Sunday 9 October 1988

An eye-opening account from inside an ultra-secret operation

Mark Perlstrom, undercover agent, is no stranger to money laundering, drug smuggling and crooked firms.

In the late 1980s he started working for the British Customs office and was quickly thrown in the deep end, joining Operation C-Chase (for ＂currency chase,＂), an undercover investigation that penetrated Pablo Escobar’s mighty Medellin cartel, brought down the corrupt BCCI bank (nicknamed the ＂Bank of Crooks and Criminals＂) and stopped London’s gangs from moving their ill-gotten gains around the capital.

As part of the Uniforms - the new, secret, anti-money-laundering squad - high-speed car chases, bugging homes and spying on targets was day-to-day business.

Told by a true insider and revealing never-before-told-secrets of the industry, India Uniform Nine lays bare the intense rivalry between crime-fighting organisations and how that leads to corruption, chaos and some scarcely believable antics in the covert world. And how Mark’s own operation was nearly scuppered by a US Customs bungle.