Creative Apple. Ever have one of those days where you just want to say forget it I quit a day when you just want to leave everything behind I know I've thought about starting a new career, but what would I do? I only have two

skills, marketing and telling freaky stories on the radio. But Mark Ruskin actually did it. He quit his job as an assistant DA in Brooklyn.

An assistant DA in New York, he could have had a dream legal career working at some fancy law firm making tons of money.

So what did he do after giving up his career as a powerful attorney?

Well, he joined the FBI Academy.

Why did he join the FBI?

Well, in order to prosecute criminals, you have to catch him first.

It didn't take long for Mark to become an undercover agent.

For 27 years, he slipped into various different characters,

busting criminals ranging from drug dealers to Wall Street insiders.

At one point, Mark was juggling three or four cases at a time,

switching back and forth between identities.

He wrote a book about his time at the FBI appropriately titled The Pretender.

When I first discovered his book, I immediately shot him a message.

Luckily for me, he agreed to share some of his stories. I'm Javier Leyva and this is pretend radio.

Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. My first assignment was to San Juan Puerto Rico. In the late 80s and early 90s, San Juan Puerto Rico had one of the highest murder rates of any US city.

Some of the violence can be blamed on the machiateros, a separatist group actively trying to make Puerto Rico an independent country.

So now I had gone from being an attorney in New York where the biggest thing I had to worry about was a paper cut and poking myself with a pencil in the courtroom.

So now I was in the streets of San Juan Puerto Rico as a combatant against the Machia

terrorists in the war for liberation.

We learned at one point that the Machia terrorists

had a plot to assassinate an FBI agent.

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