Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  The Kassar arrest made international headlines that put the DEA Special Operations Division on the map, at a fortuitous moment. Nine months earlier, Representative Henry Hyde, a powerful Illinois Republican, had tacked a provision onto the USA Patriot Act that created a new federal felony, criminalizing the use of drug money collected anywhere in the world to aid international terrorism anywhere in the world. Hyde had been frustrated that Afghan traffickers, having achieved a near monopoly on the world opium supply, were using the profits to sustain the Taliban, kill American and allied troops and civilians, and prolong the war in Afghanistan. The Afghan cartel’s heroin and opium trafficking did not violate U.S. laws of the time because those laws were aimed at stopping drugs from entering the United States. Afghan heroin was marketed mostly in Europe, Iran, and Russia. Most of the heroin sold in the United States was made from opium poppies cultivated in Mexico and Colombia.

  The Hyde provision gave the DEA sweeping new extraterritorial authority that was not limited to the Afghanistan war zone. It was a ticket to everywhere, so long as the DEA didn’t screw it up by overreaching. One scandal, anything that looked like abuse of power, and the law, and maybe the agency itself, could be swept away, its jurisdiction assigned to the FBI, a more hidebound, risk-averse bureaucracy.

  DEA leaders decided that this audacious, inevitably controversial statute should be invoked only by the Special Operations Division, and within it, only by a small, handpicked, closely supervised team of seasoned agents. No cowboys, no showboaters. The chosen few were organized into the Bilateral Investigations Unit, successor to the old untouchables group. The new unit came to be known as the 960 Group, after the section of the U.S. legal code where the Hyde Amendment landed.

  Milione was a natural choice to run the new group. He had proved he could walk the line between dauntless and wild-ass crazy. Under his leadership, the 960 Group, housed on the corner of the second floor of the SOD building, came to exude an almost mystical aura, something like Skull and Bones at Yale. The 960 Group was not for anyone who needed structure or hated flying. It attracted agents who yearned to go to places they didn’t know existed. The most successful were never in the building long enough to set a yellow legal pad on a laminate desk. Milione’s view was, agents who weren’t out talking to sources weren’t doing their jobs.

  In April 2007, Milione was briefing Juan Zarate, President George W. Bush’s deputy national security advisor, about the Kassar investigation when Zarate pulled out a news clip. “Here’s a guy you ought to take a crack at,” he said. The piece described a Russian named Viktor Bout, who was to the arms trade what Wal-Mart was to retailing—high-volume, cheap, and unstoppable. Bout was even bigger than Kassar. He owned an air cargo fleet and was delivering massive quantities of weapons to militants in many countries, including Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and the FARC in Colombia. By one U.S. government estimate, he had made $50 million supplying arms to the Taliban during its rule in Kabul. Zarate wanted him stopped because he was supplying Charles Taylor, who had led a rebel army in Liberia and Sierra Leone, drugged and recruited children as soldiers, and imprisoned women as sex slaves.

  As assistant secretary of the Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes, Zarate had used his authority to blacklist the Russian from the international banking system, but the sanctions did not seem to have impeded him. Bout appeared to enjoy the active protection of the Kremlin. Zarate was disappointed that the intelligence agencies didn’t go after Bout. Some in the intelligence community even did business with him because he provided a service they couldn’t get elsewhere—a sort of FedEx service for clandestine lethal aid. The Pentagon, the British government, NATO, and UN had used Bout and his front companies at one time or another to ship weapons to groups they supported.

  Zarate didn’t think that Bout was directly involved in the drug trade. He sold guns to anybody—anybody—who wanted them, including drug traffickers. Zarate turned to the DEA agents because he wanted Bout shut down for good, and he thought DEA agents would do the job. Zarate had spent a lot of time with DEA agents and knew he could count on them to jump out of their lane, display ingenuity, take chances, and piss off some people at the State Department, the CIA, and a few foreign capitals. One of the DEA’s unofficial mottos was “Better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

  So when Zarate asked Milione if he could do something about Bout, Milione said, “Sure.” He and Brown put together a scenario they called Operation Relentless. They used roughly the same template they had devised for the Kassar case—an oblique approach using an associate of Bout to get close to the man himself and to entice him to Bangkok with the promise of a mega-deal.

  On March 6, 2008, in a meeting in a DEA-bugged hotel conference room in Bangkok, Bout offered everything the “FARC representatives”—actually DEA informants—wanted and more—20,000 to 30,000 AK-47 machine guns, five tons of C-4 military explosive, antiaircraft cannons, sniper rifles with night vision scopes, drones, ultralight aircraft armed with grenade launchers, and 700 to 800 SAMs, enough to wreak havoc at airfields across the world. Bout boasted that the SAMs could knock down U.S. helicopters and American military pilots working with the Colombian police to search out FARC cocaine labs. With extras, he calculated the price for the first phase of the deal at around $20 million.

  The Thai police appeared with handcuffs, with Milione, Brown, and other DEA agents a few steps behind them. Bout didn’t try to talk his way out. He had talked too much already. “You have all the cards,” he told Milione.

  By the time the LeRoux investigation was on, the 960 Group had hoodwinked and handcuffed a dozen or more drugs and arms kingpins, all without violence and without losing a single case in court. “The power of treachery,” Milione said, was always underestimated.

  The unit had been expanded to four teams of agents and intelligence analysts, one team for each continent. Milione had been promoted to assistant special agent in charge of the Special Operations Division. As the case agents for LeRoux, Cindric and Stouch called on the agents on their own Africa team, then borrowed people from the Asia and Europe teams and from DEA posts overseas.

  Pat Picciano, a Thai-speaking agent assigned to the DEA Bangkok contingent, served as liaison to Colonel Chokchai, the on-scene commander for the Thai government. On Takedown Day, Picciano relayed messages between Chokchai, who was all over Phuket with his raiding party, and Cindric and Stouch in the honeymoon cottage/command center.

  After finding Hunter’s safe house empty, Picciano and some of the Thai cops plunged into a thicket of banana trees and scrub in the yard. Picciano’s mind clicked through the possibilities: Maybe Hunter spotted the cops on the road to the house. Maybe he saw cops on the street. Maybe he got word from the neighbors. Maybe he was hiding in the bushes. Maybe he was up one of the trails.

  The hillside, rising 1,200 feet above sea level, was laced with footpaths, dirt driveways, and more banana trees and scrub. Hunter could be hiding anywhere around there. Picciano climbed back in his Toyota and floored it, tires flinging up gravel and sand and sending chickens and lizards scattering. Some of the Thai cops peeled off to other trails. The hill disappeared into a cloud of dust and giant flying insects.

  No Hunter. This was very, very bad.

  Cindric looked at Stouch. “Fuck, we gotta launch Estonia.” It was midmorning in Tallinn.

  Stouch nodded. He called Steve Casey, a 960 Group agent who had flown to Tallinn with his partner, Matt Keller, to coordinate the arrests of the mercenaries Michael Filter and Slawomir Soborski. Stouch found Casey and Keller with Toomas Loho, chief of the Estonian narcotics unit, and Rene Kanniste, head of the organized crime bureau. Chris Urben and Ryan Rapaszky from the DEA Copenhagen office were with them. They often shared trafficking intelligence with Kanniste and Loho, who were struggling to contain Tallinn’s opioid epidemic, caused by a tsunami of cheap Afghan heroin and even cheaper Chinese fentanyl. The Estonian cops were glad
to return the favor by arresting Filter and Soborski.

  “Time to launch,” Stouch told Casey.

  “We got it,” Casey said, giving a thumbs-up to Loho.

  Casey and Loho raced out of the building and down a short alley to the Estonian SWAT hut.

  “It’s a go!” they shouted at the SWAT commander.

  Sixteen Estonian SWAT cops filed out of the hut. They were on the big side of huge in street clothes. In black tactical helmets and matte black body armor that covered everything except their eyes, they looked like giant mutants. Still, a good sniper could shoot through an eyehole or armpit.

  Casey had briefed the SWAT cops to prepare for anything. Filter and Soborski had been unarmed when they walked off their flight at Tallinn International on September 21, but by September 25, Takedown Day, they could have acquired a small arsenal or even a large one. Tallinn, a Baltic port just 120 miles from the Russian border, was known as the Silicon Valley of Europe for its thriving information technology industry, but it was also a major crossroads for transnational organized crime and drug traffickers. In the local underground, native Estonian mobsters mingled and sparred with Russian, Chechen, Ukrainian, and Belarusian criminal networks, any of which would gladly sell weapons to visiting gunmen. Filter and Soborski knew this part of the world and might have set up an arms delivery to their hotel before they left Phuket.

  “They’re mercenaries,” Casey told the Estonian policemen. “Assume they’re going to have guns, assume they’re going to have knives, assume they’re going to fight. That’s what these guys have been doing for years. That’s what they’re paid for.”

  Filter had been a German army sniper deployed to a remote base in northern Afghanistan. Though he was just twenty-eight and his service record was thin, it was doubtful his commander would have trusted him to defend against Taliban ambushes if he weren’t an excellent sharpshooter, reliable and hypervigilant.

  Soborski, forty-one, was even more competent. He had spent thirteen years in the Polish military, eight of them in the elite counterintelligence unit JW GROM, whose motto was “Unseen and silent.” Besides being a seasoned sniper, he had gone through extensive training in close-quarter combat, explosives, karate, and other offensive and defensive techniques.

  As an operator on the Polish police hostage rescue team and president’s protection detail, Soborski had trained with, among others, the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and its counterparts in the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, and Belarus. He spent five years on a protection detail for the president of Poland and had guarded President George W. Bush and Pope John Paul II on visits to his country. After leaving active military service, he worked as a contractor in Afghanistan, Haiti, Eastern Europe, and Dubai and in maritime security missions, protecting merchant ships against pirates in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.

  Georges had developed a sort of grudging respect for Soborski, one maverick to another, especially when he overheard Soborski telling Hunter to fuck off, that he had hired on for traditional protection work, not contract hits. Everybody, including Georges, wanted to tell Hunter to fuck off, but the Pole was the only one who actually did it.

  Still, Soborski hadn’t quit when he heard that the job involved killing, so he would have to pay the price. Georges warned the DEA agents to tread carefully around him. “He’s poison,” the Frenchman said.

  Casey took Georges’s words to heart and passed them on to Loho and Kanniste and then to the SWAT team. “Be. Very. Careful.” He said it over and over.

  The Estonians listened politely, but they had that look Casey recognized, because he had worn it himself. The look was confident, edging toward cocky, and a little impatient. We’ve got this, the look said. Listen, we know our job. Don’t worry about it.

  Casey worried. He feared that the Estonians were underestimating the lethal potential of the two mercenaries. Was he sending them to their deaths? As the SWAT cops piled into their van, Casey approached the nearest SWAT operator, who was about the size of a restaurant refrigerator, and tried to drive the point home, again.

  “You guys, just be safe,” he pleaded. “Let’s all come home tonight.”

  The big cop roared with laughter. “Don’t you worry, I be safe,” he said. “And we have fun later.”

  By fun, he meant vodka.

  By 11 a.m. on Takedown Day, Loho, Casey, Keller, Urben, and Rapaszky were standing on the sidewalk outside the hotel, staring at the mix of medieval and Soviet-era architecture. It was gray and cold. The agents shivered and shifted from foot to foot in the frigid wind blasting across the Baltic, but they couldn’t go inside the hotel because Estonian law barred foreigners from being on the scene of arrests. The SWAT team filed into the hotel and up the stairs. A few minutes later, one of the SWAT cops emerged and told them that the SWAT leader had knocked on the door and boom, both mercenaries were on the floor face down before the door stopped vibrating. Textbook. By 11:34 a.m., Casey called Cindric and Stouch to say that Soborski and Filter were in custody.

  Casey went into the hotel and saw Filter slumped on his narrow bed, wrists cuffed behind his back, eyes downcast, as the cops searched his belongings. An Estonian prosecutor was there, laboriously documenting the search and the evidence. Filter was a visibly broken man.

  Soborski was standing in the hallway, also cuffed, with three SWAT cops around him. He was watching the search of his duffel. Unlike Filter, he was standing tall and dead calm, and his eyes were alert, flicking left and right, scanning the doors and hallway.

  “Okay, this guy’s going to run,” Casey thought. “He’s going to try to do something. He’s looking for an opening, for someone’s guard to be down.” Casey’s shoulders and legs tightened involuntarily, bracing for a chase.

  The police took both men to the station and put them in separate holding cells. Loho and a couple of his cops went into the cell with Soborski. Casey waited just outside. Loho emerged in a few minutes, looking shaken. Soborski had tossed Loho the handcuffs that had bound his wrists behind his back and sneered, “Here, you’ll be needing these.”

  How did he do that? Casey had no clue, but he pulled out his phone and fired off a warning email to Cindric and Stouch in Phuket: “Just so everyone is aware and to be vigilant. Soborski was transported back to Estonian HQ and put in a room. He then proceeded to undo his handcuffs from behind his back and handed them to the Estonian cops.”

  Outside the holding cell, Loho said something to the SWAT cops in Estonian, then escorted Casey to another room and said, “I’ll be back.”

  Loho returned in forty-five minutes and said, “Everything is taken care of. They are processed now.”

  Casey went back to his hotel room to do paperwork. He never did get that vodka with the SWAT cop. There was too much to do. The next day, Loho phoned him with some strange news. Shortly after the handcuffs incident and the DEA agents’ departure from the police station, Soborski had been rushed to the hospital with a medical emergency. Something in his abdomen had ruptured—an appendix or a spleen—and he had had surgery. Soborski was lucky he had gotten arrested, Loho said, so he could get medical treatment. It was a surprising development, but the Americans had no choice but to take the Estonians’ version of events.

  Back in Phuket, Takedown Day was not going as well. It was midafternoon there, and Rambo Hunter was still missing. Cindric and Stouch were burning through their cell phone batteries, pleading with Chokchai to get some cops to the airport, the port, anywhere Hunter might be found if he were trying to flee the island. Milione said very little, but every now and then he shot them an encouraging smile or brushed off a problem with a flick of his hand.

  Picciano and Grace were sitting glumly in Picciano’s Toyota SUV on the hilltop above the safe house, looking at the dust settling on the trail they had just ripped up, trying to figure out what to do next, when Bee, Picciano’s Thai helper and translator, called from a Thai cop car. He had good news, maybe. Bee had just remembered that he had the cell phone number of the maid who
cleaned the safe house. He had met and sweet-talked her when he was helping the Thai cops bug the place. He had just called her to find out if she knew where Hunter might be.

  “He moved out a month ago,” she said. “He’s staying with his girlfriend.”

  She said she had cleaned his new place, which was a cottage next to the Loch Palm golf course, just over the hill.

  Picciano and Grace called Stouch, who brightened. “The golf course,” he said. “Remember those pings? Wasn’t there a golf course right there?”

  “Yeah,” Cindric nodded, grinning. “There. Fucking. Was.”

  The flip phone’s signals from the golf course might not be gremlins after all. He checked the system again. The flip phone’s emissions from that spot were growing a little stronger.

  He shouted into his cell phone: “Jimmy, how far are you from the fucking golf course? We’re getting long pings.”

  Grace shouted back that they were close.

  “Are there houses there?”

  “Yes!”

  There was a small, gated community of vacation houses, the Garden Villas, on the rear perimeter of the golf course.

  Picciano pulled up to the golf course just as Chokchai and his men converged on the place.

  A few plainclothes Thai cops stationed themselves on the road and at the entrances, watching for approaching motorists. Others walked across the grounds, asking people if they had seen a pale American with a really shiny, bald head.

  As Picciano walked toward the golf club bar and office, he spotted a Harley-Davidson in the parking lot, and in the bar, a bald American, back to the street, tapping on a laptop. Picciano gave Chokchai a thumbs-up and trotted inside. When he got close enough to see the face of the man who had been riding the Harley, he realized he wasn’t Hunter. He was another bald, muscular American. Obviously, there was more than one Vin Diesel wannabe in Phuket. Hell, there might be several hundred.