographs.
In the film, The Infiltrator, directed by Brad Furman, Mazur is content to let us believe that he looks like Bryan Cranston. Cranston, who portrayed Walter White on the award-winning television show, Breaking Bad, slips easily into the role of Mazur, who went under deep cover to infiltrate drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s cartel. And today, although most of the bad guys that Mazur helped put in prison remain there or are dead, Mazur chooses to stay out of the spotlight.
As his cover, Bob Musella, a name plucked from a gravestone, Mazur was quite the opposite. He wore shiny suits, drove a flashy car, and flew in private jets. That persona, rich and connected, allowed Mazur to embed inside Escobar’s cartel, eventually befriending Roberto Alcaino, played in the movie by Benjamin Bratt. Alcaino had direct ties to Escobar. At the height of the drug trade in the 1980s, Escobar, called “The King of Cocaine,” was responsible for an estimated 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the United States. At one point, he was thought to be bringing in an estimated $420 million a week.
Mazur, a U.S. Customs Service special agent, was asked to be part of an effort to bring down Escobar. But his work as a special agent with Customs – and before that, as a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI) for 11 years – made him realize that drug dealers like Escobar had an Achilles heel: finance. If you could exploit that weakness, he believed, you could bring the dealers down. He was right.
At IRS-CI, their mantra is “Follow the money.” And that’s what Mazur did. Mazur, as Musella, spent six months building an image as a wealthy financial adviser. Once inside the system, he spent three years, with the help of informants, painting a picture that he had legitimate businesses that could be sources for drug cartels to launder money. Why was that important?
Money laundering works this way: the bad guys get money through illegal activities – like drugs, as here – and get rid of the “bad” cash by replacing it with legitimate cash so that it can’t be traced. In this case, Mazur, as Musella, had legitimate businesses, including a jewelry chain and a brokerage firm: he just needed a bank willing to take the money. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was the seventh-largest bank in the world at the time, stepped up. The bank was founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, played in the film by Rez Kabir; Adebi had previously established the United Bank of Pakistan.
Over the course of the investigation, Mazur, as Musella, recorded conversations with bank executives who admitted they dealt in drug money. That evidence proved to the nails in BCCI’s coffin, leading to the closure of the bank. It remains the only multinational financial institution ever brought down in a drug investigation.
Mazur admits that license has been taken in the film because the subject matter, while thrilling, isn’t as sexy as it happens. It is, Mazur joked, like “watching paint dry in real-time.” For example, when they caught wind that one of the drug lords would be in Miami over a four-day range, Mazur/Musella would hang out in his cover mansion in Key Biscayne, waiting for word. There could be, he says, three days of actual downtime before something happened.
He wanted to tell his story, though, because he thinks it’s important – especially now. We talked just days after the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philander Castile, as well as the shootings of the Dallas police officers. You could tell it weighed heavily on Mazur’s mind as he spoke. I expected him to choose his words carefully and tiptoe around what had happened. He did not.
When he spoke of his own experiences, he said that he took seriously his oath as a public servant. “Every decision I made,” he says, “Was to do the best job I could for you,” meaning the public. He says that so many in law enforcement feel the same, that they have a “burning desire to serve the public.”
He doesn’t discount that there are bad folks in law enforcement, telling me that “Life’s a bell curve” though he feels strongly that the greatest majority of folks who are in the middle of that curve in law enforcement and public service want to serve the public and make a difference. He speaks from a breadth of experience. He’s served in three capacities in the federal government: in addition to Customs and IRS, he’s also worked with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
He says those officers and public servants who don’t do the right thing – who do bad things, illegal things – cause pain in his heart. Most, he says, are trying to do the right thing.
As for Mazur? He’s never craved the spotlight. He knows that it’s easy to see the victim of a gun, but harder to see the victim of “the darkness of corruption.” It’s not just about the drugs, he says, noting that “hundreds of billions of dollars can corrupt governments.”
There is still, he says, a segment of the international banking community marketing to the underworld. When I ask how you stop something that big, he says that it has to be a collaborative effort between federal agencies, something he admits doesn’t happen as much as it should. He cites lack of funding as an obstacle, too, telling me to “take a look at the numbers” – specifically tagging IRS-CI. “We are,” he says, “outresourced by the bad guys. Big time.”
He calls the CBBI takedown – along with Escobar’s cartel – a “team effort,” saying that his team made it possible to keep fighting. He’s big on team.
“I got the attention,” he says, “because I had the ball in my hands.”
Mazur has also written a memoir, The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel, published in 2009. After speaking with Mazur, the book is now on my reading list.
The Infiltrator, starring Bryan Cranston, John Leguizamo, and Benjamin Bratt, opened in theaters nationwide on July 13.
