Fast Feed

She Was the DEA’s Premier Crypto Detective. The Clues Led Straight to Her Own Family

58 min read

Summary

It’s morning. The money mule—or lavador, as the cartels call their pet launderers—steers into a sweltering strip mall parking lot somewhere in Miami. He pulls into an open space, looks around, opens his trunk. Before long the adjacent space is occupied by a bagman, who emerges with a package full of cash. A silent greeting, or maybe a quick pleasantry, and the bag goes into the trunk before the two men roar off in opposite directions. Easy as that, and several hundred thousand dollars changes hands. Glance at your phone and you might miss it. But 50 yards away, a chic, striking young Russian woman catches it all while idling in her blacked-out Pontiac. She looks like she’s on her way to the office, but she’s already at work. She’s Special Agent Lili Infante, a rookie DEA officer in the Miami unit, on her first field surveillance lead. The mission is a setup. The bagman is an undercover agent. Arrayed in position around the strip mall are a dozen or so heavily armed federal agents, all waiting on Lili’s command. Less than a year out of the academy, this is her first major test. She’s not just coordinating surveillance, but she’s taking “the eye,” meaning she is tracking the target so the entire unit can follow, undetected. So far everything is going to plan, which is a relief, because Lili is desperate to prove herself. She’s an Ivy League grad and a Russian immigrant, and she was the only woman in her academy class. In the most macho, all-American branch of US law enforcement, that’s three strikes against her, even in 2014. She’s sure everyone expects her to blow it. But Lili’s a lifelong overachiever. She volunteered to take the eye precisely because it’s a tough assignment nobody wants. “Target is on the move,” Lili calls into her radio. A dozen keys turn in their ignitions. Lili lets the target pass by, plus a few cars for cover, then slips into the line of commuters. On the radio: chatter from the team out of sight. “Target location?” Taking the eye is stressful. You have to stay close and not draw attention, or stay back and not lose visual, or both, and all the while be prepared for the target to get spooked. At any moment, they might rip a sudden U-turn or swerve onto an exit, trying to suss out a tail. Or pull a heat run, having been made. Then you’re in pursuit, calling in a helicopter, turning a dangerous situation more dangerous. Lili has seen it before, many times. What you want is for it to go smoothly. “Target direction?” Lili glances at her phone, trying to note the next cross street to report back to the team. She’s newish to Miami and doesn’t know this area well. It’s hard to know any area well when it all looks the same—a featureless landscape of wide, long blocks with medians, a strip mall on each corner at every intersection, fringed by endless palms. She doesn’t know the direction. This is why she’s consulting her phone. But the map app isn’t working. The radio is crackling with confusion. It’s not going smoothly. The problem is this is not her phone. It belongs to her husband, Luis. He’s also a DEA agent. And this morning, while Lili was prepping for the mission and getting their daughter ready for preschool, she couldn’t find her phone. So on her way out the door, she grabbed Luis’ old Android. WhatsApp needs to be updated, says the persistent notification, blocking the map screen. Driving with her knees, Lili tries to deal with the phone while watching the target. He’s turning. WhatsApp needs to be updated. Fuck, she thinks, this can’t be happening. She’d planned to overcome the prejudice against her, and female agents everywhere. Now, on her first mission as surveillance lead, she’s losing her cool because of a phone snafu? Furiously tapping the exit icon, she accidentally opens WhatsApp. “What the fuck!” she shouts. Then she notices something—a message from a very young, very beautiful woman: “I miss you.” At first, Lili’s confused. Then she opens the chat and sees a history of carnal correspondence between this woman and Luis. Her heart drops. She pulls over. With Lili’s silence, the radio comms grow frenetic. “Is he pulling a heat run?” Lili is frozen. The DEA has assembled a massive unit to shut down a high-powered narco money launderer, and she is on the side of the road, reading flirty texts from her husband’s mistress. She’s losing the target. But all Lili can think about is betrayal. The messages are endless. It’s not the first time. The image she’s had of herself and Luis, the eager greenhorn agent and hotshot husband, is coming apart in real time. What about their 3-year-old daughter? She remembers the mission. The target they’re tailing is surely armed. A key rule of leadership is full faculties. One mistake and someone could get killed. She’s clearly lost tactical command. Just as they all expected, she thinks. Failing when it counts. Lili knows this could hurt her career. What she doesn’t know, in this moment, is just how far her career will eventually go; that this gut punch will catalyze her emergence as an unlikely pioneer in an entirely new kind of criminal investigation. That she will help seize millions of dollars in illicit cryptocurrency, arrest some of the world’s most treacherous criminals, and help write the playbook still used in digital money-laundering investigations. Her colleagues will know her as a principled, dogged, ruthless, sometimes frustrating but always inventive woman waging a highly personal crusade. And when she helps take down the largest and most sophisticated dark-web marketplace in history, her targets will place a 50,000, threatening to abduct Lili and send her back in the mail, piece by piece. Lili recalled seeing her mother in tears on the phone, begging for mercy. No one came for Lili, but Katya blamed herself for the predicament. She started drinking heavily to dull the regret. That was when Katya started disappearing, eventually for days at a time—and when Lili’s obsession with American cops and robbers took on new meaning. On Law & Order, the law wins. For Lili, justice became a fantasy. Now in America, at the DEA, Lili could live that dream. By midsummer, she was anxious for a breakthrough in the case. She wanted Nayfeld and his goons—Russian gangsters just like the men who tormented her mother—behind bars. Luis explained that RICO investigations could take years. Law enforcement is often about patience, he said. Lili had a hard time with that. They listened for hours, waiting for Nayfeld’s henchmen to make evidentiary mistakes. What they heard was mobsters running errands around Brighton Beach. The long shifts spent listening meant more late-night chats. Luis asked how Lili came to the States. She thought she was doomed to live and die in Russia, she said, but one day, when she was 11, the phone rang. “Hello, Lili,” a man said. “This is your father.” It was the first time Lili could remember crying. Her father had disappeared when she was a toddler. She had never known his voice. A few days later he was at the door, a burly man with dark brows, fitted into an expensive suit. He didn’t explain why he’d left, or now returned. In the US, he had become successful. Something about selling tires. Later Lili would come to realize his business was “connected,” but as a poor girl in Russia, she was amazed as he introduced her to a world of ease and excess. Lili had grown up with a single pair of pants and no winter coat, and now her father waltzed into Moscow’s elite boutiques and gave her free run of the stores. He took her to Moscow’s finest restaurants. Then he said he was bringing her to America. Lili didn’t want to abandon her family, but her mother and grandmother urged otherwise. She should leave, they said, and have a life. The other children in their neighborhood had already turned to crime. Some kids she knew were drug dealers and prostitutes. In Moscow, they said, there was nothing for her. America was as different from post-Soviet Moscow as Lili imagined, but she was still mostly on her own. Her father remained wildly generous at times but could also turn manic or sadistic; he’d shower her with gifts, then beat her for any perceived imperfection. He sent Lili to the Windsor School in Queens and then to Loomis Chaffee, an elite private academy in Connecticut. It took Lili only a few months to become fluent in English, but she didn’t make many friends. “I didn’t know how to act,” Lili told Luis. “I was like a hood rat.” And so she studied and studied, outpaced her peers, skipped a grade, and found herself 17 years old and enrolled at Columbia University in New York. Before Luis, Lili had shared her story with very few people. But something about him made her feel comfortable. Luis was charming, funny, and incredibly handsome. He had a wide smile, dark hair, and bright green eyes. He was married, though, so Lili hid the feelings she was starting to have for him. Toward the end of the summer, Luis came clean: He was falling for her too. He was separated from his wife, he said. He begged Lili to be with him. She demurred. She admitted her own attraction, but an affair went against her ethics. His marriage was already through, he said. She remained resolute. Now it was awkward. They were still up late together in the wiretap room. Alone, side by side, listening to the mobsters chat—or worse, have phone sex with their girlfriends—Lili and Luis batted romantic repartee at each other. He loved her, he said. Midlife crisis, she shot back. I’m only 32, he said. I’m not yet 20, she replied. Lili stood her ground. Come Autumn, Lili returned to school and passed the wiretap to a new analyst. Luis and his wife entered couples therapy. As the leaves turned and Lili settled into her sophomore classes, she moved on. And then, one morning, her phone buzzed. “I left her. It’s over. I need to see you.” Lili and Luis stepped off the plane into the heavy San Salvadorian air. Katya trailed behind, thickly made up, stumbling beneath a blanket of blown-out hair. Lili wondered whether she had made a terrible mistake by inviting her mother to come here and live with them. It was 2012. Just three years after graduating from Columbia, Lili was already a mother herself. She held her baby, Lia, in her arms. After Luis left his wife, Lili dated him through college and fell madly in love. After class, she met him downtown in pubs and dives, where Luis talked about the day’s dangers and shared stories from his time at the NYPD: chasing a dealer down a Bronx alleyway; wrestling a gun from a man’s hand in a high-rise hallway. Then they went back to his place. With each date, Lili’s world of exams and problem sets seemed increasingly frivolous. By the time she graduated, in 2009, the idea of Wall Street was long gone and she was set on becoming a federal agent. But it was the Great Recession, and the DEA didn’t seem to be accepting applications. So Lili and Luis married, moved in together, and had a daughter. Lili loved being a mother but quickly understood that she did not want to be only a mother. Lili roamed their apartment cradling Lia. During nap time, she called her grandmother. Once, when Lili was lamenting the challenges of motherhood, Nina offered a startling idea: Why not bring Katya to live with them and help raise Lia? Lili was reluctant. Chaos followed Katya everywhere, plus she was still drinking. But Nina said that she just needed something to live for. Otherwise, it was only a matter of time before she overdosed in her apartment or passed out in a snowbank. Nina had never steered Lili wrong. Lili booked her mother a flight. Katya made a strange addition to their home. She couldn’t drive and spoke almost no English. Her Russian was stilted and aristocratic, an affectation she had picked up while nannying for a Russian oligarch in Dubai after Lili left for America. Her typical uniform was a fur coat, silk pantsuit, and 5-inch stilettos. Katya is something of a post-Soviet Blanche DuBois, an aging beauty obsessed with status and regret, always complaining, or boasting about her greatest achievement: almost being cast, at 17, as the lead in a 1980s Soviet film. With Katya available to watch Lia, Lili contemplated the most prestigious way to fill her time while she waited out the dismal job market. On a whim, she applied to Harvard Extension School, got accepted, and began taking classes. She loved being back in the world, learning, striving. But then Luis accepted a plum but dangerous post in El Salvador, where he would be investigating high-level drug trafficking operations and acting as a diplomatic liaison. Lili, Katya, and baby Lia joined him, and the Infantes moved into a palatial embassy house, complete with a cook and a maid, whom Katya relished ordering around. Theatrics aside, Katya improved once she was surrounded by family. She quit drinking and threw herself into caring for her granddaughter, just as Nina had predicted. She was a doting and careful (if theatrical) babushka, seemingly intent on making up for the ways she had neglected her own daughter. For Lili, it was healing to watch. But she was still restless. Determined to finish her degree, Lili started flying back and forth to Cambridge weekly—a five-hour flight, during which she crammed case studies. At home in El Salvador, she finished problem sets while rocking Lia to sleep. After two years, she graduated from Harvard with honors and submitted her application to the DEA. “Are you a bitch, or a slut?” At the DEA academy in Quantico, Virginia, Lili considered the question, which she assumed was rhetorical. It wasn’t, as she discovered when her instructor, an older, bulging, terrifying woman, repeated it, much louder. “Neither?” “WRONG!” the instructor said. “As a woman, to survive in this agency, you’ll have to become either a bitch or a slut. Take your pick.” (The DEA declined to comment on the record for this story.) It was 2014. Lili was the only woman in her class. Her peers were very large men accustomed to violence: former police looking to up the stakes and Afghanistan vets in search of a new thrill. Lili dominated many of them academically, answering questions first or correcting their errors. In athletic training, she was ferocious, pouncing on her training partners in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu, even though she was half their size. She wanted to dispel any suspicions about female timidity. She succeeded. No one at Quantico had ever met anyone—man or woman—quite like her. “Instead of a bitch or a slut, I chose a third option,” Lili says. “I was annoying.” After 20 weeks of training, Lili graduated near the top of her class. She would be stationed in Miami, where Luis had already been reassigned after his stint in El Salvador. Ever since the cocaine explosion of the 1980s, Miami had been America’s central depot for the drug. Geography made it inevitable. The city leans into the Atlantic, pointing toward the Caribbean—the source of endless contraband, smuggled in by imaginative cartels. In the heyday of the cocaine trade, powerboats rocketed across Biscayne Bay, their hulls stuffed with powder. Cessnas drifted in low over the skyline, dodging radar to land on airstrips in the Everglades. Cartel divers attached magnetic parcels to cargo ship hulls. Homemade narco subs slipped unseen beneath the surface. For the Miami DEA office, this still meant constant action and late nights on dangerous cases—exactly what Lili was looking for. Compared to the dingy New York office, the Miami DEA was a gleaming palace of spotless glass and marble. Agents drove fast cars and hit the extensive first-floor gym before their shift, setting personal records on the bench or running combinations on punching bags before heading upstairs. This was the office that had brought down Noriega, rooted out a Hezbollah money-laundering ring, and once intercepted the sale of a 200. Lili used a marketplace called Blue Sky to purchase cocaine from a vendor named HonestCocaine. When other agents caught wind of what Lili was up to, they gave her a hard time. “Stick to your casework, Sochi,” they said. “Don’t get distracted by internet funny money.” A week later, a package arrived at a DEA post office box. The white powder went to the lab, and HonestCocaine lived up to their name: The delivery was real, and high quality. Lili marched back into her boss’s office. There are dozens of sites, she said, and thousands of dealers. “We have work to do,” Lili said. To take down dark-web marketplaces, Lili needed to know how they worked. She’d been attending local cryptocurrency meetups in Miami: oddball gatherings of techies, gambling addicts, and libertarians who met at local Cuban spots to sip café con leche. Her presence as the only young woman, yet again, caused a stir at first—the crypto demographic at the time was decidedly male and nerdy—but they were impressed by her focus and interest. While the crypto acolytes waxed poetic about freedom from fiat currencies and the beauty of the blockchain, Lili was enticed by the opposite implication. The fact that every bitcoin transaction was indelibly recorded meant it was perhaps not anonymous. Once she figured out how to trace it, following the money would be easier than ever. Dark-web investigations paired well with single motherhood. No longer able to stay late at the office, Lili was home by 6 every night, in mom mode, playing with Lia and talking about her day at school. After putting her to bed, Lili cracked open her laptop and clocked back in, working late, sometimes chatting with her grandmother as she scrolled through listings of drugs, guns, and stolen passports. After a few weeks, Lili was ready to select a target. She felt like “a kid in a candy store” deciding who to go after first. One vendor, username Owlcity, stood out for his potent inventory: Alpha-PVP, aka bath salts, and fentanyl. The DEA had no playbook for how to pursue a dark-web case. She began by purchasing some product from Owlcity, 2.5 grams of Alpha-PVP. The package came a week later and clearly incriminated the dealer. But who was Owlcity? A dark-web case, Lili realized, is the exact reverse of a typical narcotics investigation. Here, the crime is visible for all to see—the drug arrives at your doorstep—but you can’t prove who sent it. Lili examined the package. Owlcity had been careful. Fake name and return address. A generic stamp, untraceable. She dusted the cardboard for fingerprints, but the exterior had been handled many times, by couriers and warehouse workers. Changing tack, Lili attempted to penetrate Tor and pin down Owlcity’s IP address. She taught herself to analyze the blockchain. As with English, she picked it up quickly. But every effort was a dead end. Her target remained a disembodied string of characters, a ghost. Finally, in February 2016, Lili had a flash of inspiration. She messaged Owlcity and politely explained that a package she had ordered from him earlier had never arrived. Because the dealer seemed to pride himself on good customer service—he had a 98 percent positive rating—she had a hunch the dealer would respond. He did, and she asked him to track the package, hoping that when the user went to USPS.com, they wouldn’t think to use Tor. Which they didn’t. Owlcity had no idea that the DEA could access the post office web-traffic tracking logs, which led Lili to an apartment only a few miles away, in the suburb of Miramar, and a name: Chrissano Leslie. A week later, Lili surveilled Leslie, a young Jamaican man, driving beneath the palms to his local post office, where he dropped off a package with fentanyl in it. A few months after that, Leslie awoke to the sound of his front door splintering off its hinges. Shooting out of bed, he grabbed his stash, ran half naked to the bathroom, and shook a cascade of pills and powders into the toilet. Close behind was Lili’s Clan Lab team—a special unit trained to handle lethal substances like Fentanyl: 10 guys in hazmat suits, armed. “Freeze!” He flushed the toilet, but the pills clogged the drain. He was trying to flush again as agents tackled him. Leslie’s apartment was brimming with home-pressed pills, and underneath his bed they found a stash of weapons: handguns and an Uzi. A serious dealer, just sitting in the suburbs, with no visibility to police or DEA. Just as Lili figured. As the agents got cuffs on Leslie, the toilet overflowed, pushing a cloudy fountain of fentanyl-laced water across the tile. The Owlcity arrest made the papers, and Lili earned some stripes. She moved full-time to cybercrime, and her supervisor even suggested she lead a team. But she says she had a tough time recruiting in her own office; even worse than a know-it-all rookie was a know-it-all rookie with a promotion. The Jurassic narcs didn’t want to be her subordinate. So Lili widened her approach. Throughout the Owlcity investigation, she’d enlisted outside federal agencies to help her when the DEA’s resources fell short of the demands of a complex, drawn-out cybercrime investigation. To access banking records, she’d used IRS investigative tools; to track Leslie’s packages, she’d employed Postal Inspections; to kick down his door, she’d called in FBI SWAT. To bring each of these agencies onboard, she’d visited them in person and pitched a PowerPoint-enhanced presentation on the looming dangers of dark-web drug dealing. Her renegade enthusiasm was contagious, and at each agency she convinced a few agents to help her out. Now, Lili had a new pitch: What if these agents stayed with her and formed an official task force? She found takers and even added agents from Homeland Security. Almost unintentionally, Lili had formed one of the first interagency cybercrime task forces. She was 28. Later that year, Lili was at a crypto conference when she met Tigran Gambaryan, already a legend in cybercrime for developing the capability to decipher the blockchain. Tigran had been an investigative state auditor before picking up a badge and gun to join the IRS’s elite Criminal Investigations Division, the law enforcement arm of the federal tax authority, where agents used specialized techniques to bring down criminals in the field. Lili watched Tigran present his investigation into the corrupt DEA agent Carl Force, who had skimmed more than 25 million. That evening, the Miami DEA emptied out, and Lili was the last to leave the office. As she crossed the parking lot alone, a little melancholy stirred. For the first time in years, there was nothing to chase. She’d proven herself, outlasted the skeptics, and somehow, from a desk in Miami, taken revenge on the same kind of crooks who had haunted her childhood. But she wanted to share it with someone who really understood what it meant to her. She called Luis. When he picked up, she said quietly, “I did it.” The following year, 2023, Lili received an award for Outstanding Investigative Accomplishments in Cybercrime from Homeland Security. The ceremony was in DC, a ballroom full of badges and banquet tables. Lili was handed a small Lucite desktop ornament with her achievement engraved into it. It was strange to receive such an honor, as Lili was no longer a federal agent. The Hydra case had made her an even bigger star—at a money-laundering investigations conference in Bangkok, Lili was told by a former intelligence agent that surviving Hydra admins had placed a 9 million had vanished into thin air. It remains the most consequential arrest of a corrupt DEA agent. “The drug war’s a game,” Irizarry shrugged to an AP video crew. “A very fun game that we were playing.” Lili had been shaken. Irizarry’s corruption was staggering. And he damaged the clever, deep-cover casework she’d been developing outside of Hydra, where Lili-as-Olga had been successfully enticing criminal organizations into the trap of crypto laundering—until that entire operation was compromised by Irizarry’s bust, since all those introductions had been made by Igor. As one of Irizarry’s confidential informants, he was now forever tainted. “You can’t win an unwinnable war,” Irizarry had told the Associated Press. Fuck you, Lili thought. It was one of several corruption scandals that tarnished the entire DEA. And now Lili was onstage representing that agency, in a dark suit, hair pulled tightly, smiling for photos. Back in Miami, Lili wondered what was next. She was 32 years old, and for the first time she felt the uncertainty of that youth. Her hard edges were softening. The road ahead wasn’t a clear line of duty or a strict moral code. She’d spent her whole life trying to impose order on the chaos of her childhood. It gave her a world of binaries. The law provides justice. People love you or they betray you. But this belief set the stage for a lifetime of disappointments. She’d spent all these years seeing everyone’s flaws, but not her own. She’d become deep friends with Luis. She reflected on the ways she hadn’t always been the easiest partner either, leaving him for Harvard with an infant while he was undercover. And as much trouble as Katya had always been, she was still Lili’s mother. Every time Katya seemed to fall off the wagon, Lili took her in. It felt liberating, the idea of mercy. In this light, she could even understand her grandmother and her inability to abandon her grandson, no matter his misdeeds. You can’t erase pain with structure, she learned. Or purity. Or anything. You can’t outthink heartbreak. So what can you do? You can recognize that the world is messy; that people fail you, and you fail them. You make peace with ambiguity. You realize that love and imperfection can coexist. You see that knowing this is the real safety net. Institutions may not be the answer, but people are. You forgive your mother. You forgive your grandmother. You look in the rearview mirror and see that your daughter in the back seat is likable and chatty, a sociable spitfire, like her father. You raise her the best you can, the way your mother could not do for you, to see the world for all its possibilities. Spot illustrations: Chris W. Kim Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at [email protected]. Comments Back to top

By Joshuah Bearman, Owen Long

Original Article

Backlinks