Chris Feistl is a retired DEA agent who spent 26 years stationed in Miami, Colombia and Phoenix. He also has field experience in the Caribbean, Central and South Americas.
After spending six years in Miami, Chris joined Jerry Salameh in Bogota, Colombia in 1994. Upon arriving in Colombia, Pablo Escobar had just been killed, so Chris worked exclusively on tracking the Cali Cartel. His expertise was in tracking laundered money and Chris had success linking the cartel’s money to Swiss banks. Working with Jerry for another three years, Chris was essential in the capturing of Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, the two brothers leading the Cali Cartel.
For the better part of 2000s, Chris remained in Colombia as Assistant Regional Director at the U.S. Embassy.
These days Chris is back in America, but he misses Colombia dearly. Most of the formative years of his life took place there- it’s where he met his wife. It’s also where he made a name for himself and his family. When he was there he had to adhere to specific missions. He’s itching to go back to explore passion project investigations such as finding caletas that he may have missed or were outside the scope of his investigations.
In Season 2 of FEM, Chris is looking to utilize the skills he’s developed over the years. He has management written all over him. With an extremely laid back and approachable demeanor, he’s able to process high stakes information and make the right decisions very quickly. While he’s done field work all over, including in Miami and Colombia, he was also a rising star who quickly rose to management levels at the DEA. He aced all of his promotion tests with perfect scores (something very rare among agents). For this reason, most of his career has been in oversight and he wants to redirect that skillset to our show. He wants to take information that intel analysts and sources in the field give him, formulate a plan of attack, and execute operations using that information. Being a six-foot tall white American with long blonde hair, Chris can’t fit in all that well on the ground in Colombia. Therefore, he mainly operates from the shadows until it’s time to execute an operation. This leaves an opening for people like Jerry and Guillermo who can fit in better on the ground.