The Infiltrator: A Drug Story

 

THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

The Infiltrator (for those who are not already familiar with it), is a movie about a very high level, very intense, very lengthy sting operation carried out by the Drug Enforcement Agency in the 1980s.  It stars Bryan Cranston as a real life U.S. Customs agent, Robert Mazur.  Over a five-year period, he plays the role of a mob-connected, very successful money launderer who, step-by-step, manages to infiltrate the cocaine distribution network of the then drug king-pin, the Colombian Pablo Escobar.  He has two partners, one a street-wise, punky looking character played by John Leguizamo, and the other a female rookie agent (Diane Kruger), who plays the part of Mazur’s fiancée.  Her role is critical in creating the final sting-of-stings at which a whole bunch of high, medium, and low members of the drug gang are rounded up and eventually sent to prison.  Of course, if the particular drug in which they were dealing was legal like, let’s say, alcohol, the “drug gang” would be known as the “distributors,” as in, let us say, Budweiser Beer.

It happens that Budweiser is a major beer distributor as well as a major brewer.  It was originally founded, interestingly enough by a Sudeten German family in what was in the 19^th century the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The Sudeten Germans were later to provide for the unopposed entry of Nazi Germany (of course facilitated by the British and the French who were most interested in keeping the Nazis focused East, towards the Soviet Union) into what had become Czechoslovakia) into Western Czechoslovakia (and subsequently all of it).  Budweiser is currently in the process of attempting to use its evermore dominant position in beer distribution (comparable to that of Escobar for cocaine) to put out of business the rapidly growing family of “craft-beer” brewers (as Escobar did in gradually putting out of business the smaller growers and distributors of cocaine).  Such is the similarity in the power of distribution between the “licit” and “illicit” drug industries.

The movie itself is, in my view, brilliantly done.  Bryan Cranston is a long-time character actor who happened to come to prominence playing the lead in a TV series —Breaking Bad—about the manufacture of and trade in, coincidentally, another one of what I call the RMADs (recreational mood-altering drugs): dexamethasone.  He has now burst into stardom, portraying among others, the black-listed Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  But all of the actors are fine, with Benjamin Bratt playing superbly as one of Escobar’s top lieutenants, who happened to live in the States.

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Source: The Greanville Post