Inside the Cartel

How an Undercover FBI Agent Smuggled Cocaine, Laundered Cash and Dismantled a Colombian Narco-Empire

He smuggled over $1 billion worth of cocaine into the United States…

He laundered tens of millions of dollars of drug money…

He became one of the most trusted members of the Colombian drug cartels…

All while he was an undercover agent for the FBI.

Meet Martin Suarez, an FBI special agent who specialised in Colombian drug cartels and still holds the record for the longest time spent continuously undercover. As his alter ego, “Manny,” Martin followed the rules of the cartels: use the right lingo, drink the right whiskey, wear the right watch, and avoid the wrong questions. Learning on the fly, Suarez fell deeper and deeper into the world of Colombia’s most ruthless narco-empires.

At first, he stepped into the high-stakes game of smuggling mass quantities of cocaine into Miami for the Medellín Cartel—all of which was eventually seized. Thousands of kilos later, Martin became a money launderer for the North Coast Cartel, eventually exposing the Black Market Peso Exchange, an insidious criminal network that allegedly involved billionaire bankers, blue-chip American corporations, and even the president of Colombia himself.

Martin Suarez had two goals in life: to be a good family man, and make his own father proud—the man who inspired him to become an FBI agent in the first place. And so, he lived every day on the run between his two selves—Manny, the smooth-talking narco, and Martin, the upstanding lawman, trying not to lose himself in the underworld, put his family in harm’s way, or blow his cover.

Told with the gripping, pulse-racing action of a Hollywood blockbuster, Inside the Cartel is the story of how one man’s life’s work was the first strike in America's epic War on Drugs, and what happens when your cover is blown and the only thing protecting you is your will to survive.