An alleged smuggler to Colombia's cartels had a secret ally: the DEA
[May 17, 2025]
By JOSHUA GOODMAN and JIM MUSTIAN
MIAMI (AP) — 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.
[to top of second column]
|
This undated photo provided by the Colombian National Police in a
March 2024 document shows Diego Marín. (Colombian National Police
via AP)
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.”
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
