Listen to Keith Bulfin’s story on the True Spies podcast The Reluctant Narco

An undercover US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent has a shelf-life of about six months on an operation - after that, they are pulled out or they’re dead. Keith Bulfin was hoping for the former when he was imprisoned for money laundering and later found himself dragged kicking and screaming into the US war on drugs.
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Bulfin was an Australian banker, an unwilling DEA recruit facing an ultimatum. If he was successful, Keith would have a shot at returning to his old life. If not, he wouldn’t have to worry about where he’d be living.

While Keith Bulfin’s book, Undercover: A Novel of Life, is billed as ‘fiction’, Bulfin assured the SPYSCAPE True Spies podcast that everything he shared in the interview was a true story.

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Keith Bulfin: the reluctant narco‍

Keith grew up in New Zealand and was running an investment bank in Melbourne, Australia in the ‘90s when he met a client named ‘Gomez’ (a pseudonym), a ‘coffee importer’ with plantations in Central and South America. Gomez wanted to put down roots in Australia and was in search of a clever banker to invest his considerable wealth. As it transpired, Gomez had also run a fishing co-op on the Gulf of Mexico that shipped its catch to Florida between layers of cocaine. With the money he pocketed, Gomez bought two banks which, according to the US Department of Justice, were used to wash the drug money.

Before long, Gomez was on the run and landed in Australia with a false passport and a need for a financier who could turn his drug money into legal tender. Enter Keith Bulfin. At the time, Gomez was under surveillance by the Australian authorities, the US DEA, and the Mexican police. Before long, there was a knock on Bulfin’s door early one morning before the sun rose over Melbourne’s sprawling suburbs.

“They decided to ask if I would be willing to assist in becoming involved with the banking and the drug cartels in Mexico City,” Bulfin recalled. “And I told them that I would not be entertaining such an idea.” 

Apparently, this was the wrong answer.

“They said, ‘Well, you will change your mind. We’ll investigate everything you've done over the last 10 years and we'll find something.’ Which they did. And they said I was involved with a conspiracy to defraud over a valuation on a casino and also a theme park.” 
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Recruiting a DEA agent in prison‍

Bulfin soon found himself in a maximum-security prison serving three years alongside Gomez and Gomez’s brother-in-law, who was also linked to the Mexican drug cartels. The three men knew a lot about finance and it created a bond. Drugs and money go hand in hand as the cartels control the cocaine market worldwide and handle between $240bn to $500bn a year. 

While that may sound like a lot of money, there are also a lot of bribes to be paid out to operate freely - politicians, police, and government officials throughout Central and South America all want a taste, and that’s just the start of the money trail. Luckily, Keith Bulfin knew quite a lot about how to disperse cash - how to launder it, how to spend it discreetly, and how to invest it in fine art and other gold-plated schemes.

It was the perfect CV for an aspiring cartel banker and it led to Keith working with his new friends on the outside. What the drug traffickers didn’t know was that Keith was now also a DEA agent - a reluctant narco facing deportation to New Zealand, a man so desperate to recover his Melbourne home and return to his life that he’d agreed to work as an undercover agent infiltrating the Mexico and Colombia cartels.

In fact, Keith would end up working undercover between 1997 and 2004, long past his six-month DEA expiration date.
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Keith Bulfin & Essex Finance, bankers to the narcos‍

Keith soon found himself living in San Diego where he claims the Drug Enforcement Agency set up a company, Essex Finance, just north of the Mexican border with a company registration in the British Virgin Islands and three years of tax returns. It was the perfect vehicle to launder money. Keith could easily commute to Mexico City to meet with cartel contacts and return home to pay off corrupt judges or other officials. By funneling cash through a series of anonymous bank accounts, Keith could arrange big paydays that would be hard to detect.

“So I would make a phone call to San Diego and say: ‘I have funds to bank.’ They would nominate the bank and I'd go to the bank and feed the cash through the system and then transfer from that bank - a wire transfer - to a nominee bank account in London or in France, Germany,” Keith explained. “I would transfer to one account, to another bank, to another bank, so I would set up nominee companies, and eventually, the money would arrive at the destination where the cartels wanted their money.” 

It seemed like a safe arrangement - sufficiently complicated that it would be difficult for the nominee banks to unravel what was unfolding. Plus Keith was working for the DEA, so he figured they had his back. 
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Keith Bulfin: the reluctant narco

In the multi-billion dollar narcotics business, however, if no one’s out to get you, you’re not worth dealing with. While they were happy to work with him, the cartels did not trust Keith. He could not afford to make a mistake, which is exactly what happened when his DEA handlers decided Keith needed to bring another undercover agent with him to Mexico. 

“One thing I refused to do was to tape the conversations with the cartel leaders,” Keith said. “The US Department of Justice wanted tapes. Tapes were evidence for them. But I said to them: ‘It's too dangerous, I carry taping devices and get caught with that, I'm immediately executed.’”

Naturally, this didn’t sit well with the DEA. From their perspective, they needed tapes to get convictions and if Keith wouldn’t do it, someone else would. A DEA bruiser by the name of Al was brought into the operation. His job was to wear a wire during the next cartel meeting in Mexico. Keith knew that if it all went wrong, both of them were dead. The prospect seemed more and more likely as the days passed.

“Al didn't want to listen to what I had to say,” Keith recalled. “And then he arrived late at the airport. He was hungover. So when he got on the plane, he slept. So I didn't have an opportunity to brief him or to tell him anything at all, and when we arrived in Mexico City, he simply, after we left Customs, disappeared.”

“The next time I saw him was five minutes to 10 am the following morning when I had a meeting with two other bankers acting for a cartel group.”

To hear more, listen to Keith Bulfin’s True Spies podcast The Reluctant Narco.