LeRoux’s money-moving procedures were so convoluted that neither Jack nor any other underling had a way to see the Boss’s entire financial picture. “He had so many fake and real companies that for most it was impossible to track,” Jack said. “LeRoux confused everyone except himself, as he knew every single dollar he had out there.”
Jack moved from his little apartment in Subic Bay to one of LeRoux’s properties that served as a safe house for Hunter and other mercenaries on the “security team.” Located in an upscale, gated community in Manila, it had five bedrooms, five baths, and a big kitchen. It had no pool or other flashy stuff. LeRoux thought that ostentation encouraged the local political hacks and police cops to demand higher bribes.
It was at the mercenaries’ safe house that Jack learned that the worst hazard working for LeRoux wasn’t street criminals in Port Moresby or Bulawayo but right there in Manila. One night, Leo let Jack in on the secret to survival in LeRoux’s world. He explained that LeRoux sometimes had fits of temper, accused various employees of theft or treachery, and ordered one of the mercenaries to kill the accused. Most of those he suspected worked for the pharmaceutical operation or some other branch of LeRoux’s empire, but LeRoux had been known to tell one mercenary to kill another.
The mercenaries made a pact, Leo said. If ordered to kill a comrade, they would go through the motions and fake some photos of the “deceased,” who would make himself scarce. “There was daily gossip about everything LeRoux did, crazy stuff, ideas about people who died, everything,” Jack said.
Even then, Jack stayed on, rationalizing that since he knew all LeRoux’s gunmen, he would be a step ahead. The mercenaries and office workers made the same decision, staying on with LeRoux, even though they all heard the gossip. The pay was good, and, as LeRoux instinctively knew, money can buy a lot of denial.
After three months of bro time with the mercenaries, Jack, ever the romantic, decided to marry the hot girl from Subic Bay. He asked Hunter to help them find a place to live. Hunter handed Jack the keys to yet another penthouse, this one on the fortieth floor of a skyscraper.
“Here, it’s yours as long as you need it,” Hunter said. This one was empty. Jack and his girl bought new furniture and enjoyed the view.
Whenever Jack reported to LeRoux, it was always at the Boss’s nearly bare white penthouse atop Tower 2 of the forty-five-story Salcedo Park Twin Towers in Makati City. He owned an identical and completely empty penthouse atop Tower 1. Jack learned that he had bought both penthouses and registered the Tower 1 penthouse as his official residence, though he actually worked in the Tower 2 penthouse, because he figured that if the cops or business enemies showed up to raid his place and arrest him or shake him down, he would see them going into Tower 1 and have time to make his escape from Tower 2.
As far as Jack could tell, LeRoux owned five or six other houses, condos, and hideaways around Manila alone, and more places in the Philippines countryside. He had a colonial-style beach house on the coast near Manila and another beach house in Subic Bay.
At least one residence was for Cindy Cayanan, his mistress and their children. Others were places where he could indulge his sexual fantasies. He liked freaky. LeRoux ordered up prostitutes, sometimes three or four at a time. LeRoux bragged—bragged—to Jack that he had become enraged at a young woman for not performing a sex act the way he wanted, so he beat her with a baseball bat, sending her to the hospital. When her father, an official, complained, LeRoux told Jack that he paid the man $2 million in hush money on the spot, then added him to his payroll for regular bribes. The episode turned out to be a win-win for the men. Jack never found out what happened to the poor woman.
“I think he had a few complexes considering his body or maybe because of his inability to have a normal social conversation with a woman,” Jack said. “Of course, being in the Philippines and having all that power, and with women easy to get, I believe whatever frustration he had, it was easy to work out on those women. It was a way to dominate and abuse women to polish his ego.”
Jack noticed that LeRoux had a small boy’s fascination with gear, especially firearms, but no mechanical aptitude whatsoever. That fact became apparent one day when LeRoux showed Jack a stack of M4 assault rifles, the kind carried by U.S. Army infantry soldiers. “My new tools,” he said proudly.
Jack took one and broke it down in a routine “clear-disassemble-reassemble” drill that took twenty seconds or so, a normal time for those in his navy unit. He was looking to see whether the serial numbers of the parts matched. If they didn’t, that meant that LeRoux had been ripped off with a mess of random parts. But the numbers matched. The guns were new, as advertised. He smiled and told LeRoux that the guns were the real deal.
LeRoux quivered with delight. Seeing a man slap and click the steel parts of an assault rifle together seemed to be close to an erotic experience for him. It occurred to Jack that he must have fantasized about being a soldier, which is why he surrounded himself with warriors and their tools.
LeRoux showed off what he knew about the M4—all the specifications, where every component was made. He had obviously gone online and memorized the data. “He knew about every single weapon on this planet, from a small gun to missile systems,” Jack said.
But his knowledge stopped at book learning. “There is a big difference between knowing the theoretical parts of a machine and the practical part of actually using it in combat,” Jack said. “Only by being in real-life situations you learn how a gun performs, not by reading it online. But it’s freaking impressive that he knew so much detailed information about everything.”
When it came to hand-eye coordination, LeRoux was missing something. That’s probably why he had to hire hit men. He knew all about guns on paper, but hand him a loaded one and he couldn’t hit a cardboard target, much less a moving one.
His sense of proportion was all out of whack. While they were playing with the M4, LeRoux decided to reward Jack for a job well done, so he reached into a closet and extracted a brand-new bulletproof vest, one of a batch he had ordered custom-made in Sweden for his bodyguards. “Here, keep that with you for when you go into dangerous places,” he beamed.
Jack suppressed a laugh. The Filipino bodyguards were diminutive. Two of them could almost fit into one of Jack’s shirts. Jack thanked LeRoux diplomatically, took the tiny vest back to his place, and threw it into the bottom of a closet.
Late in 2008, LeRoux revealed the real reason for his interest in Jack. He was going to create a stronghold—his own small kingdom—in a part of Somalia that he judged was far off the radar of the Great Powers.
“My objective in Somalia was to obtain a small territory and set myself up as a warlord, using whatever violence was necessary,” LeRoux said later. But he didn’t tell Jack that.
Instead, he cheerfully informed Jack that he was going to start up a commercial fishing business in the Indian Ocean. He had his eye on a place called Galmudug, on the Somali coast. It was an autonomous area with its own president and the beginnings of a governing body of tribal leaders. Nobody important wanted that scrap of territory, not the warlords in Mogadishu and only occasionally the al-Shabaab militants to the south. The tribal leaders of Galmudug disdained al-Shabaab’s fractured Islamism and, LeRoux thought, would probably welcome help in keeping them out of the territory.
Hunched over the dining table, LeRoux showed Jack satellite images he had commissioned, detecting abundant schools of tuna in the Indian Ocean right off the Galmudug coast. The bounty of the sea was a gold mine! Demand for tuna in Hong Kong and China was nonstop. They would erect a tuna cannery on the coast. They would also harvest and sell shark fin in China and lobster in the Gulf Arab states. They would make a fortune and spread the wealth—well, a bit of it—to Somalis who would be lucky to see a handful of euros in a year.
Working through one of his proxies, a South African businessman named Edgar Van Tonder, LeRoux had already registered a corporation called Southern Ace Limited in Hong
Kong. Southern Ace was a front for acquiring gold and timber receive and laundering pharmaceutical company proceeds. He told Jack they would use Southern Ace to set up a base for the Galmudug fishing business. Jack would supervise construction and operation of the new base. He would be the face and voice and hands-on leader of the venture. LeRoux would be the silent partner, using the alias Bernard John Bowlins, a white Zimbabwean.
To get a fake Zimbabwean passport and national identity papers for “Bowlins,” Jack would have to make a side trip to Zimbabwe and bribe somebody.
Jack was flattered by LeRoux’s confidence and praise. In retrospect, he would see that it was all a manipulation. By all objective measures, LeRoux was a textbook narcissist and possibly a psychopath. He had no interest in others. Every conversation was all about LeRoux—his desires, his needs, his whims, and his beloved projects. What saved him from being insufferable was that he had something of the aura of Steve Jobs, whose aides invented a term for the Apple founder’s way of driving subordinates to deliver on his visions. Jobs, they said, had a “reality distortion field,” and everybody who entered it got caught up in it.
LeRoux used his piercing eyes, authoritative manner, imperturbable smile, and exclamations of “magic” to cast a spell. He hypnotized Jack into believing that he could get it all done—and do it in Somalia, one of the most chaotic places in the world. Jack let LeRoux’s reality distortion field wrap around him like a blanket. What was left of his better judgment wafted away.
“All I have to do,” Jack rationalized, “is get on the ground, assess the situation, and arrange the level of security I need to stay alive.” Crossing the street in Manhattan was dangerous, too. And look at the upside. As a man who loved two things, adventure and working with his hands, what could be better than building a company, maybe even a new industry, in a forgotten corner of the world? This was probably exactly how Cecil Rhodes and his pioneers felt. Jack suddenly understood imperial exuberance.
The first thing he had to do was talk the local leaders into giving Southern Ace permission to do anything LeRoux wanted. LeRoux had sent two emissaries to negotiate with them in 2008. They got nowhere. In January 2009, Jack went to Nairobi to try again. He met with the president of Galmudug, Mohamed Warsame Ali, a politician and diplomat who went by the nickname Kiimiko. Jack promised that the Southern Ace tuna fishing business would create hundreds of jobs. He pledged to build housing for workers, a water pumping station, a school for the workers’ children, a mosque for their worship, and more. When that didn’t seal the deal, he handed out LeRoux’s cash.
After four months of negotiations, Jack returned to Manila in triumph, with a signed agreement and big plans.
When he landed, his life turned upside down. His Filipina wife met him at the airport, looking cadaverous. When they walked into the borrowed penthouse, Jack peered around and saw—nothing. It looked the same as when they moved in. She wasn’t living there anymore.
She confessed that she had been taking crystal meth, a lot of it. Meth was to Manila what coke was to Manhattan, Miami, and Malibu in the early 1980s—the party drug of choice, money pit, and, for some, a one-way trip to oblivion. She had sold all their furniture and everything else she could find to buy meth for herself and her friends.
Jack felt nailed to the floor. His head was spinning. He called LeRoux, who sent his lawyer to reprimand the building management for letting a bunch of meth freaks strip the penthouse without intervention from the security guards.
Jack didn’t care about the furniture. He was brokenhearted. He filed for divorce, returned to Somalia, and threw himself into the work of constructing the fishing business. He desperately wanted to do something unselfish—“to build something there,” he said, “to organize and work with people who have been abused and abandoned by their government for the past twenty years.”
And if he and LeRoux got rich in the sushi trade, even better.
LeRoux exploited this twist of fate to his own darker purpose. Holed up in his penthouses and safe houses, he was multitasking—devising bigger and better projects, knowing that Jack, sober and earnest, would do a good job for him in Somalia. Jack would work even harder, he knew, without the annoying distraction of booty calls with a girl jacked on meth.
Very rarely, Jack caught a glimpse of some of the demons that hounded LeRoux. Once, while they were discussing the fishing business, LeRoux remarked that they needed to do something that was legally risky.
“Who can we trust?” Jack asked.
On the word “trust,” LeRoux whirled to face Jack and exploded.
“If you find out your whole life was a LIE,” he shouted, hurling words like poison darts, “and it was done by the people you call FAMILY, then what is the point of trusting ANYONE? I have NO trust in my business partners but MORE than in my FAMILY, that’s for sure.”
Jack was rocked back on his heels. Although he had heard that LeRoux blew up at people, this was the first time he had ever witnessed one of his hissy fits, and it was shocking. LeRoux gave the impression that the explosion was triggered by his recent discovery that he had been adopted—and that he couldn’t forgive Paul and Judith LeRoux for not leveling with him.
The rant might have been a play for Jack’s pity. LeRoux could have been angry about being adopted, but that fact wasn’t news to him. Fully a decade earlier, when LeRoux was working at SecurStar, his boss Wilfried Hafner had witnessed a similar fit, only on the earlier occasion, LeRoux cursed his biological father, not his adoptive parents.
In 2008, LeRoux set out to search for his birth mother. According to internal DEA documents, he enlisted the help of a cousin’s husband, a white businessman who, like LeRoux, had been born in the colony of Rhodesia and who now lived in South Africa. As the man later recounted to DEA agents, LeRoux wanted to find his own birth certificate. The man made a trip to Bulawayo and came up with the document.
There was no happy reunion. Much later, LeRoux told others that he thought his birth mother had been abandoned as a child. The implication was, she had nothing to offer him, so he stopped searching. But this remark, like other references to his supposedly sad family background, could have been yet another manipulation.
After the no-trust outburst, Jack didn’t ask LeRoux about his family or childhood. He didn’t want to kick a hornet’s nest.
“Most of the time LeRoux just completely avoided the subject of family in such way that I felt something bad had happened,” Jack said. “He was locked in his own world. He was cold as a block of ice. You couldn’t have emotions or feelings. That was for weak people.”
Jack found life much simpler in Somalia. Except for LeRoux, nobody—not ex-wives, not ex-girlfriends—could find him unless he wanted to be found. What guy hasn’t had that fantasy?
Jack rented a sixteen-room, two-story concrete blockhouse near the dilapidated airport in Galkayo, the main city in Galmudug. On the outside, the house looked like a big concrete box, but the interior was decorated with tile and hand-carved wooden furniture. It was cool and airy and rather pleasant. It could accommodate forty people. Jack used it as a barracks for his growing entourage of house servants, bodyguards, and construction workers.
Jack organized 250 of the local tribesmen to act as a militia to protect the building and area. He armed them with weapons, equipment, and vehicles acquired in Somalia’s bustling arms bazaars. He bought light and heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, and body armor. He acquired two Russian ZU-23 antiaircraft guns—truck-mounted, double-barreled cannons that fired like a machine gun and could knock down a helicopter. Jack had no intention of taking down aircraft but thought these weapons would frighten al-Shabaab scouts. Mounted on trucks, with two thousand rounds of ammunition, they looked like steel dragons rolling down the rutted roads.
Jack spent piles of LeRoux’s money. He purchased and installed large diesel generators to power the base. The school and mosque went up, and the water pumping station, as promised. He obtained some fiber optic cable and set up Inter
net connections.
He spent his evenings studying the Somali and Muslim culture. He wrote a manual for LeRoux’s Western employees, with rules on how to live, work, approach, and behave in Somalia. He proudly showed LeRoux how he had mastered nuances of the culture. For instance, he wrote that when you entered a meeting with tribal elders, you should always greet the oldest person in the room first, even if the president were among those present.
“Brilliant,” LeRoux said. He promised to circulate his tome to the rest of the staff. He valued Jack’s person-to-person diplomacy. He didn’t know how to cultivate the tribesmen. He was glad to pay Jack to do it.
Since a contingent of al-Shabaab militants camped nearby, Jack built a concrete wall around the house, topped with a razor-wire fence. He set up three circles of guards and checkpoints around to protect the house. Every night, Jack could hear rounds flying. He slept with a loaded AK-47 in his bed and a light machine gun with an ammunition belt in his room, in case the compound was overrun.
Jack drilled his rookie militiamen to adopt round-the-clock vigilance, testing them constantly. Once, during the night, he climbed out of the house and crept up on the guards who were supposed to be protecting the perimeters. All seven were sleeping. He took their AK-47s away, then walked around to the front door and knocked, to make the point that if a six-foot-three white guy could break out, steal assault rifles from seven guards, and walk to the main gate without being noticed, then they were doing a lousy job and would all be dead if this were the real deal.
“After that night, not even a cat could sneak by,” Jack said and laughed.
But al-Shabaab was constantly trying. The camp measured about thirty-one acres of flat desert. Jack ordered the militiamen to make constant patrols in Land Rovers. On one searing day, at about noon, the patrol radioed that eight al-Shabaab fighters had gotten inside the outer perimeter and were making their way toward the compound. Jack ran to his Land Rover and followed, peering through a pair of binoculars. He could see the intruders, almost a mile away. What kind of men would pick this bloody-hot moment to run around the desert? Maybe because they thought most people would be napping?
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