Covert FBI Agent Smuggled $1 Billion in Cocaine to Crush Colombian Cartels

A former FBI undercover operative recounts in his memoir that he helped smuggle $1 billion in cocaine to crush Colombian cartels, and he lived to tell the tale. Martin Suarez, who operated for years under the alias “Manny,” describes an August 1994 assassination attempt at his Puerto Rican gated-community home, a hit allegedly ordered by El Toro Negro, the North Coast Cartel’s money boss, and the peril that followed as the investigation expanded. The memoir Inside the Cartel: How an Undercover FBI Agent Smuggled Cocaine, Laundered Cash, and Dismantled a Colombian Narco-Empire (Dey Street Books) frames Suarez’s experience as a peak example of the risks and leverage involved in counter-narcotics operations along the Miami corridor and beyond.

To pass as Manny, Suarez had to learn the rhythms, vernacular, and routines of the traffickers he hoped to infiltrate. The FBI built him a front office on Miami’s industrial south side—a warehouse that outwardly functioned as a produce business, moving crates of oranges and vegetables through the port while interior rooms served as the launchpad for one of the bureau’s boldest undercover operations. The aim, Suarez writes, was not a single bust but a sustained infiltration designed to expose the cartel’s financial and logistical networks. He trained with Diego, a cooperating witness and former Medellín Cartel pilot, who taught him how to spend money, talk, and act like a trafficker. The education extended to language and culture: if a cartel operative would say “triple hijo de puta” rather than the English equivalent, then so would Suarez; he believed adopting the lingo was essential to maintaining the ruse.

Image: Manny undercover profile

He also needed to look the part. Suarez stockpiled European linen, Italian slacks, high-quality denim, cowboy boots, and tropical fedoras, grew a mustache, and wore a diamond-studded Rolex and heavy gold bracelet. Behind the scenes, he climbed into a pair of FBI-bought luxury cars and used a crew with marine and aviation skills to operate a clandestine supply chain. “To complete the vibe, I put more swagger in my step. I ratcheted up my cockiness,” he writes. “In the eyes of the cartel, I was one of the most prolific drug smugglers in South Florida.” The goal was to become indispensable to the trafficking network, a trusted facilitator who could deliver on big loads and move money with a speed that would keep the cartel’s accountants and enforcers satisfied.

A typical drop looked less like a quiet handoff and more like a scene from an action thriller. Suarez’s smuggling vessel was a 100-foot lobster boat anchored at specific coordinates off Cuba’s coast, with a 36-foot Mako fishing boat acting as the runner. A plane from Colombia would drop tightly wrapped bundles of cocaine into the sea, and the team would haul them aboard the lobster boat before the cargo sank back into the water. “A great whooshing came from overhead, the rippled squealing of a plane. The cartel had arrived,” he recalls. “And then I heard the sound: BANG! BANG! BANG!” Each 45-kilogram bale hit the water near the boat, forcing Suarez and his crew to fight water to retrieve as many bundles as possible before the sea swallowed them.

At times, the operation teetered on the edge of danger in ordinary moments. Suarez recalls dining at a restaurant with Gustavo, a North Coast trafficker known as El Loco. In the middle of their conversation, El Loco’s wife, Ella, whispered urgently that two men nearby were federal agents. “I can smell a cop from a mile away,” she told him. The moment underscored how thin the line was between survival and exposure when authorities sought to insert a deep-cover operative into a cartel ecosystem that thrived on fear and precision.

In August 1994, the FBI deemed the operation complete. Suarez says he discarded his undercover gear and money-laundering wardrobe and even crushed his wire and phones. But the danger did not end there. A hit squad closed in within days, and when a pursuing sicario cornered him, Suarez fought back and was struck with a broken nose as he chased the attacker across a golf course. He fired a final shot, but his bullets ran out. Local headlines framed the incident as a home-invasion botched attempt, but Suarez says the implication was clear: El Toro Negro had ordered the hit, and the cartel’s reach extended beyond the borders of the United States. A month later, a U.S. Attorney unsealed an indictment charging 52 members of the North Coast Cartel and its associates with drug trafficking and money laundering—a dramatic public reckoning that underscored the scale of the cartel’s operations and the FBI’s response. Toro Negro disappeared in the process, and Suarez never learned his real name.

Suarez traveled back to San Juan in 1996 and 1997 to testify in the cases, entering the courtroom as a federal agent rather than Manny. “Manny, a federal agent? It couldn’t be!” he quotes defendants as saying, illustrating the shock of the undercover reveal. The trials culminated in convictions, and Suarez retired from the FBI in 2011. He says Toro remains at large, a shadow figure who could still be listening for the whisper of a shoulder tap—whether real or imagined, in Suarez’s view, Toro’s long arm likely never fully released its grip.

Image: Undercover FBI agent smuggled cocaine (alter ego)

The narrative, long circulated in memo-style briefing rooms and on the record in court, gains a wider audience in the memoir. Suarez emphasizes the moral ambiguities of undercover work and the practical realities of combatting a global narcotics enterprise in which cartels viewed the flow of money as part of the cost of doing business. He writes that not a gram of those drugs ever reached American streets and that the money laundered for the cartel helped fund the very operation designed to bring it down: “Not a gram of those drugs ever made it to the streets,” he notes, and the cartel’s payments were used to fund the investigation itself. He adds another insistence on the complexity of this work: “We funneled every payment given to us by the cartel back into the government’s coffers.”

The broader context of Suarez’s account places it squarely in the era of the so-called War on Drugs, when the Medellín Cartel and its successor networks expanded into a multinational, multimillion-dollar operation that stretched from Colombia to the United States and beyond. By the mid-1980s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel had evolved from a notorious drug ring into a sprawling enterprise, flooding the U.S. with cocaine and turning Miami into a principal point of entry. The undercover operation described by Suarez illustrates how federal agents sought to infiltrate that system from the inside, leveraging insider access to undermine the cartel’s financial infrastructure and its operational capabilities.

Image: Martin dressed in undercover alter ego

The book’s revelations come as authorities continue to confront the enduring logistics of the global drug trade, where raw narcotics and laundered money cross borders through complex networks and shadow economies. While the specific operation ends with convictions against dozens of cartel affiliates, the broader problem persists: the ability of violent criminal organizations to adapt, finance, and extend their reach across oceans and jurisdictions. Suarez’s account contributes to a broader historical record of how undercover work has shaped—often in unsettling ways—the struggle to dismantle narco-empires while managing the personal and professional risks borne by those who go undercover to take them down.