Book Review: Undercover

Book cover of Undercover by Keith Bulfin. Photo / Supplied

Undercover by Keith Bulfin
Random House $39.99

This outstanding transcription of extraordinary events carries a telling subtitle: "A Novel of a Life". Whereas this sort of caveat usually gives the memoirist the opportunity to sensationalise, in Bulfin's case the only thing that would appear to be fictionalised would be the names and perhaps some of the places where the incredible events take place.

You simply read it as a memoir and wonder if, after all that he witnessed and the calibre of people that he double-crossed, changing a few names and places would guarantee him any sort of safety. Because this self-confessed "conservative, middle-class banker well into middle age, a community-minded family man from country New Zealand", became an undercover agent for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency with the express intent of infiltrating the money trail of the major, murderous Mexican drug cartels.

A little creative accounting inflating property values to investors in Australia sees him convicted and imprisoned. Threatened with deportation back to New Zealand, he gets an offer he can't refuse: to trade his friendship with Daniel Gomez, a Mexican cartel bigwig he befriended in prison, to help out the DEA, who are "interested in tracking cartel money and identifying major distributors in the United States".

"These people need a banker, a broker and an investment manager", he is told, and while Bulfin has no intention of rolling on his friend, "jobs for international bankers who have done time for fraud aren't exactly thick on the ground". So, he signs on for the ride.

Next thing, he's surrounded by dead bodies and a suitcase full of cash in a hotel room, with DEA minders issuing instructions re the dead and nearly dead via mobile. So far, so surreal, the start of a rush of events that criss-cross the map, involve cartel heads, bodyguards, and more cash than even Charlie Sheen can drag into a hotel room.

At one stage Bulfin, unable to draw millions from an Austrian bank in cash for one of his "clients", gets the bulk of it in travellers cheques and spends two full days signing the offending documents. Ingenious to the end, and smart from the get-go, Bulfin has recorded all his conversations with his handlers, tapes that become his insurance policy when it becomes clear they're unlikely to bail him out, let alone have any traceable record of him and his remarkable undercover work. Indeed, the DEA become as much of an enemy as the cartels and Bulfin realises he is really just collateral damage to either.

When another DEA leak sees his safety compromised, he siphons untraceable cash from DEA credit cards and does the unthinkable: heads to Mexico to do a deal with the cartels direct.

What Bulfin then witnesses (beheadings/torture) and what we have to read bring home more forcefully than any other event or scene in the book, exactly what he was heavily and dangerously involved in. What he sees haunts his writing for the rest of the book and, it appears, haunts him for life.

Is he ever truly free? The regretful tone that permeates the whole book would say no. Now living back in Melbourne, no longer in touch with the family he loved and met in the US and totally disenfranchised from his "real" family, it sounds like a lonely life where the extreme danger he lived under, while bringing down some big figures, seems to have been for little.

As anyone who flicks through the papers will know, the turf wars in Mexico's northern towns are as violent as ever, the body count huge, the cartels still untouchable. Perhaps this is what fuels the air of melancholy that descends over the final chapters. Memoir or not, it seems chillingly, inescapably real.

Michael Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.