Reported by Thomas Brewster

(Excerpt shared below. To read full report, go to: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/08/19/the-wiretap-the-dea-laundered-19-million-of-cartel-drug-money-into-cash-and-crypto/)

For over a decade, the DEA ran a money laundering operation for a Columbian narcotics trafficking cartel. In total, the agency and its sources took in $19 million in drug money, funnelling cash into bank and cryptocurrency accounts controlled by sources, agents and the cartel. At the end of it all, two heroin traffickers were charged as a direct result of the operation.

That’s according to both a source familiar with the investigation and a recently-unsealed seizure warrant, which shows how the DEA was deeply embedded in the cartel’s attempts to evade law enforcement, both in shifting old school fiat currencies and digital alternatives. The DOJ declined to comment.

While two arrests may not seem like a good return for so many years of effort, former federal agents told Forbes that there were likely tangential investigations that benefitted from the undercover operation.

The DEA’s investigation began in 2009 when it had sources infiltrate various networks of money launderers across the U.S., Colombia and Mexico, all of them affiliated with a Cali, Colombia, drug trafficking organization referred to by the DEA as the Pecoso. Likened by the DOJ to the Sinaloa cartel, it had mostly focused on large-scale cocaine shipments. To conceal the source of their income, it recruited individuals who would exchange or deposit cash across different accounts.