Due to the power he obtained as the leader of the Medellín cartel, between the 80s and 90s Pablo Escobar was designated as enemy number one in the United States anti-drug fight, which caused the authorities in this country to implement multiple strategies that aimed to capture the boss.
As if it were a movie hollywood, In 1989, DEA agent Robert Mazur accepted the mission of infiltrating the Medellín cartel.with the finances of the criminal structure being the North American’s main objective.
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The plan was to present himself to the drug traffickers as Robert Mussela, a real man who had died years ago, who was known to be involved in illicit businesses, simultaneously with his participation as a businessman in other projects.
The strategy with which they attracted the attention of the drug traffickers consisted of presenting to the public that Mussela was a man who did not like to have meetings with his partners, in the same way that he had a representative who was in charge of finalizing the details of his businesses. .
With this in progress, Mussela’s emissary (the agent’s new identity) indicated to multiple people that sHis boss could manage accounts abroad with unlimited sums of money, which, in order to launder his assets, was attractive to the bosses..
During the first months, the contacts were with lower-ranking criminals, while the agency had Gerardo Moncada, the cartel’s main partner, as the main objective before reaching Escobar.
A meeting in Paris, attended by one of the cartel’s lawyers and later by Moncada, was the first victory that the DEA agent had, whom He promised him that there were possibilities of creating a savings fund of up to $100 million dollars..
The agent’s proposals caused him to have several meetings with members of the cartel, but the presence of undercover agents made the Colombians suspect that something was not right; Added to this, the bosses showed that there was a presence of people who were monitoring the surroundings of the areas where they were with the businessman, so Mussela asked Moncada to have a personal meeting in which he would be without any of his protectors. .
In dialogue with the BBCthe agent revealed that in that meeting he had to show the records of the transactions to Moncada, which led to a recorder that remained in his briefcase almost being discovered.
That same element accompanied him during meetings with members of the Bank of Credit and International Commerce (BCCI), which handled drug traffickers’ money for several years.and faced with the danger that they would be discovered by the Colombians, the focus of the mission changed.
This caused Kathy Ertz (Mussela’s fictitious girlfriend) to invite representatives of the banking entity and some bosses to an alleged marriage that would take place in Tampa Bay, Florida.
A day before the ceremony, during a bachelor party in which he brought together several important members of the BCCI, Several limousines took the party participants to where a special unit ended up arresting them, with Mussela being presented as the leader of the criminal structure.
For citizens and the media, it was an operation in which more than 50 people were arrested. In addition to this, this infiltration brought about the fall of the BCCI, which had its main headquarters in Luxembourg. Manzur’s story was recreated in 2016 in a film starring Bryan Cranston.
