One Piece of the Jigsaw — Keith Bulfin on Cartels, Covert Banking, and the Art of Following the Money

Most people who end up in a warehouse in Mexico City, surrounded by Colombian cartel enforcers arguing about whether to execute them, don't make it to a second conversation.

Keith Bulfin does. And in this follow-up episode, he picks up exactly where Part One left off — three years served in a maximum security US prison, a one-way flight to San Diego, and a covert banking operation embedded inside one of the most powerful criminal organisations on earth.

This is a conversation about survival, intelligence, and what happens when the people who are supposed to keep you alive turn out to be the least reliable people in the room.

What Three Years in Maximum Security Actually Teaches You

Keith went into prison as part of a DEA operation — the goal was to earn the trust of two Mexican cartel members being held there, so that he could follow them straight into the organisation on release. The strategy worked. What nobody warned him about was everything else.

White-collar offenders don't go to maximum security. Keith did. That mismatch made him a target from day one.

"There's so much jealousy within the prison. People want to stand over you, think you've got money — they'll threaten you. And unless you pay them or bribe your way out, they'll attack you."

He was stabbed twice. Beaten over the head with a broom handle. Then, while recovering in hospital, something unexpected happened: the neo-Nazi faction in the prison assumed — because he was blonde and blue-eyed — that he was one of them. They started protecting his back. In a place built on threat and leverage, Keith had stumbled into cover he didn't ask for.

The hardest stretch was two months in solitary lockdown: 23 and a half hours in a cell, 30 minutes out. He developed claustrophobia. His coping mechanism was to lie flat on the floor and press his face to the gap under the door — breathing whatever air came through.

"I felt I just couldn't cope being in that small cell. But it was all part of the experiment."

And it worked. The cartel members vouched for him. The moment he was released, he was on a plane to San Diego.

Arriving in Mexico City

Going from a maximum security cell to running a covert bank for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico City is not a transition with much of a middle ground.

"It's like stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire."

Keith had almost no briefing on how the cartels actually operated. The DEA's rationale, he says, was that the less he knew, the more naturally he'd stumble through — and the more convincingly he'd read as genuine. What that meant in practice was that he arrived largely blind.

His first meeting with the son of a major cartel leader came with a motorcade: a lead car with four bodyguards, three bodyguards directly behind Keith in the vehicle, six motorcycles each carrying a driver and a shooter — positioned to extract the group if ambushed. When they arrived at the father's office, Keith was stripped to his socks, swept for recording devices, and made to leave every item outside the room.

"I knew from that moment onwards I could never wear a wire or try to record any conversation with them."

The cartel operated on a simple principle when it came to trust: if you vouched for someone and they turned out to be an agent, they didn't come for that person first. They came for you. Vouching was a bet with your life as the stake.

The father ran everything through coded language — the "sugar industry" meant cocaine. Operations in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia. He offered Keith 900,000 in cash that day, and $9 million the following week.

"Coming from investment banking, when people talk about $9 million in cash, it's hard to fathom. But then you realise what these people earn."

At peak, Keith estimates the five major Mexican families were generating revenues of over $200 billion annually. Today, he puts that figure closer to $400–500 billion — more than the combined revenue of Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.

They Know Everything About You

One of the most unsettling passages in this conversation is Keith's description of how the cartels monitored him. They weren't just watching his movements — they already knew his children's school, which classroom his wife worked in, who his friends were, where he had dinner the previous night.

The questioning style was deliberate. A cartel leader would already know the answers before asking — and would ask anyway, watching for inconsistency.

"You can never tell them a lie. Never. Because they know exactly what's going on."

And it went both ways. Back in San Diego, the DEA would run him through the exact same debriefing — same questions, same sequence, sometimes followed by a lie detector test. He was relaying every transaction not once but twice, sometimes three or four times, to two sets of people who both already knew what had happened.

The Embassy That Couldn't Help Him

Before his next trip to Mexico City, Keith decided to test his emergency extraction plan. The DEA had told him: if anything goes wrong, go to the American Embassy, ask for the DEA attaché, and you'll be pulled out.

He called his controller to say he was running a dummy exercise and went to the embassy. What he found was a kilometre-long queue of Mexicans applying for visas, a US Marine at the gate who refused to let him in because he wasn't American, and — eventually — a DEA attaché who arrived wearing his badge openly, walked straight into a busy café, called out to the staff by name, and proceeded to sit with his foot up on a stool, revolver visible at his ankle.

"He's advertising the fact he's a DEA agent in a city where the drug cartels are wandering around. He could be knocked off by someone just following him back."

Keith rang his controller from outside. She was embarrassed. He had proven what he needed to prove: if the cartels were following him that day, he would have been shot at the front gate while arguing with a Marine. The extraction plan was worthless.

The Warehouse

The most dangerous moment in Keith's time in Mexico wasn't a chase or a shootout. It was a meeting in a warehouse where he sat across from Colombian representatives who were openly debating whether to execute him.

The operation had collapsed. An agent brought in to support Keith — a man Keith had flagged as unprepared — had made critical mistakes. Blood was spilled. Keith had to abort and flee Mexico. Then he went back.

"I knew there was a 50/50 chance I would be killed. But if I went back and put myself in front of them — they would execute me, but not my family."

His Mexican contacts sat alongside him at the table and argued on his behalf. The Colombians argued back: it was a matter of principle. He had been part of an operation that cost them. The money had been recovered, but the conversation kept returning to execution.

Then one of Keith's prison-forged allies cut across the room with a single play: before you kill him, you owe us commission. We organised the banking. Pay us.

The Colombians refused. The friend held his ground: if you won't pay commission, let him live — he's our commission. He's our banker.

The Colombians looked at Keith, looked at each other, calculated that the commission dispute was worth more attention than a killing, and walked out.

"Until that point, I thought I was going to be executed."

Outside the warehouse, his friends hosed him down in the cold night air. He had lost all fluid from his body. For days afterwards, he says, he couldn't locate himself in time.

After Mexico: From Bahrain to Berlin

Keith's work didn't stop with the DEA operation. In a later chapter — based in Bahrain — he found himself tracking Iranian money flows being used to fund Shia unrest in the region, then following the trail to Europe.

The money was moving via a Syrian banker working for Iranian interests, channelled through a romantic relationship with a policewoman at the German embassy. Keith befriended her, tracked her to Berlin, and watched as she passed a diplomatic bag from a café near the zoo to a pair of motorcyclists.

He pressed for a formal meeting with German intelligence — and discovered the policewoman had been working for them all along. She wasn't being manipulated. She was the operation.

"I thought that was an amazing operation. Here I was witnessing the whole thing from the outside."

The Jigsaw Method

Keith describes his investigative approach using a framework borrowed from a former FBI deputy director. Law enforcement, he explains, needs 50% of the jigsaw pieces before they can build a case. Intelligence agencies can work with 25%. Keith says he needs one piece — or just an outline of what the picture might be.

"You give me an outline of what the problem is. Can you paint a picture? Because once you've got the picture, you can follow."

That skill — built across decades of covert banking, cartel proximity, and intelligence work — is now what corporations and family offices hire him for. A Perth-based Bitcoin trading company lost over $12 million to a Ukrainian group that had planted surveillance equipment in their offices, quietly acquired their wallet passwords during a fake due diligence visit, and vanished on a flight to Europe over a weekend. Keith's contacts traced them. He recovered roughly 50% of the stolen funds.

"You need leverage to get it back. In all cases, we've managed to negotiate — give us some money back, and there'll be no further drama."

The Bigger Picture: Following the Money

The cleanest, most underreported story in global crime, Keith argues, is money laundering at scale. The UN estimates that over $4.4 trillion moves through the global banking system in laundered funds annually. The US Department of Justice puts the American portion at over a trillion dollars.

Digital currency has made it significantly easier. A digital bank can be established in Dubai for $600,000–$700,000. Criminal organisations are now structuring themselves around securitised tokens — financial instruments that don't carry the same regulatory burden as listed equities.

"The cost to governments of managing global funding — compliance, regulation — is already in excess of $5 trillion. And it's going to get worse."

His prescription is blunt: forget chasing shipments and trafficking units. Attack the balance sheet.

"If they don't have money, they can't operate. Seize the financial infrastructure. That's where you stop it."

Quick Fire

What gives you joy: Swimming every day.

Mantra: Be strong.

Favourite book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Words to your younger self: Be strong.

What you want more of: Enjoy life. That's the most important thing.

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