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

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 $4 million bounty on her head. But right now, she’s just heartbroken. “Infante!” she hears over the radio. “Where are you?” It was spring 2007, Lili’s sophomore year at Columbia University. She was a serious and studious economics major who cut a notable figure on campus, a tall Russian émigré who rarely socialized. Having grown up in the chaos of post-Soviet Moscow, in an unstable household, Lili sought structure, discipline, and excellence. She planned to outwork her peers and land a coveted internship on Wall Street her first summer. Among the few diversions Lili permitted herself were weekly Skype calls with her grandmother Nina, back in Russia. Lili had a complicated relationship with her mom, a divorced drinker with a string of boyfriends, but Nina was her closest confidante, the only person she truly trusted. Lili would stay up late to tell Nina about life in America, her inability to integrate into campus culture, and her ballroom dance club, which was her other recreational indulgence. Lili didn’t like “fun,” per se, but she liked dancing for the same reason she liked school—it’s orderly, choreographed, predictable. Critically, it’s also nonverbal. Conversation doesn’t come easily to Lili. All her life, she’s felt like an outsider, an amateur anthropologist peering in on humanity rather than participating in it. A room full of twisting, twirling, silent strangers is one of the few places Lili feels ordinary. As the spring semester drew to a close, Lili set her eye on summer jobs. She’d applied for a financial analyst position at Citi’s wealth management division and another position, described only as “Russian language analyst,” which she’d stumbled across on a career board. One day, she received offers from both jobs, minutes apart. She could report to duty at Citi Wealth, fulfilling a longtime goal. Or she could accept the analyst position, which mysteriously listed no employer, only an address: 99 10th Avenue. This turned out to be the Manhattan headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration. She was intrigued. As a child in Moscow, Lili had been obsessed with American police procedurals. She was drawn to their clean message of good versus evil and the inevitability of justice, which was the opposite of the lawless kleptocracy she knew. During her childhood, Moscow was ruled by gangs. The police often worked for bribes. Here, the police came when you called. She admired them. But should she begin her career on Wall Street or realize her childhood dream of fighting crime? The following Monday, Lili showed up at DEA headquarters, a giant industrial box in Chelsea just south of the neighborhood’s blue-chip art galleries. A receptionist guided her through a warren of fluorescent-tube-lit hallways and deposited her in a room with a huge bulletin board, classically arranged with mug shots, question marks, thumb tacks, and byzantine constellations of yarn. An agent straight out of central casting—bald, no-nonsense, sturdy—introduced himself and showed her around. Lili couldn’t believe it. The agent told her what she’d be working on, a RICO investigation into Russian gangsters based in Brighton Beach. She would operate a wiretap and translate in real time the conversations of drug runners, money mules, foot soldiers, and hit men. “Think you can handle that?” the agent asked. Lili was stunned. “Yes,” she said, after collecting herself. “Hell yes.” “Good,” he  said. He handed her a set of headphones. “Welcome to the DEA.” The moment she tuned into the wire and heard unfamiliar voices, she was hooked. Lili has always loved the puzzle-solving aspect of surveillance. Growing up, she often eavesdropped on her mother’s phone calls, trying to decipher the mechanics of adults and their relationships. The wire provided a new outlet for that voyeuristic impulse. Spying felt right. She happily pulled triple shifts. Lili was aiding an investigation into a gang led by a man named Boris Nayfeld. He came to power by seizing control of the Bratva—the Russian mob—in Brighton Beach after an alleged assassination. His gang had hooks in every racket imaginable: drugs, diamond smuggling, human trafficking, Medicaid fraud, murder for hire. Lili’s primary targets were two Ukrainian brothers, Nikolai and Arthur Dozortsev, who were linked to importing ecstasy tabs by the million from Southeast Asia and laundering the profits through shell companies and luxury items. They were rumored to own a hilltop villa in the French Riviera, a Riva Vertigo yacht, and an Aston Martin Vanquish coupe. They were high-profile fixers—and very scary men—who turned out to have very ordinary conversations with family, friends, girlfriends, dentists. Lili was  fascinated by the mobsters’ quotidian chatter. She wondered: Was everyone capable of evil? Lili is a dogmatically ethical person. Dishonesty, betrayal, and violence confound her. And here were stone-cold criminals, leading otherwise normal lives. As Lili translated, agents worked in the field, acting on the intel she gathered—raiding stash houses, making arrests. Others supervised her surveillance. One of those was a  brash, handsome 32-year-old lead case agent named Luis Infante. Surveillance is like war: mostly boring. Between crucial moments, there’s a lot of time spent lounging, spinning around in cheap swivel chairs. Eventually, Luis and Lili got to talking. Luis was half Puerto Rican, half Cuban, born in Yonkers; he’d become a special agent after four years with the NYPD and the state troopers. His was not such a strange path. But how did an Ivy League sophomore, Luis wondered, end up in a basement operating a wiretap? Lili started at the beginning. She was born Lilita Shabazian in 1987, in Moscow. Her mother, Katya, had aspired to be an actress but got pregnant at 19. Unwilling to sacrifice her own youth, Katya spent nights partying. Alone at home, an 8-year-old Lili made her own dinner and sat in front of the TV, sipping her mother’s booze and watching reruns like Walker, Texas Ranger. Katya maintained their meager household by selling clothes in the local market. At times, Katya traveled, leaving Lili in the countryside with her grandmother, Nina, a strict and independent woman. Nina grew her own food and made her own elaborate dresses. She had high hopes for Lili and would sit with her granddaughter and read the classics: War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, and Lili’s favorite, The Three Musketeers, with its themes of loyalty and courage in the face of corruption. Nina was a bright spot in a bleak childhood, much of which Lili spent wandering the streets of Moscow with other aimless children. “For us,” Lili told Luis, “there were no piano lessons.” One night, Lili told Luis a story about how, when she was a child, a local gang threatened her mother. In Moscow at the time, anyone who sold goods had to pay for protection; Katya paid a gang that came cheap and was low in the local hierarchy, which left he