This is undaunted Life a Man's podcast.

I'm your host Kyle Thompson.

Let's get into it.

All right, guys, we've got a couple of special guests on the podcast today.

We have Martin Suarez and Ian Frisch.

So Martin worked as an FBI special agent for 23 years, and he holds the record for the most time spent continuously

undercover, and he has infiltrated criminal organizations across the United States, Europe, Asia,

Central and South America, and the Caribbean. And he is a six-time recipient of the FBI's

Special Achievement Award, a four-time recipient of the Department of Justice's Outstanding

Law Enforcement Officer of the Year Award

and received the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association

Lifetime Achievement Award.

And then he retired from the FBI in 2011.

And Ian has been a writer for the New Yorker, the New York Times,

New York Magazine and Esquire, among many other publications.

And they combined to write the new book called Inside the Cartel, How an undercover FBI agent smuggled cocaine, laundered cash, and dismantled a Colombian narco empire.

And so this was a really incredible interview and a really incredible book.

I will mention from the beginning that Martin does have ALS, and so his speech can be a little bit labored, and he lost his train thought a couple of times, but it's all good. You can still understand what he's talking about, and also Ian would hop in several times to give a little bit more color and context of certain things. But there's so many details on the book that we didn't get to in the interview, but we did get into, okay, what made you want to join the military and then what made you want to transition into the FBI? What do the FBI see early in you that you would potentially be a good person to go undercover? Because at the time, they weren't really doing a lot of undercover. They didn't really have a lot of tradecraft in terms of doing undercover work. How he ended up getting into drug smuggling and how that's actually

very close to what he learned in the Navy. So that was pretty interesting. But then the Medelline

cartel and other cartels, when did he feel like he had their trust? And then we talk about this

enormous bust where he was told by the cartels that they needed to smuggle 3,000 kilos of cocaine, which was about half a billion dollars in street value and how it ended up being smuggled, but then it was taken over by the FBI, but it didn't implicate him. We got into, you know, when to wear a wire, not to wear a wire. When, you know, his alter ego, whenever he was, you know, infiltrating and smuggling was Manny, but he's Martin.

And so how do you transition from Manny to Martin and back and forth?

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