Before Marc Ruskin was an undercover FBI agent, he was an assistant DA in Brooklyn. Why did he give up his career as a powerful attorney to join the FBI academy?

It didn’t take long for Marc to become an undercover agent. For 27 years, he slipped into various different characters busting criminals ranging from drug dealers to Wall Street insiders. At one point, Marc was juggling three or four cases at a time – switching back and forth between identities. He wrote a book about his time at the FBI appropriately titled “The Pretender.” When I first discovered his book I immediately shot him a message. Luckily for me, he agreed to share some of his stories.

In the late 80s and early 90s, San Juan Puerto Rico had one of the highest murder rates of any US city. Some of the violence can be blamed on the Machetero, a separatist group actively trying to make Puerto Rico an independent country.  

Marc: “So I had gone from being an attorney in New York where the biggest thing I had to worry about was a papercut. Now I was in the streets of San Juan Puerto Rico as a combatant to the Macheteros. We learned at one point that the Macheteros had a plot to assassinate an FBI agent. The problem was, we didn’t know who the FBI agent was.”

Listen to my interview with Marc Ruskin on part 2 of “The Pretender.”

You can find The Pretender on Amazon.com or at your local bookstore. Also a special thanks out to St. Martin’s Press for letting me share Marc’s story with you.

Also, you can follow Marc Ruskin on Twitter @mhruskin