Undercover stings siphoned off drug millions
Cartels and money laundering part of job, says ex-cop who got his start in Regina
When Chris Mathers first came to Regina in the 1970s, it was for training at the RCMP Depot Division. He returned this week to speak about his life as an undercover agent, helping drug cartels and terrorists clean their dirty money.
Addressing the CFA Society Saskatchewan’s annual forecast dinner — a meeting of the local investment and financial adviser community — Mathers spoke about cybersecurity as well as his time posing as a gangster, buying drugs and setting up illegitimate fronts for massive criminal enterprises to launder their money.
Mathers worked most of his career undercover for the RCMP before heading south to work for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Customs Service. But he got his start working the streets as a new recruit.
“I was on the street buying drugs ... but as I grew older, I started to do a little bit more sophisticated stuff,” he said during an interview Tuesday prior to his speech.
The “sophisticated stuff ” meant money laundering. Millions of dollars from drug traffickers and extremists the world over have to be cleaned through quasi-legitimate means.
“I’d pretend to be a legitimate business man and people would come with their dirty money and we’d pretend to launder it for them,” he said. The operations Mathers headed took the dirty money and placed it into an account that the RCMP, or his respective agency at the time, could monitor.
It was far more involved than the pop-culture staple of a restaurant used as a front, but the principle remains the same — just much, much bigger. A coffee import company, a few investment companies, import-export businesses were all fronts for these investigations.
Mathers was the face of the businesses. He worked in an office, wore a suit and pretended to launder millions in ill-gotten gains. He and his associates attracted business by claiming they had confederates in the financial industry who would be able to move the money around and make its source untraceable. Mathers did have those connections — but they knew he was a cop.
“We’d give them a statement every month of all the stocks that they held but they didn’t hold anything. That money was already in the Receiver General’s account,” he explained.
In his early days, Mather’s clients included the Cali drug cartel and notorious drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel. “Pretty much everybody that was doing bad things, we were doing business with them,” he said. “And it wasn’t all dope, it was everything from telephone frauds, boiler room frauds, to stolen cars to big safe attacks.”
But during the investigations and stings, money had to be sent back to countries and groups involved in illegal activity to quell any suspicion of Mathers and his operation. “Every dollar you send to these foreign countries aids corruption, murder, drug trafficking and so you don’t want to be sending too much of that because then you’re just helping them,” he said.
“So our rule was for every dollar we sent down there, we had to seize five ultimately, or more. And that’s what we did.”
After his undercover work — and after, according to Mathers, staying in a safe house for a number years after a group tried to kill him — he went to work at KPMG’S forensic division, where he was promoted to president of KPMG
Corporate Intelligence Inc. He focused on investigating and preventing organized crime from entering businesses streams, money laundering and terrorist financing. As a consultant, Mathers also focuses on cybersecurity, as finance is conducted online and new scams circulate on the Internet.
His advice to stay safe online, includes making a password that strays far from the ‘word and number’ formula. Hackers are able to decipher and crack those passwords easily according to Mathers. Instead, think of a poem, a song, or passage committed to memory and use the first letter of each word in a sentence, with capitals and symbols thrown in the mix. It’s not infallible, but it’s enough of a deterrent to make scammers move on from your account and onto another.
“Why do you secure your house? Essentially you secure your house so that they’ll break into the neighbours,” said Mathers. “But if the neighbour secures his house and so on and so on, you push them right out of the neighbourhood.”