The informant earned millions working for the DEA. He paid no taxes.

MIAMI (AP) — A longtime informant who traveled the world partying with rogue U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents avoided a prison sentence this week after admitting he failed to pay taxes on nearly $4 million he received for years of undercover work.

Andres Zapata was sentenced Wednesday in Austin, Texas, to time served after agreeing to cooperate in a decade-long investigation that has implicated several agents in misconduct, according to two people who weren't authorized to discuss the ongoing inquiry and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Zapata, 48, was extradited to the U.S. last year from his native Colombia, where he had worked closely with José Irizarry, a former DEA agent serving a 12-year sentence for skimming millions of dollars from money laundering stings to fund luxury travel, expensive sports cars and frat-house style parties.

The DEA paid Zapata, a professional money launderer, $3.8 million from 2015-2020 for his work as a confidential informant, court records show. He pleaded guilty last July to a single charge of failing to report those earnings on his tax returns. Informants are required by the DEA to report such income to the IRS but are rarely prosecuted for failing to do so.

The Justice Department's criminal division, which prosecuted the case, declined to comment. The DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zapata's lawyer, Don Bailey, argued at the sentencing hearing that it was unusual for prosecutors to target someone who had risked their life helping U.S. law enforcement combat violent cartels for an offense he didn’t even know he was committing.

Zapata and other informants "don't get 1099s or W-9s,” Bailey said, referring to forms typically filed by independent contractors to report income. “You don’t know what you owe. You sign a piece of paper for money. You don’t get receipts.”

At the hearing, Zapata told a federal judge he was ready to move forward with his life after having spent over a year in a rough prison near his hometown of Medellin awaiting extradition.

“I've learned my lesson,” he said, according to a transcript of the proceeding.

U.S. District Judge David Ezra described Zapata at the hearing as having been “very cooperative” with the government. He denied a request by the AP to unseal sentencing records. In sentencing Zapata to time served in Colombia, the judge also ordered the former informant to pay $1.2 million in restitution, an amount reflecting the tax loss to the U.S. government.

Internal DEA records obtained by the AP show the agency first signed up Zapata as an informant in 1998, employing an erstwhile vacuum salesman whose brother-in-law got jammed up for drug trafficking.

Over the next two decades, he became one of the agency’s most prolific informants, arranging covert cash pickups and assisting in investigations from Peru to Los Angeles, the records show, earning more than $4.6 million from the DEA.

But he didn’t supply agents with just tips.

Under the cover of a DEA assignment, the Colombian-American dual national crisscrossed the globe with agents and sometimes prosecutors from Miami in what Irizarry has described as a “world debauchery tour” that flouted strict rules against cozying up to informants.

A secret WhatsApp chat agents used to revel in their three-continent joyride details Zapata’s role procuring prostitutes — and helping what Irizarry coined “Team America” get out of trouble. In 2018, Zapata had been on assignment in Madrid drinking with an agent who was briefly detained and accused of sexually assaulting a woman.

Irizarry told investigators that Zapata kicked back some of the reward money he earned as an informant. He recalled a night Zapata showed up at his apartment in Colombia with a bag containing $40,000 in cash — money Irizarry used to purchase a Tiffany ring for his wife.

Zapata also allegedly served as a go-between for payments Irizarry admitted to taking from Colombia’s “Contraband Czar” Diego Marin — a one-time DEA informant arrested in 2024 in Spain as part of a Colombian bribery investigation. Marin and Zapata appear in a video obtained by the AP partying with agents at a Madrid restaurant.

Mustian reported from Natchitoches, Louisiana.