Barry Seal was a real-life informant who appears as a character in The Infiltrator, but there's much more to his story that the film leaves out. In The Infiltrator's cast, Seal is played by actor Michael Par. In real life, Seal was an American airline pilot born in 1939 who became a drug smuggler for the cartel, working under Pablo Escobar. He began by transporting small quantities of marijuana in 1976, and by 1978, he was fully involved in transporting large shipments of cocaine. In 1981, he began working for the Medelln Cartel.

By that same year, the DEA was already onto Barry Seal's smuggling side hustle. In 1983, he was charged, and by 1984, Seal offered himself to law enforcement as an informant. He participated in two major undercover operations, leading to arrests not dissimilar to those made in The Infiltrator's ending, before answering for his own crimes in Florida and Louisiana. After his trials,...