Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  LeRoux had seven or eight other luxury properties around Manila and Subic Bay, plus places scattered from Hong Kong to northern Europe, but Jack had the impression that the penthouse was the place where he spent most days, making business deals via text, email, and voice-over-Internet systems. He used outdated hardware and software that he had studied inside and out, to assure himself that his computer and messaging systems didn’t have trapdoors that foreign spies could enter.

  In the penthouse kitchen, two bored cooks hung about, gossiping with the bodyguards. LeRoux kept the cooks and a maid on duty around the clock, even though he usually sent out for his favorite foods: Big Macs, pizzas, and Kentucky Fried Chicken wings. If fast food was good enough for Warren Buffett, who was famous for eating breakfast at McDonald’s every single morning of his frugal life, it was good enough for LeRoux. But the Sage of Omaha, closing in on his eighth decade, looked as if he might live forever, while LeRoux, at thirty-six, was bloated and ungainly. That’s probably why he mainlined Diet Coke and Coke Zero by the case, in the futile hope of containing his spreading belly. LeRoux didn’t drink alcohol. His strange big brain was his instrument, the fount of all his wealth, and had to be kept clear and clean. No bling, blonds, or clubbing. His vice was prostitutes, sometimes in multiples. He ordered in. Cindy Cayanan, LeRoux’s regular girlfriend, accountant, mother of two of LeRoux’s children, and, at home, his feisty Dragon Lady, kept to one of the other residences, sometimes raging about his sessions with hookers, which he called “raves,” but mostly acquiescent. He was the money in the relationship. It appeared that they both enjoyed a good fight, almost as much as a fuck.

  There was a bed in the master bedroom and in a second bedroom, a pile of U.S. Army M4 assault rifles and some body armor. No art. No décor. No mementos. He didn’t want to possess anything he couldn’t throw in a suitcase. He was in a constant state of readiness to vanish.

  “He always had a backup plan ready,” Jack said. “He paid top dollar for the most exclusive homes but inside was barely nothing. He never showed off. He lived very minimalistically and always was prepared to move.”

  Running an organized-crime business required complete mobility and the absence of sentiment. As indelibly, quintessentially Rhodesian to his core, LeRoux was well suited to the role. He had spent his first dozen years in a society, now dispersed, of extraordinary privilege intertwined with unremitting tension. White colonists in politically isolated Rhodesia believed in taking what they wanted and depending on themselves. They fought hard and dirty and almost to the bitter end. Almost, because they made sure they had a way of escape. And then they slipped back, if they could, because they never really belonged anyplace but Rhodesia.

  Paul Calder LeRoux was born on Christmas Eve 1972 in Bulawayo, Rhodesia’s gritty, vibrant second city. He was the illegitimate son of a young white woman and her lover, both of British descent. A married white Rhodesian couple, Paul and Judith LeRoux, adopted him. Two years later, a daughter—Paul’s little sister—arrived.

  Today, only 17,000 people of European extraction live in Zimbabwe, a landlocked nation of 150,000 square miles wedged between South Africa, Mozambique, Botswana, and Zambia. At the time of LeRoux’s birth, some 260,000 whites resided there, ruthlessly dominating, exploiting, and fearing the country’s 4.8 million blacks. Bulawayo, a precolonial tribal capital whose name meant “place of slaughter,” had blossomed into an industrial powerhouse and processing center for the region’s abundant metal ores, cattle, cotton, tobacco, and maize. The colony’s wealth cushioned it from international sanctions meant to force Prime Minister Ian Smith, an unyielding champion of white rule, to agree to a transition to majority—black—rule.

  But the black nationalist movement was gaining strength. Three days before LeRoux was born, the colony’s long-simmering racial and economic disparities ignited into what whites called the Bush War and blacks called the War of Liberation.

  At exactly three o’clock on the morning of December 21, 1972, black nationalist guerrillas, backed by the People’s Republic of China, attacked a tobacco farm owned by a Belgian émigré hated for his cruelty to black laborers. Sporadic guerrilla raids on other white farms followed. The Rhodesian security forces, among them a shadowy clandestine unit known as the Selous Scouts, counterattacked ferociously. The civil war escalated as both sides engaged in hideous atrocities. The British historian Piers Brendon, in his 2008 book, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, wrote:

  Cities such as Salisbury and Bulawayo, where most Europeans lived, were hardly affected by the bloodshed. But guerrillas, some backed by China and others by Russia, crossed the frontier from Mozambique and Zambia to attack remote farmsteads, railways and roads. Rural whites turned their houses into fortresses, protected by sandbags, searchlights, barbed wire and guard dogs. The guerrillas tried to enlist the native population, using terror tactics against anyone who resisted. Chiefs were regularly tortured and murdered. Schoolteachers were raped. Villages were looted and burned. Counter-insurgency measures were no less savage. They included collective punishments, the closure of schools and clinics, the establishment of free-fire zones and protected villages similar to concentration camps. African cattle were seized or deliberately infected with anthrax. Captured combatants were given electric shocks, dragged through the bush by Land Rovers or “hung upside down from a tree and beaten.” One District Commissioner engaged in “stamping on them” said that he had “never had so much fun in my life.” The Selous Scouts committed the worst atrocities, especially during cross-border raids and hot pursuits. . . . By 1974, though, more insurgents were being recruited than killed.

  By 1978, Rhodesia was in a weakened position. Its only ally, South Africa, was staggering under international sanctions because of its own apartheid policies. Under pressure from the United Nations, Great Britain, and the United States, Smith reluctantly held elections. On March 4, 1980, guerrilla leader Robert Mugabe’s party won in a landslide. The colony of Rhodesia disappeared from the map, replaced by the independent nation of Zimbabwe.

  Liberation brought no peace. Mugabe launched a dirty war against tribal and political rivals. He created a 5,000-man Fifth Brigade, had it trained and equipped by North Korea, and dispatched it into the countryside to pillage, rape, torture, and slaughter. Between 20,000 and 80,000 people, mostly civilians, died.

  The LeRoux family would have avoided witnessing the worst of the violence if it is true, as has been reported, that they lived in the mining town of Mashaba (also spelled Mashava), about 150 miles east of Bulawayo, where Paul LeRoux the elder was reportedly a supervisor of underground asbestos mining in the enormous Shabanie and Mashaba asbestos mining complex, one of the largest and most hazardous mining operations in the world at the time. Available accounts of the period indicate that Mashaba was a relatively quiet company town, meting out misery and early death to black asbestos miners, but it would have afforded an uneventful childhood to the son of a white overseer.

  White privilege couldn’t survive Mugabe’s financial mismanagement, which launched the Zimbabwean economy into a tailspin and sent white professionals fleeing. For many white Rhodesians, returning to the British motherland was not an option. Rhodesians labored under a stigma dating back to the colony’s early days. “Kenya was advertised as a rich man’s playground, a sportsman’s paradise, the officer’s mess as opposed to the Rhodesian sergeant’s mess,” British historian Brendon wrote. In modern times, British intellectuals dismissed white Rhodesians as thuggish, dull-witted, entitled hicks who couldn’t make a go of life in the real world. “One is struck in Salisbury by the startling incompetence of the Europeans,” British journalist Richard West observed in his 1965 book, The White Tribes of Africa. “The rude, lazy hotel staff, the shop girls who cannot add, the airline staff, who misread your ticket, are all incompetent even by African standards. But they retain their jobs because customers prefer to be served by whites and because there are few Africans qualified to replace them. The whites make sure
of that.” Robert Blake, a British historian who wrote the well-regarded A History of Rhodesia, described the colony as a “cultural desert” that “never threw up as a by-product any sign of intellectual, literary or artistic life.”

  Some Rhodesian intellectuals agreed with these condemnations. Foreshadowing American progressives who regarded Donald Trump’s base as rednecks and, as Hillary Clinton famously sniped, “deplorables,” Frank Clements, a white Rhodesian reformer and journalist who served as mayor of Salisbury in the early 1960s, complained in his 1969 book, Rhodesia: The Course to Collision, that the Rhodesian whites who put Ian Smith in power were “the misfits of British society” who “had decided that they themselves were not equipped to succeed at home. In no field of activity, from accountancy to welding, from journalism to selling, did Rhodesia offer inducements to the successful or the conspicuously talented.”

  Even for the best and brightest of the white Rhodesians, job prospects were bleak in Britain and Western Europe, then in the grip of a severe recession and mass unemployment. Most white Rhodesians chose to resettle just over the border to South Africa.

  The LeRoux family joined the white exodus in 1984 and landed in the grimy South African mining town of Krugersdorp, 540 miles to the south of Bulawayo. LeRoux’s father reportedly parlayed his knowledge of mining into work as a consultant to South African coal mines.

  South Africa offered the newcomers a marginal living and little peace. In 1984, Afrikaner hard-liners enacted a new constitution that guaranteed whites control of parliament, gave Indians and “coloureds” a minority share and excluded blacks altogether. When black nationalists launched protests, the white government decreed a state of emergency and suspended civil rights, drawing international condemnation and tougher trade sanctions that cratered an economy already beset by years of drought.

  Krugersdorp did not escape civil unrest. Its neighboring black townships joined the protests and bombed government buildings. In 1990, Nelson Mandela, the leader of the black nationalist movement and head of the African National Congress, was freed after twenty-seven years in prison. Four years later, apartheid was abolished, the first multiracial elections were held, and Mandela became South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

  During the years of political isolation and recession, Krugersdorp, like other West Rand towns, saw the rise of squatter camps populated by down-at-the-heels whites, as John Grobler, an investigative journalist in southern Africa, put it, “mostly Afrikaners, mostly poor and, as result, quite a criminal element coming from that area.” With a legal system in survival mode, enforcing laws harshly or not at all, South Africans, white, colored, and black, did what they could to survive.

  What actually went on in the LeRoux household remains a mystery. From time to time, LeRoux hinted to acquaintances that his childhood, though not physically impoverished, was emotionally arid, that his mother was frail and his father had left the family. He also claimed that his father developed an off-the-books sideline as a diamond smuggler and introduced his son to figures in the South African underworld. It has not been possible to verify details of LeRoux’s childhood and teenage years. By the accounts of several people who have known him over the years, LeRoux was an able manipulator and fabulist who said whatever served his purpose at the moment. Though he wasn’t a habitual complainer, he wasn’t averse to portraying himself as Oliver Twist or Horatio Alger if it got him what he wanted.

  This much is beyond question. The teenage years are the worst time to be an outsider and LeRoux was one in every respect—an English-speaking Rhodie among mostly Afrikaans-speaking whites, a white in a population that was 85 percent black and Asian. Whites were at the top of the economic and social heap in South Africa, but LeRoux, chunky and socially awkward, was no good at any of the sports his schoolmates worshipped and didn’t fit in with the cool kids.

  He buried himself in his computer. He studied programming at a South African technical school, soon outstripped his classmates and his teacher, and learned new techniques on his own.

  In 1992, when he was twenty, he snagged his first job, working at a London-based information technology consultancy called BEI International, which provided document management systems to law firms and other clients. He coded network security and records management systems for corporations, banks, law firms, and government ministries. He presciently made a point to develop a specialty in the young field of cybersecurity, hardening computers and computer networks. The field would soon double and redouble, as businesses, intelligence services, identity thieves, and malicious hackers carved increasingly ingenious electronic pathways into computers that held sensitive data.

  For a young man of no connections and no prospects, this was an interesting and possibly ingenious choice. When he landed in London, it was as an orphan—friendless, feckless, and scruffy, with no family or friends to guide him into the circles where businessmen and women exercise power and make money. The corner suites and private clubs were still the domain of men, and a few women, who graduated from Ivy League institutions or Oxbridge. An unkempt, poorly credentialed white southern African like LeRoux would never be invited to bloviate over martinis and coconut shrimp at the World Economic Forum at Davos.

  But as a cybersecurity expert, he could spend as much time as he liked roaming around inside the digital brains of great institutions and tinkering with servers and network connections. He would be welcomed into the electronic nerve centers of banks, corporations, law offices, and government ministries. He would be routinely ignored and taken for granted, but an enterprising IT security guy could learn a lot by observing how big powerful institutions worked at their most fundamental level.

  LeRoux could have used his powers to search out and destroy immense quantities of data. He didn’t. He was no troll. He was destined to be an innovator.

  In London, he met and married a young Australian woman. He followed her to Sydney in 1994 and joined a firm called New Era of Networks—NEON for short. The marriage didn’t last, but he got Australian citizenship and an Australian passport out of it. Later, he often introduced himself to people as either Rhodesian or Australian, but usually not South African, though he carried a South African passport. There may have been something about the intrepid Crocodile-Dundee-this-is-a-knife Australian identity that appealed to him.

  After the divorce, he resumed his rootless life as a security geek for hire. He jumped from NEON to a firm called Crypto Solutions and bounced around between London, Hong Kong, Virginia, and Seattle.

  LeRoux would later make the uncheckable but plausible assertion that while in Britain, he consulted for GCHQ, the legendary British signals intelligence agency celebrated for cracking the Nazi codes during World War II. It had moved from the original Bletchley Park grounds to technocratic digs in Cheltenham, but the aura of romance and mystery lingered. To call LeRoux a rogue spy would be a stretch, but if it is true that he did a stint inside the supersecret GCHQ compound, he would have gained invaluable lessons from the engine room of Britain’s spy services.

  In 1997, during one of his interludes in London, LeRoux met a young man who would inadvertently show him his destiny—Wilfried Hafner, a pioneering entrepreneur with a cybersecurity and electronics consulting company in Munich. Slim, dapper, bespectacled, and bald as an egg, Hafner was twenty-five, just seven months older than LeRoux, and he was a former hacker of considerable skill and notoriety, but he had switched sides and was now running several companies and advising governments and corporations on how to shield their data from industrial spies and saboteurs. He had rich and respectable investors and a network of business contacts stretching from Hong Kong to Rio. He looked the part of the suave cosmopolite. At their first encounter, LeRoux was impressed by Hafner’s crisp manner and impeccably tailored suit. The Rhodesian had never wanted a suit, but he wanted that one. Its dark wool said gravitas and the fit, draping beautifully from shoulder to hem, said money for a tailor. “Well, you’re a guy who knows how to dress,” LeRou
x said.

  Hafner saw a hefty twenty-four-year-old, wearing the standard brogrammer uniform, a baggy T-shirt and cargo pants. Divorced and on his own, LeRoux was subsisting on junk food, struggling to make rent, and trying to figure out how he was ever going to escape IT-guy servitude. “He was unhappy because he had no money,” Hafner recalled. “He did not have a real life.”

  But Hafner knew that LeRoux had something else, something that at that moment was absolutely vital to Hafner’s next product line. LeRoux was a bare metal code ninja. He could talk to machines. In addition to more advanced and modern programming languages, he had chosen to master ancient computer languages technically known as “low-level programming,” also called “assembly programming” and “machine code.” These older languages used strings of letters, numbers, and symbols devised by mathematicians and electronic hardware designers in the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s, at the dawn of the computer era. They communicated with a computer’s raw hardware—the silicon chip itself and the other moving parts—before the operating system kicked in. The esoteric craft of low-level programming was known in the geek world as “bare metal,” or “writing close to the metal.” Few programmers bothered to learn it. Web design, image display, and other common tasks that made things look pretty in pixels used modern “high-level” programming languages, whose commands were written in English and which were relatively easy to navigate.

  Hafner’s engineers, writing code to encrypt his clients’ sensitive data, had encountered a gnarly problem that required knowledge of low-level programming. Hafner asked around and was referred to LeRoux, who did not disappoint. In a few days, he had banged out a solution.

  Two years later, Hafner returned to LeRoux with an offer no budding entrepreneur could refuse—a big title—chief technical officer—more money, and, most important, a place at the table, meaning a full partnership in the venture. Hafner wanted to launch a new company to pioneer a next-generation encryption technique called “full disk encryption” or “whole disk encryption.” The practice, then common, of encrypting email and text messages one at a time was not only laborious but inadequate. As banks, businesses, and agencies moved from paper to digital storage and as the capacity of hard drives expanded, people were storing ever larger quantities of sensitive information on their laptops, carrying them around and sometimes forgetting them in taxis, subways, and cafes. Sometimes these machines were surreptitiously targeted and downloaded by spies breaking into offices and hotel rooms and by officials at border checkpoints in repressive nations such as Russia, China, and Iran. The only way to secure an entire machine and prevent the theft of its intellectual property was to wrap it inside an unbreakable multilayered coding system. The technical difficulties were daunting.