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September 18, 2025 16 mins

George Noory and author Ian Frisch discuss the career of legendary FBI agent Martin Suarez who spent more than 20 years undercover working with Colombian drug cartels, why the war on drugs was ineffective, and what would happen to the gangs if all drugs were legalized.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
iHeartRadio and.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you,
Ian Fish with us. Since this book is inside the
cartel Ian the undercover agent Martin Suarez was on boats
a lot of times where they would drop ship the
cocaine from planes and then they'd go and pick it up. Well,
just recently the president has ordered the military to attack

(00:28):
and blow up cartel ships that they believe are coming
from the cartels Venezuela. Especially, what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 3 (00:38):
Well, I think, first and foremost it shows how timely
this book is. But I think that President Trump's current
efforts against the cartels are also indicative of the warren drugs,
you know, and kind of the quagmire that has become.
And Martin and I spoke about this because I asked him, mysel, well,

(01:00):
what are your thoughts, I mean, you went undercover, you
risked your life for the war on drugs? Did you
make a dent like talk to me about that? And
his response always was that his role as an undercover
agent thwarting the cartels was in his mind a very
noble one. But he understood too in the big picture

(01:22):
that he's just one guy going after a couple core groups.
But the way that the global drug trade words is
that it is self regenerating, and in order to truly
dismantle it, quote unquote, a war really needs to start,
and that was his point of view. He's like, the
Warren Drugs was never won because it never really started. However,

(01:45):
when you look at what President Trump is doing now,
complete over tactics where you show the public the video
of what you just did isn't necessarily the most fruitful
approach either. If you hold a hammer, everything's going to
be a nail, and sometimes that doesn't work. And talking
to Martin, he said that you need a blend of

(02:06):
covert tactics like what he did, overt tactics similar to
maybe what Trump is doing now, but also diplomatic sometimes gorilla.
You know, you need a complete three hundred and sixty
degree long term approach and mindset to this problem. But again,
the war on drugs is a political machine. It changes

(02:28):
with every new administration. Certainly the Warren Drugs changed after
nine to eleven, So there are a lot of factors
in here that can influence how strong the cartels are
at any given time, and then there's also consumption habits
of Americans and the you know, the the the availability
of highly addictive chemicals. I mean, you look at fentanyl now,

(02:51):
it's much it's a much different animal than than than
than the cocaine trade was even thirty years ago. Although
I will say that more cocaine is being distributed throughout
the world than when Pablo Escobar was in power. So
it's a it's a tough and complicated situation to wrap
your head around.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
What do you think would happen if they legalized all
of this?

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Personally, I'm not too sure. Certainly, when you legalize a substance,
the black market becomes much less valuable. I think people
would would rather buy drugs through legal means. I don't

(03:36):
really know the societal implications of legalizing cocaine. I personally
think that cocaine is very harmful and addictive, and I
would assume that legalizing it may open up the door
for people who wouldn't otherwise use the substance to use it.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
And that's it used to be legal years ago.

Speaker 3 (03:57):
Well, yeah, and you saw I mean, you hear stories
from the early nineteen hundreds arly eighteen hundreds, where this
would almost be a pharmaceutical drug. And I don't really
think that the results were all that good, you know.
I think they even used it as like a local
anesthetic at some point. But to me, it's like, you know,
I'm not sure you want to just try to legalize
cocaine to help solve the cartel problem. I think Colombian

(04:20):
drug cartels operate as if they're fortune five hundred companies
who have political power, who have you know, a lot
of local sway in how communities are structured. It's not
just people creating a product. They're much bigger than that.

Speaker 2 (04:36):
Now, how organized based on your work with Marty, was
the cartel.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
Like I just said, they operated as if they were
a fortune five hundred company, and the hierarchy of the
cartel was was written in stone. I mean, for example,
the Median cartel, you had Pablo Escobar, who is basically
the CEO, and then you had a series of deputies
like the Ochoa brothers, who had their own territory, They

(05:07):
had their own sort of connections in terms of trafficking
and money laundering. It was almost like a franchise e
model where you had individual drug lords who did their
own thing, but pledged allegiance and used the resources available
through a certain cartel, whether it was the Mediine cartel
or the Cali cartel or the North Coast cartel. But

(05:28):
this wasn't like a haphazard sort of approach. These were
structures and techniques that were very well thought through and
utilized by a lot of people simultaneously, which gave them
a lot of power when it came to unilateral movements. Okay,

(05:49):
we're going to move our cocaine through Mexico now, or
versus the Caribbean, and this is how the state side
distributors are going to work. And here are the people
who are going to launder our money. It was all
very wealthy and very well organized.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
When you were interviewing Marty for the book, were there
any moments that you went to yourself and just said,
oh my gosh, I can't believe this stuff.

Speaker 3 (06:12):
Of course, I mean, I think I've become slightly desensitized
to it over the years of writing this book. But
when you kind of just break it down to the
bare essentials of this story and understanding how singular his
approach was. I mean, for example, you had mentioned that
posing as a smuggler, Martin convinced the cartel to do

(06:33):
an air drop at sea, and in one of these
air drops, the Columbian Cartel's plane flew overhead and discharged
five hundred million dollars worth of cocaine into the ocean,
and Martin picked it up with fellow undercover agents by hand,
threw the bales of cocaine into their little boat, brought

(06:56):
the cocaine to a bigger boat which was then routed
to Miami, and the undercover operations still going on, and
they actually give the cocaine to the State side distributor,
and that's when they make their bust. Just to understand
how incredible that is, Like that would never happen today.

(07:16):
You could never do that. And beyond that, that's just
like that's that's chapter one of this book. I mean,
when Martin became a money launderer, the FBI made a decision.
They said, you know, when we did the smuggling stuff
and the cocaine distribution, not a gram hit the street.
It all got seized at opportune times. That deflected blame

(07:38):
from Martin, but also again kept the drugs off the street.
So they made sure that his undercover legend was intact
while also seizing the drugs, but with money laundering, the
only way to truly know how the apparatus worked was
to allow the narco dollars to go back into the
underground economy. So when Martin was launch ring money for

(08:00):
the cartel, they weren't seizing that cash. They were letting
that cash actually be laundered so they could find out
how the cartels did it. And that was remarkable to
me because you know, that was a huge public relations
risk for the FBI if the if the operation went
sideways and top brass at the Bureau was you know,

(08:20):
strutted out in front of Congress, they would have to
answer some some pretty tough questions. But from an operational standpoint,
and Martin explained this to me that it was it
was a necessity for them to really understand where this
money went. A sale of cocaine happened, the cash is
then given to certain people, where does it go from there?

(08:42):
And for the FBI to allow the narco dollars to
go back into this underground economy was remarkable to me,
and again something that would never happen today.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
That's true. What kept the bundles of cocaine that were
dumped into the ocean from sinking.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
So cocaine is a powder and enough air can get
into the bales when they're packed in Colombia to keep
them afloat in the ocean, they would not sink, and
they were wrapped in a certain way where water would
not intrude onto the drugs and one ruin them, but
also be allowed the bail to sink. But the cartel

(09:23):
would do these sorts of drops also in the middle
of the night, and they're not really using huge flashlights
or anything. They would draw attention to themselves. So they
had a fixed glowsticks to the bales. So when they
come out of the airplane, Martin's and his little bow,
he can see the bales falling from the sky with

(09:44):
the glow sticks, and then when they hit the water,
you can see just a line of glow sticks. And
he would navigate his boat slowly and pick one up
at a time and just follow the glow sticks.

Speaker 2 (09:54):
In the middle of the night. How low did the
pilots get there ian before?

Speaker 3 (10:00):
Pretty low, I think that they could. These are dual
propeller planes, so they can handle some cargo but still
be maneuverable, and they would come down pretty low, probably
like maybe one hundred feet or so, which also gives
them a little bit more accuracy in terms of where
they're going to drop the bails, because you really don't

(10:20):
want to have a kind of all over the place
type course. You want to be able to drop the
bails in a straight line so the retriever can pick
them up quickly, but also so you don't lose one
or two in the in the ocean's current, because it
would take a long time to find one if it

(10:40):
if it was kind of tossed indiscriminately.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
In your opinion, did Martin's work make a dent in
the cocaine traffic?

Speaker 3 (10:50):
I think at that time it did. I don't think
it did. Like you know, I say, oh, you know,
Martin smuggled a billion dollars worth of cocaine, and all
of that cocaine was eventually seized by the FBI. You
think to yourself, oh my god, that's so much. It
really wasn't. I mean, at that time, the cartels were

(11:14):
importing billions of dollars of cocaine every month, and it
took Martin years to smuggle and seize just one billion's worth.
But I will say that Martin's greatest contribution to the
war on drugs and the war on these cartels at
that time was more psychological. And that's what I mean

(11:39):
when you when I speak about the current situation with
the cartels, is that sometimes you need a more philosophical approach,
a more holistic approach, in that it's not just about
seizing drugs, it's about destabilizing the cartels from the inside.
And I think that was Martin's greatest achievement in that

(12:00):
when he was doing these operations and all the cocaine
was getting seized and then people are getting arrested, the
cartel was kind of spinning around in a sort of
funhouse mirror sort of situation where they didn't know what
was up what was down anymore. They didn't know who
they could trust, and that creates internal turmoil within the cartel.
They start pointing fingers at each other, They start pointing

(12:21):
fingers at their rivals, They start pointing fingers at an
associate or another group that they're working with and saying,
are you guys screwing us over? Are you guys lying
to us? And that's really what can do the most
damage to these cartels. It's not really the drugs being seized,
it is the destabilizing effect of Martin's role as an

(12:44):
undercover agent that made the greatest impact.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Where did the cartel get the product to begin with?
Did they grow it themselves or did they import it?
How did they get it?

Speaker 1 (12:55):
So?

Speaker 3 (12:55):
Columbia and much of South America is prime prime growing
geography for cocaine, and cocaine is derived from the coca plant.
And a lot of these high level drug lords that
align themselves with specific cartels, they owned a lot of land.

(13:20):
A lot of these very successful drug lords in the
nineteen eighties and nineties were previously rice farmers, different types
of farmers who owned thousands of acres of Columbian jungle.
But when cocaine became the number one export out of Columbia,
they transformed this land into cultivation fields where they could
grow cocoa in a super remote area and manufacture the

(13:45):
drug without fear of reprisal. And then from there, once
a drug is manufactured, it can be transported locally to
a basically packaging facility, and then once the bales are
to go, the powers that be at the cartel could say, okay,

(14:05):
these this shipment's going to go here to this person.
You know, that's where the kind of buying and selling
really begins. But the most successful drug lords made their
own cocaine because they could control every step of the process.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Did the Colombian governments just turn their cheek the other way.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
Pretty much? Yeah, In my opinion, I think that they
kind of came to realize that they didn't have the
resources to to necessarily remove the role of a cartel
in Colombian society. And what I mean by that is
the irony of all of this, too, is that narco

(14:48):
dollars really did come to prop up the Colombian economy.
A lot of the money that the cartels made entered
the above ground economy in some way or another, whether
it's through real estate development or using merchandise as a
money lundering tactic and having that merchandise enter the above
ground economy for cheaper than what it normally would be.

(15:12):
You know, if you removed the role of the cartels
in the Colombian economy, you might have some serious problems.
And I think that the Colombian government perhaps thought that
the devil we know is better than the devil, we
don't know, and that sort of guided their decision to
try to work with the cartels and create some equilibrium

(15:34):
with them still operating in the country while trying to
mitigate the worst parts of cartel rule, you know, extradicial killings, violence,
this sort of thing over corruption, but trying to I guess,
utilize the better parts of the drug trade, if you

(15:54):
could call it that, to make Columbia a decent place
to live for as citizenry.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
And how do we know that they weren't signon partners
with the government.

Speaker 3 (16:05):
Well, we kind of do know in some respects that
Narco dollars had entered the political establishment in pretty over ways.
There was a couple scandals throughout the eighties and nineties
where it was revealed that the Cali Kartel and the
Mediane cartel had donated money to political campaigns. I think

(16:31):
that was a little bit.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
More rare as you got higher.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
Up the food chain in the Colombian political establishment, there
was certainly more common regionally.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
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