Inside the Cartel: How an Undercover FBI Agent Smuggled Cocaine, Laundered Cash and Dismantled a Colombian...

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Martin Suarez Ian Frisch

Inside the Cartel

How an Undercover FBI Agent Smuggled Cocaine, Laundered Cash and Dismantled a Colombian Narco-Empire...

Martin Suarez, Ian Frisch

$34.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

HarperCollins
25 September 2025

Memoirs; True crime; True stories of heroism, endurance & survival; Drugs trade & trafficking; Organised crime

He smuggled over $1 billion worth of cocaine into the United States…

He laundered tens of millions of dollars of drug money…

He became one of the most trusted members of the Colombian drug cartels…

All while he was an undercover agent for the FBI.

Meet Martin Suarez, an FBI special agent who specialised in Colombian drug cartels and still holds the record for the longest time spent continuously undercover. As his alter ego, “Manny,” Martin followed the rules of the cartels: use the right lingo, drink the right whiskey, wear the right watch, and avoid the wrong questions. Learning on the fly, Suarez fell deeper and deeper into the world of Colombia’s most ruthless narco-empires.

At first, he stepped into the high-stakes game of smuggling mass quantities of cocaine into Miami for the Medellín Cartel—all of which was eventually seized. Thousands of kilos later, Martin became a money launderer for the North Coast Cartel, eventually exposing the Black Market Peso Exchange, an insidious criminal network that allegedly involved billionaire bankers, blue-chip American corporations, and even the president of Colombia himself.

Martin Suarez had two goals in life: to be a good family man, and make his own father proud—the man who inspired him to become an FBI agent in the first place. And so, he lived every day on the run between his two selves—Manny, the smooth-talking narco, and Martin, the upstanding lawman, trying not to lose himself in the underworld, put his family in harm’s way, or blow his cover.

Told with the gripping, pulse-racing action of a Hollywood blockbuster, Inside the Cartel is the story of how one man’s life’s work was the first strike in America's epic War on Drugs, and what happens when your cover is blown and the only thing protecting you is your will to survive.

By: Martin Suarez
With: Ian Frisch
Imprint: HarperCollins
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 270g
ISBN: 9780008807634
ISBN 10: 0008807639
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 25 September 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Ian Frisch has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, Playboy, Wired, and Vice. He has appeared on Bloomberg Television and speaks regularly at universities both about writing and entrepreneurship, and was a finalist for the 2016 Associated Press Sports Editors Explanatory Award. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews for Inside the Cartel: How an Undercover FBI Agent Smuggled Cocaine, Laundered Cash and Dismantled a Colombian Narco-Empire

""Inside the Cartel is proof that truth is always stranger than fiction. In the case of Martin Suarez’s incredible career as an FBI agent, the truth includes being the first to infiltrate Columbian drug cartels and holding the record for the longest time spent continuously undercover. This memoir is a stunning, riveting and extraordinary real-life story of life in the shadows."" – Don Winslow, #1 International Bestselling Author of The Cartel and The Border “Martin Suarez’s work and exploits as an FBI undercover agent is legendary inside the Bureau. Both exhilarating and frightening, Suarez’s account of infiltrating and dismantling one of the largest and most insidious narco empires in the world is breathtaking. The tradecraft on display will remind readers of a John Le Carre novel, but, shockingly, it’s all true!” – Robert K. Wittman, founder of the FBI Art Crime Team and New York Times bestselling author of Priceless and The Devil's Diary