Miami is cosmopolitan and full of intrigue, a contemporary Casa blanca on the Atlantic Ocean, where cocaine cowboys trade gunfire from fast-moving Ferraris. But Tampa, sitting on Florida's west coast next to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, wears a patina of age and tradition.

Flying into Tampa, over meadows with a water table so high that ponds sprout anywhere nature or real estate developers gouge the surface, one circles a beautiful natural harbor. Waves of algae bloom across the blue expanse of water. The city hangs between two broad inlets. To the east, the channels fork around the modern development of Harbour Island. One leads to the Hillsborough River, another to the docks of Ybor City, the nineteenth-century settlement of Cuban cigar makers. To the west, long causeways cross the shallows of Old Tampa Bay, providing access to handsome beaches and mammoth traffic jams. A sheltering peninsula, with St. Petersburg at its tip, protects the broader expanse of Tampa Bay to the south. The hot, humid breath of the Gulf creates an oppressive atmosphere that prickles the flesh for much of the year.

In the late eighteenth century, these natural features drew pirates like flies. Where other civic cultures celebrate explorers and pioneers, Tampa glories in its buccaneers. The major local festival each year honors the memory of Gasparilla, a renegade Spanish naval officer with a nasty temper who covered his crimes with a veneer of gentility. According to legend, when Gasparilla's pirates captured a ship, they killed the men and older women and kept the younger women for pleasure and ransom. Those fortunate enough to have wealthy families who could pay to get them back were placed in a stockade on what is now Captiva Island, south of Tampa.

Gasparilla thrived for three decades. His end came in 1821 when the United States annexed Florida and his ship was sunk by the USS Enterprise on its maiden voyage. But the Spanish pirate's memory lives on in Tampa's version of Mardi Gras.

Twentieth-century Tampa retains that buccaneering spirit through its criminal element, too. Until his death in 1987, Santos Trafficante, the Mafia boss in Tampa, enjoyed much greater prestige and power within organized crime than any of the more famous New York dons. And he multiplied that influence by working in tandem with his mob neighbors to the west along the Gulf, the Carlos Marcello family in New Orleans. Together, they had plied the drug trade and used the money-laundering services of Meyer Lansky and his associates in south Florida and Las Vegas, where Lansky had helped the mob develop methods for hiding the money they skimmed from profits at the casinos they controlled.

It was in this hot, humid area, where crime had germinated and prospered over two centuries, that the seeds of a new money-laundering investigation were planted in 1986. At the time, no one knew that this organism would spawn a financial scandal destined to reverberate around the world.

Whenever more than three federal agents cooperate on a criminal investigation, they have to give it a name. Some of these names have become legendary-Operation Greenback in Miami, Operation Greylord in the corrupt courts of Chicago, Operation Exodus at the nation's ports. The monickers are catchy and motivational, imbuing a sense of team spirit and camaraderie in the agents, particularly if they happen to have been brought together from different agencies.

The Tampa money-laundering investigation was known as Operation C-Chase. As often happens, the brass in Washington and a good many reporters would get the name wrong.

Because Operation C-Chase centered on money laundering, outsiders immediately thought that the "C" stood for C-note, slang for a hundred- dollar bill. The Customs brass in Washington would decide they liked that explanation, too. In fact, the origin of the name was much less inventive. The apartment complex near the Tampa airport where the investigators set up their first undercover residence was called Calibre Chase. "I'm going out to C-Chase," an agent would say in the Customs enforcement office near the airport, and so the investigation came to be called Operation C-Chase.

As is usually true of these investigations, it started with a small fish. Gonzalo Mora, Jr., ran a modest import-export business in his native Medellin, a mountain metropolis of more than one million people situated in a river valley in north-central Colombia, but he was really a money-laundering wanna-be.

All around him, Mora saw the riches of big-time cocaine trafficking transforming peasants into feudal lords. The Ochoas, hard-working restaurant owners a decade earlier, were rich and respected. Pablo Escobar, a petty criminal and sometime enforcer, was one of the world's wealthiest men. They lived on vast ranches, surrounded by their own armies. They swept into Medellin in their fancy cars and flew around the globe in their own jets.

Like Escobar, Gonzalo Mora, Jr., was plump and short, about 180 pounds and five feet, six inches tall. Unlike Escobar, he was still trying to strike it rich. For two years, Mora had been running a small-time money-laundering operation under the cover of his import-export busi ness. He or some associates would pick up cash generated by drug sales in Detroit, Miami, Los Angeles, and New York. Mora would deposit the money in amounts of less than $10,000 into his U.S. bank accounts. Then he would write checks on those accounts and sell them to money brokers on the black market in Colombia. The brokers would pay him in "cleaned" pesos, after subtracting their own fee. Mora would then pass along the pesos to the drug suppliers, minus his own commission of six to seven percent.

Using the money brokers as intermediaries, while cumbersome and somewhat crude, provided an additional layer of protection for both Mora and the suppliers. Mora also laundered cash this way for some of his import-export customers who wanted to evade taxes or escape Colombian currency restrictions.

Most of the cash that Mora laundered belonged to a mysterious member of the Medellin cartel known as Don Chepe. Not as flamboyant as Escobar or Carlos Lehder, Don Chepe was nonetheless a power within the cocaine trade. Drug authorities in the United States would one day determine that he was one of the silent leaders of the Medellin cartel, although it would take them months to uncover his identity. The amount of business Don Chepe was passing through Mora's ring was peanuts. Rarely did the pickups amount to more than $10,000 or $15,000 at a time.

Ambitious and greedy, Mora was eager to get a bigger piece of the action. He was confident that he could get more business from the drug suppliers, particularly Don Chepe, but first he had to develop a bigger network to handle the cash.

In July of 1986, Mora contacted another Medellin resident, Alvaro Uribe, and asked for his help in expanding Mora's little laundering operation. Mora knew that Uribe had done some drug business in Florida before. He wanted Uribe to return there and open several bank accounts that Mora could use to launder more drug money. What Mora did not suspect was that Alvaro Uribe was a paid informant for American law enforcement authorities.

Police have always used informants and there have always been criminals willing to provide information on their partners in crime in exchange for money, vengeance, or their own freedom. The escalation of the war on drugs brought with it the necessity of penetrating the Colombian cartels. This was difficult, since the cartels tended to distrust anyone who was not Colombian and dealt with traitors and suspected traitors in a very violent and public fashion.

As a result, at a time when the role of informants had been elevated to a new level of importance, so had the risks. Those willing to chance the wrath of the Colombians were well compensated for their troubles. Alvaro Uribe had been paid thousands of dollars in the past by Customs agents. For his initial tip and assistance in setting up C-Chase, he would eventually receive a $250,000 payoff from the U.S. government.

As soon as Uribe arrived in Florida with his orders from the expansion-minded Mora, he contacted agents in the Customs Service in Tampa and described Mora's plan. The agents immediately recognized an opportunity to get inside a Colombian money-laundering ring, but it was a small one. It might not lead anywhere. The trick was figuring out how to see where this trail would lead as fast as possible. There was plenty of work chasing money launderers and no one wanted to waste a lot of time on a dead-end investigation.

The plan was hatched one night just a few days after Uribe's initial contact. A small group of agents sat in the Customs Service's enforce ment office in a small office complex near Tampa International Airport and examined their options. They were led by Paul O'Brien, the assistant special agent in charge of the Tampa region and head of enforcement. With him were several veteran agents, among them David Burns, an IRS agent who had worked with Customs since Operation Greenback, Emir Abreu, a Spanish-speaking Customs agent, and Robert Mazur, who had switched to Customs from the IRS in 1983.

It was Mazur who pointed out the potential value of Mora. Sure, he wasn't the most sophisticated or senior money launderer in Medellin. His use of smurfs with cash deposits under $10,000 and presigned checks was dangerous and outmoded. But Mora's ambitions made him vulnerable. A properly structured undercover sting could appeal to him by pretending to offer something he desperately needed-an efficient, safe means of moving drug money into the banking system. With this asset, Mora could hustle new business in Medellin and perhaps push his way to the top of the financial heap there. The U.S. Customs Service would make it all possible and be around to bring it all down.

The logic appealed to O'Brien and the others. The first step would be for Uribe to introduce Abreu to Mora as an experienced launderer who could set up additional bank accounts and help expand Mora's smurfing business. Once Mora was comfortable with his new associate, Abreu and Uribe would nudge the Colombian toward bigger pickups and more sophisticated laundering techniques. As the business expanded, so would the penetration of the Colombian drug and money networks set up in the United States. "We would ask Uribe to plant a seed in Mora's ear that this smurfing was crazy," explained Bob Moore, a Customs supervisor on the case. "It's the old-fashioned way to launder money. It's labor intensive and it's dangerous because too many people know about your business."

Bob Mazur, who had by that time spent thirteen years with Customs and the IRS, was assigned to be the case agent. His chief responsibility would be maintaining contact with Abreu while he was undercover and keeping the supervisors informed, too. What Mazur really wanted, though, was a chance to go undercover himself.

At the age of sixteen, Emir Abreu had left the small village in Puerto Rico where he was born for San Juan. He joined the Customs Service as a uniformed patrol officer there in his early twenties and specialized in drug interceptions along the Puerto Rican coast.

After thirteen years, Abreu had joined the service's elite corps of special agents and moved to the mainland. It was similar to moving up from beat cop to homicide detective, although the crime in which Abreu would specialize was narcotics trafficking. It was a brotherhood apart, and one in which Abreu's Spanish made him a sought-after agent for undercover operations. By his own guess, the tough, wiry agent with a wacky sense of humor had played more than fifty undercover roles. Some had lasted an hour or less. Others had gone on for weeks. None had consumed as much of his life as would his new role as Emiho Dominguez.

Alvaro Uribe had telephoned Gonzalo Mora in Medellin and de scribed his new friend to the businessman. Mora had sniffed the bait and arranged for his brother, Jimmy, to take a firsthand look at things.

The meeting occurred on July 14, 1986, in a room at the Sheraton River House Hotel in Miami. The Sheraton's location on an exit from Miami International Airport made it a favorite rendezvous for business men eager to get in and out of town in a hurry. When Jimmy Mora arrived, Uribe introduced him to Emiho Dominguez and explained that Dominguez could help with his brother's money-laundering operation.

Jimmy Mora, whose given name was Gabriel Jaime, was exhausted and on edge. He had driven cross-country from his home in Los Angeles and had planned to pick up ten kilos of cocaine in Miami to take back with him. However, someone had reported a break-in at the house in nearby Kendall where the cocaine was stashed, and when police arrived to investigate, they stumbled upon a van containing 450 kilograms of the white powder. The loss was the responsibility of the cocaine's suppliers, but it meant that Mora would return to Los Angeles empty-handed. In order to salvage something from the trip, he was eager to set up the deal with Uribe and Abreu.

The two men explained to Mora that Uribe would open up accounts in Tampa at banks with Miami branches. Abreu had an organization in place that could pick up cash from drug sales in cities across the United States. All Gonzalo Mora had to do was provide instructions on where the drops would take place. The cash would then be deposited in Uribe's bank accounts in Tampa and Miami in amounts of less than $10,000. Uribe would provide Gonzalo Mora with presigned checks that Mora could complete in Colombia and sell to the money brokers. The amount of the checks would correspond to the amount of drug money deposited in bank accounts, minus a three to four percent fee for Uribe and Abreu. That money would remain in the Florida bank accounts.

The scenario sounded fine to Jimmy Mora. He said he would tele phone his brother with his recommendation to go ahead with the scheme. The following day, July 15, Uribe telephoned Gonzalo Mora in Medellin and was instructed to open two accounts at Tampa banks. The scheme was under way.

Nine days later, Abreu and Bob Mazur took Uribe to an office of Barnett Bank in Tampa. There, they met with a bank officer named Nancy Goetz, who helped them open a checking account in Uribe's name. The following day, the three men went to a branch of Florida National Bank in St. Petersburg, just across the causeway from Tampa. An assistant vice president named Rita Rozansky helped them open a second checking account for Uribe.

Barnett Bank and Florida National Bank were among seven large banks in seven cities that either had already agreed or would subsequently agree to cooperate with Operation C-Chase. Goetz and Rozansky, along with key employees at each of the other banks, knew only that the accounts were part of a law enforcement investigation. They did not know any of the details.

The cooperation of these banks was a key element in the undercover operation. Each institution had agreed to accept any amount of cash that the agents brought in for deposit. This meant that the government had solved the most difficult aspect of any money-laundering scheme- getting the money into the banking system. The drug trafficker's cash could be converted readily into a variety of financial instruments and sent anywhere in the world.

On August 1, Uribe and Abreu returned to Miami and met again with Jimmy Mora. This time the meeting was at a popular restaurant on Southwest Eighth Street and the Colombian brought along his father, Gonzalo Mora, Sr. Uribe handed over several blank, presigned checks from the accounts he had opened at Florida National Bank and Barnett Bank. Uribe also handed Jimmy Mora something else. It was an engraved white business card. On it were the names Financial Consulting Inc. and Robert L. Musella.

"That guy's big," Abreu told the Moras. "I work with Musella and he is hooked up with a big money-laundering business. He'd be interested in meeting you."

The following month, Gonazalo Mora, Jr., telephoned Uribe from Medellin with a coded message. His father had sixteen dozen flowers for his shop and Uribe should pick them up. This meant that the elder Mora had $16,000 at his apartment in Miami that was to be picked up and deposited in the accounts.

A few days later, on a Friday, Abreu flew to Miami to pick up the money, but the old man was not home. His wife searched the apartment for the cash and finally discovered $12,000 in boxes in the back of a closet. Abreu took the money back to Tampa with him. Over the weekend, Mora, Sr., showed up in Tampa with the additional cash. He apologized for the mix-up.

Mora had another request. He knew that Abreu was setting up the laundering operation's headquarters in a small apartment near the Tampa airport. Mora would like to stay the night there before returning to Miami.

The apartment at Calibre Chase, a new complex of apartments and swimming pools tucked behind a grove of trees dripping Spanish moss, had a bedroom, living room, and kitchen, and it was filled with tape recorders and video cameras. Lacking the vast technical resources of the much larger FBI, the Customs agents had planned to install the devices over the next few days to monitor later meetings. Right now, the stuff was strewn throughout the apartment.

Abreu was in a jam. The future of the whole operation could be hanging in the balance. If he turned Mora down, it might make the old guy suspicious. It was too early in the relationship to take that risk. So he said sure and offered to drive Mora there. Before they left, Abreu slipped away and telephoned Bob Mazur.

"Get over to the apartment right away and clean it out," he said urgently. "I gotta take old man Mora over there."

When Abreu and Mora turned into the complex off Hillsborough Avenue about an hour later, the undercover agent silently prayed that the apartment would be cleaned. What he saw made his heart sink. Mazur's car was still in the parking lot outside the apartment. Slowly, Abreu got out of the car and walked to the apartment with Mora. He rattled the door hard as he inserted the key and began to open it.

Mazur heard the noise. Grabbing the last piece of video equipment, he jumped into the living room closet and pulled the door shut behind him. Hunched in the bottom of the closet, clutching a video camera and unable to stretch out his legs, Mazur listened as Abreu and Mora talked and talked in Spanish. They talked for four hours. At one point, Abreu tried to persuade his guest to go out for a bite to eat. No, Mora said, he was too tired. Finally, Mora said good night to Abreu and got ready for bed.

Trapped in the closet, Mazur listened carefully as Mora's rhythmic breathing turned to rasping snores. After several more minutes, he opened the door a fraction, peered out, and then crawled from the closet. His legs were stiff and cramped, but he managed to get across the living room to a window and slip out, taking the camera with him. It was four o'clock in the morning.

Over the next several months, Abreu picked up over $100,000 in cash in Miami on orders that Mora, Jr., passed along through Uribe. The system worked smoothly and efficiently. The Moras became more comfortable with Abreu, although they resisted his delicate efforts to extract the identity of the drug supplier who was their principal client. The money-laundering operation itself was still small-time. The Cus toms agents were anxious to speed things up, to move into the big time.

In November, Mazur and Abreu told Uribe to bring up the name Robert Musella again. In a telephone call with Mora, Jr., he suggested that the Colombian come to Tampa to meet this financial consultant named Musella. The guy had a lot of connections and maybe he could help them expand their business. Anyway, said Uribe, Musella is loaded and he'll pay for your trip up.

When Mora agreed to the meeting, it touched off a frenzy of activity among the Customs agents. They had been constructing a false identity for Musella slowly, not knowing when the new character would enter the drama. Now they knew, and it was soon. Musella would have to be too good to pass up, someone who could offer Mora and his Colombian drug connections all the right avenues for laundering large amounts of cash.

The man who would play the part of Musella was Bob Mazur, the case agent. With his financial background from IRS and his long experience on money-laundering investigations, he was the natural choice. Under cover assignments are all volunteer in federal agencies. Mazur volunteered for the job because he loved the rush of undercover work and honestly believed his efforts helped in the battle against drugs. This was one gig where Mazur would not be sitting backstage, tucked away in an office monitoring the work of agents on the street. They could find a new case agent. He was going under. This was why he had joined the Customs Service in the first place.

Robert Mazur was the sort of person some people would describe as "brilliant" and others would label "arrogant." Reactions to him were usually strong, and few people were left sitting on the fence when asked their opinion of him. Not surprisingly, he often inspired admiration and dislike in equal portions.

"Bob Mazur is one of the smartest agents I've ever seen," says John Hume, who spent fifteen years as a federal prosecutor before going into private practice, ultimately representing one of the defendants in Opera tion C-Chase. "He is also among the most arrogant."

To Hume and his colleagues at the defense table at the climax of C-Chase, Mazur would come to seem the embodiment of the bullying, enticing, deceitful undercover agent whose charm and intelligence tempt honest people to cross the line.

Fellow agents admire some of those same qualities in Mazur, though they will argue vehemently that no one was entrapped in C-Chase. But when asked what makes Mazur a successful undercover operative, they would invariably list two chief attributes-his brains and his relentless determination.

"He is the best agent I have ever worked with in my life," says a top law enforcement official who was involved in the C-Chase case. "He will do what it takes to get the job done. That is a quality that is not common in federal law enforcement. The guy really takes his job seriously."

An undercover agent's mind is whirring all the time, worrying about staying in the role, avoiding a potentially fatal misstep, balancing between getting the right conversations and words on tape and not going too far and breaking the law by entrapping the quarry, all the while drawing the bad guys along without slipping in too deep himself. As for nerves, they are most vital when something unplanned occurs, when simple chance or innate stupidity undo the careful planning, leaving the agent on his own.

"Undercover could be an hour or a day or a couple weeks or months and months," said Steve Cook, a veteran Customs official who became the C-Chase case agent near its conclusion. "Personally, I don't get paid enough to do that. But Mazur, he is a real dedicated guy. He had to keep these people cool and worry about touching all the bases for the prosecution to work. It creates a lot of pressure, a tremendous burden on him. All the rest of us are just supporting cast."

In his college days at little Wagner College in New York City, Mazur played on the varsity football team although he is under five feet, ten inches tall. He once described his college football days by saying, "It was a lot of fun, but that's about as far as I could go at my size. And even then, there were giants all around me."

It was a revealing statement for a very private man, a man who said so little about himself that some of his colleagues did not even know he was married. The struggles that a smaller man goes through playing football against bigger opponents are not unlike the challenges confronted by an undercover agent. Both must survive by agility and intelligence, not brute strength. Part of what others interpreted as Mazur's aloofness was actually his inner security, a sense that he could depend on himself.

Even as he approached his late thirties, Mazur retained an athletic build from his college days, making him look imposing despite his medium height.

Mazur grew up in the middle-class New York borough of Staten Island. At Wagner, he majored in business administration and finance, with three years of course work in accounting. Recruited upon graduation by the IRS in 1972, he spent three years on a variety of investigations and then began to concentrate on money-laundering cases when he trans ferred to the Tampa field office in 1975.

As with any trade, undercover work involves both an apprenticeship and natural instincts. Everyone always said that Mazur was a natural, that his self-control and intelligence made him impossible to rattle, impossible to jolt out of his role, but he also served a long apprenticeship, picking up tricks and learning skills over the years. These he accumu lated in many ways. Routine investigations, tracking money through banks and front businesses, taught him how to make his way through the financial mazes built by moriey launderers. Supervising and planning undercover operations showed the value of strategy and caution. And the actual undercover work, venturing onto the street posing as one of the bad guys, both fascinated and inspired him.

With this thirst, each undercover stint yielded lessons or contacts that made the next more effective. Each time Mazur went into the field, whether for a few hours or a few days, he was laying the groundwork for a more ambitious project down the road. He accumulated false identities and business contacts, storing them for future use. One day, he knew, it would all be required for the role of a lifetime.

When Operation Greenback was formed in early 1980 in Miami, other regions picked up the new idea. The original Greenback crew in Miami, who called themselves the Wild Bunch and developed a close-knit camaraderie that lasted throughout their careers, sometimes looked down on their new rivals. Relations between the original Greenbackers and the regional imitators later became suprisingly touchy. Nonetheless, Mazur pushed and cajoled his IRS supervisors into setting up the Tampa version of Greenback.

Often, Mazur had bristled at the lack of imagination and daring involved in undercover investigations. With Greenback in Tampa, he saw a chance to go all the way for a change. Since it was a joint operation with Customs, he also would get a chance to see how the other agency operated, for Customs had a reputation as a wilder group than the agents of the Internal Revenue Service. He was not disappointed.

One of Mazur's first Greenback cases taught him the value of friendly banks. In August 1981, officers of a small bank in St. Petersburg became suspicious about a new account. A Colombian businessman with an English name was bringing in large amounts of cash, but he never deposited more than $10,000 at a time. It appeared to be a classic case of smurfing, and the bank president telephoned the IRS. David Burns, an IRS agent working with Greenback, came up with the idea of placing Mazur inside the bank, where he would pose as an employee. It was the first time that the IRS had tried this particular tactic in Florida.

His first day on the job, Mazur met the Colombian, Vincent Graham Taylor, and accepted a bribe to divide a large cash deposit into a series of transactions, all under the $10,000 reporting limit. Rather than make a quick arrest, Mazur struck up a relationship with Taylor, a gregarious man who had attended the U.S. Naval Academy in the 1950s and had once been expected to become secretary of the navy in Colombia.

Over the next three months, Mazur learned that Taylor was at the top of an extensive smurfing ring that laundered money for several drug rings in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. Dozens of couriers were depositing $150,000 a day in as many as fifty different banks. Taylor, well aware of the opportunities presented by a friend inside a bank, intro duced Mazur to four prominent money launderers in Miami. One of them, in turn, put Mazur in touch with an independent drug ring in Arizona that needed to launder money.

After three months, Greenback teams fanned out to Tampa, Miami, and Phoenix and made simultaneous arrests to smash the entire operation. Taylor was caught with a suitcase full of cash and eventually was sentenced to ten years in prison, a stiff term for a money launderer back then.

The bankers who alerted the IRS were given commissioner's awards, the highest commendation available from the IRS. More important for Mazur, he had seen the fruits of being patient and following a trail. And he had made some new friends in a financial institution who would be there when he needed them in the future.

Mazur picked up a little more knowledge a year later, in 1982, when he posed as a member of a drug distribution network looking for a way to launder its profits. The targets were a middle-aged financial consultant named Charles Broun and a mystical marijuana smuggler named Bruce Perlowin.

Broun's basic laundering technique was deceptively simple. After collecting cash from Perlowin, he carried it to the Cayman Islands in flight bags. There, he deposited the money in accounts of corporations registered in Luxembourg and the Netherlands Antilles. The money would then be transferred back to U.S. accounts in the names of these shell corporations and blended in as profits in a series of seemingly legitimate businesses. Among the businesses was a chain of motels in which Perlowin owned a substantial hidden interest.

As part of the undercover operation, Mazur perfected his acting skills. One of his chief tasks was getting close to Perlowin, whose marijuana ring was bringing multi-ton shiploads of Colombian marijuana to San Francisco on a weekly basis. Perlowin had survived for years because he was extremely suspicious of newcomers. However, the first time he met Mazur, he told him: "I'm a very intuitive person. If you were the heat, I'd know it." A few months later, both Broun and Perlowin were arrested and their operation was smashed.