My Life Undercover For The FBI: Marc Ruskin

Imagine being paid to lie? Imagine having to live a lie for most of your professional career? If you forget your lies, or get them mixed up, you could be killed. This was the life that Marc Ruskin lived as a secret undercover FBI agent for almost 20 years.

The FBI generally has about 100 UC agents working full-time in the field. In the 1990s and 2000s, Marc Ruskin had the most diverse, and notorious, case list of all, and the broadest experience within the bureaucracy, including overseas. He worked ops targeting public corruption, corporate fraud, Wall Street scams, narcotics trafficking, La Cosa Nostra, counterfeiting―and gritty street-level scams and schemes.

Sometimes working three or four cases simultaneously, Ruskin switched identities by the day: Each morning he had to walk out the door with the correct ID, clothes, accessories and frame of mind for that day’s mission. Meet Alex Perez, Alejandro Marconi, and Sal Morelli, just a few of Ruskin’s undercover personas.

But what about the psychology of doing undercover work? Did Marc ever feel guilty about turning in his subjects, after getting to know them quite well over a period of time? Does he ever think he provoked them to carry out more crime in order to build his case? Do elements of these characters he had to act and live out stay with him? Listen to find out more. 

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