Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  “False alarm,” Picciano radioed Chokchai.

  The Thai cops questioned the golf club staff and guests. Somebody pointed out a vacation house. A neighbor said that the renter looked like an American. He had left on a motorbike with a young woman.

  Grace phoned Cindric. “He’s not here.”

  “Jimmy, are you fucking with me?”

  “No.”

  Cindric gripped his stomach, stared at Stouch, and let fly with more F-bombs.

  The Thai cops fanned out, interviewing more people, showing them photos of Hunter. Some people thought they had seen him, but these farang—foreigners—looked a lot alike.

  A Thai cop posted near the road and golf course entrance radioed that a man and woman were heading toward the house on a motorbike.

  Picciano and Grace, who were standing on the roadside, heard the bike before they saw it. Then the faces of the riders came into view.

  “That’s him!” Picciano shouted into his phone to Chokchai. “That’s Hunter coming!”

  Chokchai and his men steered their cars right behind Hunter and pulled into the gated community. Picciano, driving his Toyota, fell in behind them. His heart was pounding so hard he could barely hear. When he got a closer look at the man’s face, he grinned. That was Hunter, for sure. The woman was his Filipino wife.

  Hunter’s smartphone was inside the house, turned off, with the battery removed. That’s why Cindric’s satellite cell phone tracker hadn’t found it.

  Grace called Cindric in the command center.

  “We got ’em!”

  It was 5:05 p.m. local time. Cindric, Stouch, and Milione stood up and gripped one another in an awkward three-way hug that knocked off Milione’s glasses.

  “Thank God,” Milione said, and exhaled, finally.

  Chokchai’s team rushed to a local hotel to make the next round of arrests, LeRoux’s five-man arms-and-drugs crew.

  Three of them were about to pull up at the hotel. They were Scott Stammers and Philip Shackels, the British traffickers who worked for LeRoux, buying and selling meth, cocaine, drug precursor chemicals, and small arms, and their local muscle, Adrian Valkovic, a Slovak who was sergeant-at-arms of the Bangkok branch of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, a worldwide organization noted for violence, gun-running and manufacturing and distributing meth. The Thai cops surprised the three after they climbed out of their car and handcuffed them. The last two were arrested in their hotel room. They were Kelly Reyes Peralta, LeRoux’s Filipino meth dealer, and his supplier, Lim Ye Tiong Tan, the Manila representative of a Hong Kong–based Chinese Triad organized crime group.

  Once the Thai cops had all five secured, Grace called Cindric. “Got ’em.”

  Cindric and Stouch were elated. The Brits, the biker, and the dealer were good catches. The arrest of Lim was best of all. He was the Pyongyang connection. Bald and scrawny, he affected the look of a Brooklyn hipster—black shirt, black jacket, beige cashmere scarf draped around his reedy neck, and of-the-moment combat boots laced up over skinny black pants. He was pure Chinese underground. He knew exactly how the North Korean meth pipeline worked. If he chose, he could expose a lot of it—the meth manufacturing plants, middlemen, bank accounts, shipping routes, business fronts, all of great interest to the American national security community, which was scrambling to find a way to deny Kim Jong Un the funds he needed to accelerate his nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs. Lim might also expose Chinese government complicity in Triad smuggling operations that moved meth and other contraband out of North Korea and cash back to Pyongyang.

  Murphy’s law had one more shot at blowing up the whole plan, and it was a strong one. Gögel and Vamvakias were still up in the air. If they got away, the conspiracy case would be hollowed out, and the other eight suspects might walk. LeRoux had given his mercenary team more target packages, military-speak for directives to conduct targeted killings. It was conceivable that the mercenaries could try to fulfill those missions to collect the cash they were promised.

  Kenya Airlines flight 508 bearing Gögel and Vamvakias, and unbeknownst to them, Brown, was supposed to land at Accra at 12:10 p.m. local time and depart an hour later. If, during their time on the ground in Accra, the pair got a text or some other signal from Hunter, their mates in Tallinn or some other accomplice the agents didn’t know about, Gögel and Vamvakias might bolt into Accra, disappearing into the jumble of open air markets and side streets. Brown deplaned at Accra, intending to watch the ramp closely. He hoped that if the worst happened, he could find some Ghanaian police to tackle the pair on their way into the pandemonium. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was all he could think of.

  Milione, Cindric, and Stouch crouched in their honeymoon cottage/command center, the air humid with their sweat, waited for a message from Brown, and watched the clock. “The curveballs are going to come,” Milione said soothingly. Everything was going to be okay.

  The younger men weren’t so sure. Gögel and Vamvakias had to be taken down, soon. “We needed them, 100 percent, no question about it,” Stouch said. “We could not fail. There wasn’t any room for failure.”

  They would know for certain that they hadn’t failed when flight 508 took off for Monrovia. Once it was in the air, Gögel and Vamvakias would have no way out. The flight’s departure was scheduled for 1:10 p.m. Accra time—which would be 8:10 p.m. Phuket time. Brown was supposed to let Cindric and Stouch know when the plane went wheels up.

  At 8:10 p.m. in Phuket, Cindric and Stouch waited. And waited. Brown didn’t call. The agents were determined not to panic. They’d been through the Accra airport many times. It wasn’t Zurich. Delays were the rule, not the exception. Still, their hearts were pounding like bongos.

  Ten minutes passed. Then another ten. Then another ten. The honeymoon cottage went silent. Cindric and Stouch stared at their phones and laptops, willing them to light up. Milione watched them, seeing anguish, channeling calm. When this play worked—not if, but when, he thought, because his faith was absolutely unshakable—they’d get that blast of pure joy. He had experienced it when he got Kassar, and when he got Bout, and when he got those Afghan kingpins with the unpronounceable names, and when he got a whole bunch of second-string scumbags.

  “That’s where it becomes fun,” Milione said later. “Now you’re scrambling. You’re overcome by an event or an unexpected thing, or the bad guy surprises you. That’s where you separate the men from the mice.” Some agents froze. Others got sharper and more determined. He classified Cindric and Stouch as the second type. “When it looks like the whole thing is going to go to shit,” he said, “they go, ‘Fuck it, we’re going to get this guy.’”

  At 8:52 p.m. Phuket time—forty-two long minutes after the mercenaries were supposed to have taken off from Accra—they heard three electronic pings. An email from Brown had just landed in all three men’s mailboxes. “FYI Kenya air flight departed,” Brown had written. “The big guy is sitting in 12G and the shorter guy is in 27C. See you in Liberia.”

  The agents’ eyes met. They’d done it! They didn’t need to say it out loud, but that note from Brown was like dropping a ninety-pound backpack.

  The next message came in at 10:50 p.m.: “Got ’em.”

  That meant the Liberian police had Gögel and Vamvakias in custody. All ten arrests were in the bag, not a shot fired. Cindric and Stouch whooped and looked at Milione.

  “Fucking GREAT,” Milione beamed and stepped backward. So did the two agents. Nobody wanted to try another group hug.

  Cindric cracked open a Thai beer. It was shitty, because he liked shitty beer, and it was so cold it made his eyes ache. As soon as he learned that the DEA plane had landed in Westchester County, he would text Jack, their undercover operative, who had spent eight harrowing months inside LeRoux’s organization, wearing a wire and reporting everything he heard and saw. LeRoux had given Hunter a contract to kill Jack. Jack was in the United States, hiding out and praying that the agents would get Hunter before Hunter got him. Cindric’s
message to Jack was going to be cryptic: “Look at the doj.gov website.” Jack would know what that meant—that U.S. attorney Preet Bharara of Manhattan had just announced the arrest of Hunter and the other mercenaries, declaring that “an international hit team has been neutralized by agents working on four continents.”

  Jack loathed Hunter. For a time, he had lived in a group house with the Kentuckian and the other mercenaries employed by LeRoux. They all knew that LeRoux was a tyrant, capricious and paranoid, who suspected everybody around him of stealing from him. Sooner or later he would order one of them to kill another for some imagined offense. They made a pact that the designated gunman would stage a fake hit with fake photos of a fake blood-smeared corpse—who would open his eyes, get up, wash off the grisly proof of death, and get himself another job, someplace LeRoux would never look.

  Hunter didn’t join in the mercenaries’ covenant. He followed LeRoux’s orders blindly, no matter what. When it came Jack’s turn to feel LeRoux’s wrath, for the usual trumped-up charge of embezzling, Hunter got his gun and started stalking Jack. “Hunter broke the pact and was as loyal as a weasel,” Jack said. “He did everything LeRoux wanted, as long he got paid for it.”

  When Jack got Cindric’s text and realized that Hunter was behind bars, he called his fiancée, Anya, who was on the other side of the world. They were safe, for now.

  Maybe.

  Chapter Three

  The Rhodesian

  “I DON’T WANT TO SIT ON A SOFA,” LEROUX SAID. “I WANT TO SIT ON PILES of boxes full of hundred dollar bills and five hundred euro notes. That’s what I want.”

  It was a sultry evening in Manila in the fall of 2009. LeRoux gestured around his glass-and-steel penthouse in the Salcedo Park Twin Towers, one of Manila’s swankiest addresses. The living room, the size of a small ballroom, offered a commanding view of Makati, the glittering international finance center of greater Manila. Manila Bay, inky blue at this hour, was just beyond.

  As founder, CEO, COO, and CTO of a highly profitable global e-commerce pharmaceutical business, LeRoux could stack cartons of currency to the ceiling of his penthouse and his many other hideaways around the South Pacific and Africa. Nobody but LeRoux knew how many tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, euros, and gold he had stashed in banking havens such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Dubai.

  Yet he needed so much more.

  Jack, a European navy veteran who had worked for LeRoux for the past year and a half, felt a chill go up his spine. The Boss, as LeRoux insisted on being called, wasn’t content with being the world’s biggest Internet pill peddler.

  Jack could sense that he had his mind set on becoming some fusion of Pablo Escobar, onetime king of the international drug underworld; Viktor Bout, the world’s most hated and feared arms merchant until his arrest in March 2008, and something else altogether. Something new and terrible. LeRoux, said Jack, “was convinced he was going to be the biggest, and, if he ever would be caught, it would be in the history books.” He was intent on generating awe. Stunned silence, sheer terror—awe! If his mark on history was a big bloody gash, well, the world deserved it.

  Jack didn’t know anything about LeRoux’ origins or why he seemed so angry. Was he seeking vengeance? Vengeance for what? He didn’t explain, and Jack dared not ask. Nor did Jack think of using the words “no,” “can’t,” “stop,” or “bad idea” around LeRoux. He was just a hired hand. As far as he could tell, LeRoux didn’t have an adult friend who could play the part of consigliere. The Boss seemed to be on his own, his head full of rampaging thoughts, with no boundaries and no brakes.

  Jack was one of the few people LeRoux trusted to come to the penthouse and talk business face-to-face. LeRoux made an exception for him because he was capable.

  LeRoux needed Jack’s eclectic set of skills to fulfill his latest vision, which was to create a new kind of criminal enterprise—a digitally powered, high-volume warehousing and delivery operation for drugs and arms. Call it black-market Amazon, or Amazon-for-arms. If he succeeded, LeRoux would be Escobar plus Bout plus Jeff Bezos.

  The vision required extensive physical facilities, including an airstrip to accommodate cargo planes, a seaport to handle cargo containers, staff quarters, latrines, kitchens, barricades, sentry towers, and, to defend it all, a private army, very Apocalypse Now, with anti-aircraft emplacements on all sides. LeRoux gave Jack an architect’s rendering that was based on a U.S. Army firebase in Vietnam. Every staple, every plank, every rebar, and every roll of concertina wire had to be brought in and assembled from the ground up. LeRoux wanted to locate it on a stretch of arid Somalian badlands populated by gunmen, Islamists, and goatherds.

  LeRoux sensed when he interviewed Jack that he was the man for the job. He had run his own construction company in northern Europe, so he could read architectural plans. He had spent time in war zones. He could shoot, apply a tourniquet, and bed down on a scorpion-infested patch of desert like the rest of LeRoux’s mercenaries. With his pleasantly craggy face, deep bass voice, and self-effacing manner, he could put on a tie and talk wine vintages with a government minister while slipping him an envelope of bills. He could walk into a bank and wire ten thousand euros to Hong Kong, without raising suspicion.

  “My golden boy!” LeRoux dubbed him. The Boss lavished as much warmth as he could muster on his new favorite. It wasn’t much but it was better than anything Jack had gotten from his own father, an abusive alcoholic who, to his dying day, wouldn’t concede that his son did anything right. Jack liked to hear the Boss say “golden boy.” And, of course, there was the money.

  Jack was in way over his head. He hadn’t seen this scheme for a cyber-enabled black-market megastore coming until he was caught up in it, and now he didn’t know how to get out of it.

  Too late, he realized that LeRoux’s pharmaceutical business and real estate investments were just covers for his more malign plans, which he was pursuing along multiple tracks.

  His latest brainstorm was to expand his portfolio from conventional small arms to large weapons systems and weapons of mass destruction. He had recently made a deal with Iran’s Defense Industries Organization to develop key components for the DIO’s program to build advanced, precision-guided rockets and missiles—“smart rockets” was the jargon in the military-industrial complex. Determined to amplify its power across the Middle East, Iran was stockpiling rockets and conventional missiles and supplying hundreds of thousands of them to its proxies, including Hezbollah, the Shi’a militant group that controlled much of Lebanon, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shi’a militants in Iraq, and other militants around the Middle East and South Asia. Iranian missile factories would soon start cropping up in Hezbollah territory in Lebanon and parts of Syria controlled by Iran’s ally, the Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad. Whenever Iran’s unguided rockets and missiles were lobbed at Israel, they did little damage because they lacked up-to-the-minute navigation systems, due to effective international sanctions. The situation would be very different if LeRoux succeeded. He had sent emissaries to Tehran to meet with the head of the DIO and offer to help Iran craft navigation systems that would make ordinary rockets and missiles “smart,” meaning, capable of crippling strategically vital targets, including military command and control centers, communications nodes, airport control towers, ministries, and critical infrastructure such as water systems. Such fearsome weapons, small enough to be transported by bands of militants, could alter the skylines of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Once he cinched a deal with Iran to pursue the missile guidance project, for which he expected to be paid $100 million, he assembled a team of scientists and engineers, mostly from Romania, and set them up in a clandestine research lab in Manila, with testing facilities and bunkers in the countryside.

  To obtain chemicals for the project and to deliver parts to Iran without being detected by intelligence services, LeRoux assigned several of his engineers to designing a small diesel-powered submarine. He had already completed construction of a docking facility for the s
ub at a yacht maintenance yard he owned on the coast of Batangas Province, south of Manila.

  He created a separate business to buy and sell North Korean methamphetamine, through a Chinese Triad group. The Triad was offering as much as six tons of pure crystal meth a month, for the asking price of $360 million. On the street, that much high-quality dope would bring somewhere around $1 billion. To LeRoux, it was just another opportunity with nice upside potential. He didn’t care that a transaction of that magnitude would put a big chunk of hard currency in Kim Jong Un’s pocket, greatly enhancing his ability to menace the United States and its allies with the threat of nuclear-tipped missiles. North Korean engineers were working steadily to extend the range of the regime’s ballistic missiles to reach the continental United States. It was possible, even likely that some of the millions generated by the meth would underwrite the North Korean arms race.

  What Jack didn’t see, when he first met LeRoux, was his ravening, insatiable thirst for money and control. Like most people, Jack had preconceived notions about how world-class international criminal leaders behaved. To date, most of the stereotypes had been true, and for good reason. Without exception, Colombian and Mexican cartel bosses used their jewel-encrusted guns and girls, dressage horses, private zoos, torture chambers, and over-the-top muscle cars to brand themselves winners. Swagger was marketing. The Kardashians knew that. So did Pablo Escobar, El Chapo Guzman, and all the rest of the crime lords who had achieved tabloid/clickbait status.

  LeRoux defied categorization. He lived austerely and reclusively, indifferent to most creature comforts. The penthouse where LeRoux always met Jack was starkly furnished. It looked like the inside of a new refrigerator, with Ikea-white walls, a three-cushion couch, the biggest flat-screen TV on the market, and a table with four uncomfortable straight chairs. Even as he confided his desire to wallow in currency, LeRoux perched on one of the straight chairs, his lumpy backside hanging over the seat. Jack sat across from him on a second straight chair.