An alleged smuggler to Colombia's cartels had a secret ally: the DEA

MIAMI — In the sordid annals of Colombia's underworld, Diego Marín stood out as the ultimate survivor.

Time and again, the reputed henchman for the Cali cartel evaded capture — or worse fates — as he built a money-laundering network stretching across four continents. He did so, authorities have alleged, with ruthlessness, street smarts and a willingness to bribe a slew of South American police officers and politicians.

All the while, Marín had an even more powerful ally in his corner: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

For years, the elite narcotics agency claimed it was investigating the Colombian importer, telling the U.S. Justice Department he was among DEA's top targets. In reality, the relationship was more fraught, with Marín briefly signed up as an informant even as he assiduously corrupted agents with a movable feast of prostitutes, fine dining and expensive gifts, an Associated Press investigation found.

In return, at least one of those agents helped Marín launder money and smuggle contraband — throwing law enforcement off his tracks. As the DEA looked the other way, Marín's business flourished into a criminal empire that generated up to $100 million a year, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

The AP's findings — based on interviews with current and former agents, as well as a trove of highly sensitive Justice Department files — offer an unprecedented glimpse into the fraud, shoddy oversight and profligate DEA spending that enabled Marín's ascent. The corruption was so extensive, the officials said, that it reminded them of one of the most infamous law enforcement scandals in U.S. history — the FBI's unscrupulous dealings with Whitey Bulger, the Boston mob boss.

''It's an embarrassment for the DEA,'' said retired Colombian Gen. Juan Carlos Buitrago, who spent years trying to take down Marín only to see his own career derailed by the pursuit. ''They ended up creating a monster.''

After decades in the shadows, Marín has recently become front-page news in Colombia, where he's been dubbed the ''Contraband Czar'' over bribery charges that led to his arrest last year in Spain. Among the revelations aired in Colombian media: Marín provided a private plane and an illegal $125,000 campaign donation to President Gustavo Petro.

Marín attorneys declined to comment. The DEA did not respond to requests for comment.

The revelations are the latest stain for an agency at a crossroads under President Donald Trump. DEA agents already have been redirected to assist in immigration enforcement, and the Justice Department is considering merging the DEA with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — a restructuring that could change how the U.S. fights the drug war.

‘Untouchable'

Marín, 62, learned to hustle from an early age. He was raised in Palestina, a western frontier town settled by devout Catholics who eked out a modest existence from the surrounding coffee farms. To help provide for his family, as a kid he sold candies in the town's plaza.

It's not precisely known how he got into the drug business. But it was sometime during Colombia's bloody cocaine wars, an era popularized by drug lord Pablo Escobar's infamous phrase of ''plata o plomo'': money or bullets.

His first brush with the law came in 1993, when he was arrested on accusations of hiding dope money in Colombia-bound home appliances for the leaders of the Cali cartel, Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, Escobar's main rivals. The evidence, obtained through wiretapped phone calls, tracked with DEA's own intelligence at the time that Marín was involved in drug trafficking, according to Colombian court records.

Colombian authorities declined to charge him and the case fell apart when a police officer — himself later convicted of leaking confidential information to the cartel — recanted his testimony against Marín.

In the ensuing years, the U.S. government records show, Marín sought to line the pockets of law enforcement. An FBI report from 2020 said Marín ''paid everyone off'' as he developed a niche in what's known as trade-based money laundering, a complex method of hiding and moving drug proceeds through the use of offshore shell companies and misvalued cargo shipments.

Even as he amassed a fortune, Marín was careful to eschew the narco bling of infamous drug lords. Few photographs are known to exist of him. He carefully avoided opening bank accounts and limited his electronic communications.

''He was pretty much untouchable,'' said Luis Sierra, a longtime U.S. criminal investigator who served as the Homeland Security Investigations attaché to Bogota. ''His tradecraft was compromising and corrupting Colombian — and even a few U.S. — officials.''

Buitrago, the Colombian general who investigated Marín, said he obtained reliable intelligence that Marín had offered $5 million to officials to have him ousted. Buitrago retired rather than accept an unwanted transfer.

''The message was clear: I had to get out of the way or I had to get out of the way,'' Buitrago said. ''It's incalculable the number of institutions he co-opted.''

Over time, authorities said, those relationships helped Marín emerge as a key money launderer to remnants of the defunct Cali cartel.

In that role, they said, contraband he smuggled would end up converted into pesos at Colombia's ubiquitous ''San Andresitos'': informal shopping areas packed full of budget-priced electronics and appliances. The name is a play on the Colombian island of San Andres, a duty-free zone in the Caribbean.

That sophisticated system was starting to draw scrutiny from law enforcement when Marín befriended an impressionable, up-and-coming DEA agent.

The corrupt agent

Special Agent José Irizarry — a former air marshal from Puerto Rico hired by the DEA in 2009 despite failing a polygraph — landed a coveted overseas post in Cartagena, Colombia, in part because he was bilingual. He met Marín in 2011, not long after the head of Colombia's police publicly identified Marín as a major smuggler.

The DEA's elite Special Operations Division also had pegged Marín as a major player. The agency even sought to classify him as a so-called Consolidated Priority Target, reserved for the most prolific drug traffickers and money launderers, according to hundreds of pages of Justice Department reports obtained by the AP. The investigative records, which include FBI interview notes, internal DEA memos and private text messages among agents, show Marín had been on the radar of at least five federal law enforcement agencies by the time Irizarry was charged.

But Irizarry believed Marín could be more valuable as an informant. ''Marín would come over and they would play cards and have girls over,'' according to an investigative IRS report. The meetings in Colombia were the first of many that would flout DEA rules forbidding agents from socializing with informants.

Soon, the government records show, Marín tried to compromise the DEA, showering Irizarry with expensive Hublot watches, luxury cars and a $750,000 condo.

Instead of providing Irizarry with intelligence, Marín gave him a Tiffany ring for his Colombian wife, as well as $5,000 in cash so the agent could buy a gift for his mistress. One internal government record said Marín ''viewed Irizarry like a son.''

Irizarry began protecting Marín and his organization, signing him up as an informant in 2013. ''He would pay me,'' Irizarry told the AP, ''and if he ever needed me, he had me.''

Irizarry helped Marín expand his empire, the government records show, by steering undercover DEA wire transfers to his associates, providing safe passage for containers full of contraband and even seeking to throw off other federal agencies.

Once, the records show, Irizarry told a suspicious federal investigator that ''people make up stories about Marín,'' calling him an ''open book.''

‘White Wash'

Irizarry avoided suspicion in part by exploiting a powerful Justice Department tool that long lacked proper oversight.

That tool, known as an Attorney General Exempt Operation, or AGEO, gives DEA authority to launder money on behalf of cartels with the goal of carrying out major seizures and arrests. Like actual money launderers, the DEA charges hefty commissions for the transactions — money that agents can spend more freely than government funds.

The DEA has long refused to discuss the stings, which involve setting up front companies, buying property and making wire transfers on behalf of cartels. But internal records show the number of such money laundering operations ballooned at one point to 53 around the country.

In 2011, Irizarry and other agents launched an AGEO to target Marín. In a memo spelling out the operation, they wrote to top Justice Department officials that they hoped to strike ''a devastating blow'' against Marín, whom they described as a ''primary launderer'' and investor in cocaine shipments leaving Colombia. They gave the operation a now-ironic name: White Wash.

Marín, however, was only a target on paper. And two years later, Irizarry and his Miami-based colleagues quietly converted him to an informant, a process that typically involves careful vetting and supervisory signoff.

All the while, income generated by White Wash allowed Irizarry and other agents to party around the world with Marín in what the agents described as a blur of booze, drugs, prostitutes and high-end dining.

''It was a very fun game that we were playing,'' Irizarry said.

The debauchery also included tickets to premier tennis and soccer matches in Spain, Caribbean cruises on a yacht seized from drug traffickers and lap dances at a strip club in the Dominican Republic paid for by a hitman nicknamed Iguana. The same ''sicario,'' Irizarry told authorities, boasted of killing 15 people on Marín's behalf.

The atmosphere was captured in a 42-second video clip obtained by the AP in which Marín can be seen lording over booze-filled revelry at a Madrid restaurant.

''It's your birthday, bro,'' an agent shouts to a colleague as a cellphone camera pans the private salon and a reggaeton beat livens the mood.

Also captured on camera is a longtime DEA informant who was charged last year in Texas with failing to pay taxes on more than $3.8 million in snitch money.

The clip was shot in April 2018, at the apex of Marín's power, when he had even become the godfather of Irizarry's twins. 

The agents running White Wash ultimately claimed that the operation generated 125 arrests and the seizure of $107 million in assets and nearly 9 tons of cocaine. However, a 216-page DEA audit in 2020 found White Wash's statistics were wildly inflated, and a memo prepared for then-DEA Administrator Anne Milgram described the operation as a ''mirage.''

For instance, a large chunk of the operation's total seized assets — some $30 million — was attributed to two stolen Van Gogh paintings recovered by Italian investigators in the villa of notorious drug trafficker Raffaele Imperiale. In the end, the audit attributed just five convictions to White Wash.

White Wash seized only $1.3 million in illicit funds — a little more than the $900,000 tab DEA agents racked up in travel, according to the audit. Paid DEA informants helped hide much of the partying, as agents would falsely book unneeded hotel rooms and charge alcohol and dinners to them.

To this day, the U.S. government is unable to account for another $19 million in DEA-laundered funds tied to White Wash.

The fall

After so many years with so little oversight, Irizarry grew overconfident.

In 2016, he tried to block authorities in Colombia from seizing a container of Marín's that was later revealed to contain $3 million in contraband liquor, cigarettes and clothing. Irizarry falsely told U.S. customs officials the shipment was part of an undercover DEA operation, the government records show.

Within days, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia kicked him out of the country. Irizarry was indicted in 2020 and pleaded guilty to 19 counts of money laundering. He's now serving a more than 12-year federal sentence. None of his colleagues was charged, but more than a dozen were either disciplined or investigated.

''I messed up,'' Irizarry told the AP. ''The indictment paints a picture of me, the corrupt agent that did this entire scheme. But it doesn't talk about the rest of DEA. I wasn't the mastermind.''

Marín's good fortune also appears to have run out. Last year, he was arrested in Spain on a Colombian warrant over bribes he allegedly paid to three public officials to provide safe passage for dozens of containers arriving each week, some of them from China. After being released on bail, he fled to Portugal, where he was re-arrested and is seeking asylum.

The allegations tying him to Petro, the Colombian president, recall some of the darkest episodes of that country's long fight against cocaine and corruption. The money he's accused of giving Petro's 2022 presidential campaign was received by a close aide, though the president has said he later ordered it returned.

''I know how hard Marín fought to get to me,'' Petro said on X in February, ''thinking I was like the others.''

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