Remarkably cool-headed during most of the undercover mission, Evelyn Mazur, the wife of Robert Mazur, admitted she did encounter one sticking point when it came to her husband's alternate identity. "The most challenging part of the whole case, to be honest, was the idea of Bob having a fiancé and planning a wedding. For me, that was like time-out." Robert Mazur recalled: "Ev ultimately came to the decision that it would be better for me just to go and stay in deep cover. I could come home when I finished the job and at that point we'd determine whether or not we still had a life together." Mr. and Mrs. Mazur survived the rigors of Operation C-Chase and three decades later remain a happily married couple.
Former Senator Bob Kerrey said in a Congressional hearing, "Bob Mazur [Robert Mazur] did not have a lot of fancy technology. He had a tape recorder." Operating largely outside of bureaucratic oversight, Mazur's low-budget sting led to more than one hundred criminal indictments and the collapse of the world's seventh largest private bank in 1991, when the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) forfeited $550 million in U.S. assets after pleading guilty to fraud, larceny and money-laundering.
Corrupt banking practices have metastasized over the ensuing decades since Robert Mazur's 1980s mission, as evidenced by the recent "Panama Papers" leak. Dating back to the 1970s, the secret files document how major international banks continue to hide money in more than two hundred secret off-shore shell companies, without questioning the sources of their clients' income. International banks including BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered Bank, Lloyd's, ING, ABN Amro, Credit Suisse, Barclays, RBS, HSBC, UBS, and Wachovia / Wells Fargo have all paid fines for failing to report suspicious money transfers. "We lack the political will to do anything about it," Mazur observed.
The real-life Robert Mazur once said of Operation C-Chase: "We managed an operation and stayed right on top of it, making sure that what we got was not just the money, but what we got was evidence that was prosecutable against individuals who we actually could arrest."
During Robert Mazur's real life training with the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), before he joined the U.S. Customs Office of Enforcement, Mazur learned an invaluable lesson about creating an undercover alias. "I'll never forget when an IRS special agent told me 'Do as much as you can personally to build your own identity and do not rely on the government'." By way of illustration, Robert Mazur said: "If you let someone in the government get you a credit card, there's going to be a red flag in a file somewhere at American Express saying 'If this card becomes overdrawn, contact Special Agent so and so.' The people I infiltrated had very high-level contacts. They've bought presidents of countries. It would be easy for them to get somebody in charge of American Express to give them information."
Robert Mazur (played in the film by Bryan Cranston) credits Dominic (portrayed in the movie by Joseph Gilgun), the mob enforcer posing as his chauffeur, with invaluable fashion tips. "Dominic told me where to buy my clothes," said Mazur, who paid for the expensive suits out of his own pocket. "The government does not outfit you with new clothes. As a Customs Agent there was no way I would have paid that kind of money for a couple of suits, but this stuff helped keep me alive."