Patrick Burns on Weekends with Jason Olbourne- 07 July 2024

GUEST OVERVIEW: Patrick Burns, born in Providence, Rhode Island, completed three years in the U.S. Marines before beginning his career as a Special Agent for the U.S. Treasury Department. As a result of his very first investigation, as a rookie agent, he unexpectedly uncovered one of the world's largest and most elaborate money-laundering schemes. The scheme's Mastermind, a flamboyant Italian mobster known in the criminal world as "The Fat Man", aka "Mr. Cash", was running a string of bogus gold businesses, and using them to launder the Colombian Drug Cartels' dirty money with the Italian mob's stolen gold. 
 
 Swapping out the Mob's gold with the Cartel's cash was brilliant. The unique scheme was the secret to his success. By some accounts, The Fat Man laundered $1 billion dollars in cartel drug money.The complete investigation, from start to finish, is the subject of his first book, The Coin Store: A True Story of Drug Cartels, Mobsters, Cops and Agents. After spending 12 years as a U.S. Treasury Agent, Patrick spent the rest of his career as a Special Agent for the U.S. Justice Department, specializing in gun trafficking investigations, domestic bombing investigations and international terrorist cases. Some of that work became the subject of his second True-Crime book: Ivan Sent Me. In 2008-2009 while embedded with the U.S. Army in Mosul and later in Baghdad, Iraq he headed an anti-terrorist team of investigative experts.