Behind Enemy Lines: Lydia Bulas's Life Fighting the Cartel

Lydia Bulas is the president of Lydia Bulas & Associates, a firm she has led since 2002, conducting independent reviews of anti-money laundering functions for banks and money services businesses. Her career highlights include playing a crucial role in the investigation that led to the arrest of Pablo Escobar's right-hand man and the first indictment of the Great American Bank of Dade County. Lydia has also received several accolades for her contributions, including a Drug Enforcement Award and two South Florida Impact Awards. She is a graduate of the University of Miami with a BBA in accounting and is a certified anti-money laundering specialist. 

On this episode of Zoomers 2 Boomers we discuss the fascinating career of criminal investigator Lydia Bulas. We discuss her background growing up in Cuba and fleeing to Miami as a child and how that led her to pursue a law enforcement career with the IRS. Lydia shares some of her most challenging cases over 15 years, including stopping drug-running operations for Pablo Escobar's cartel through an undercover sting. She also gives insights into her experiences with interrogations and going undercover herself to help take down high-level cartel members. 

“I saw so many drug addicts in hospitals dying, and I didn't want that for my daughter, so I made an effort to do whatever I could to stop it.” - Lydia Bulas

This week on Zoomers 2 Boomers

• What made Lydia decide to pursue a career in law enforcement
• How the drug trade is different today than it was in the 1980s
• Whether Miami is still ground zero for money laundering
• Some of the most challenging cases that Lydia worked on and how she and her colleagues helped damage Pablo Escobar’s operations
• Lydia’s experience acting as an undercover agent, along with other female agents, and how they infiltrated the money laundering gangs 
• How agents hone their interrogation skills
• Lydia’s role in the operation against Luis Javier Castano-Ochoa,  a lawyer and politician believed to be the Medellin cartel’s frontman
• What kind of tactics Lydia used to follow suspects without being detected
• How much evidence they needed to collect before making an arrest, and some examples of when Lydia was able to do that 
• How Lydia’s job impacted on her personal life and her relationships with her family
• Why Lydia would recommend that young people go into law enforcement

Connect with Lydia Bulas:

• Lydia Bulas on LinkedIn 
• The three women who brought down the Medellín cartel 

Connect with Disarming Data:

• Paige Biderman on LinkedIn 
• David Biderman on LinkedIn