Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  The al-Shabaab men must not have known they had been spotted. Jack turned on the video of his phone and recorded the militiamen sneaking up behind the attackers. His men were dressed in ragged pants and shirts, sneakers and headscarves, no helmets or proper armor. They had no place to take cover. The ground was flat, gray dust. Several of them were toting heavy rocket-propelled grenade launchers on their shoulders. These were tall as a man and kicked like a mule. They were usually mounted on trucks but the men had to go on foot across the dusty plain.

  Once in range, the militiamen shouted Allahu Akbar! God is great! They opened up with their machine guns. The desert erupted in explosions and screams. Jack could see his men spraying the landscape with bullets. Their machine guns were jamming because of the fine dust. They switched to rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

  When it was over, six al-Shabaab militants lay dead. Two had escaped. The tribesmen so hated the Islamists that they didn’t give the bodies a Muslim burial, as they did when they killed traditional enemies. The cadavers were left to dry in the sun. Amazingly, Jack’s militiamen suffered only superficial wounds. Jack welcomed them back to the compound with a jug of juice—no alcohol on the premises. He saw a teaching moment. See how the training and vigilance he was demanding paid off? They had the power to keep al-Shabaab from encroaching on their land and kidnapping and killing their families, provided they never let down their guard. They nodded and chattered and resumed their patrols with new enthusiasm.

  Jack kept the video on his laptop. “It reminded me that I was safe because of the way I worked with those people,” he said. “Things can change any second, and if you have them as an enemy you’re done because a human life means nothing there. They had wildlife like ostriches and springboks and they only killed to eat and not more than necessary. They had immense respect for their natural habitat. But when it came to humans they could shoot each other over an argument about a small thing like less sugar in their tea.”

  This wasn’t hypothetical. Jack had been thirty feet away from two men who pulled guns on each other in the local market, just because one put too much sugar in the other’s tea. One died. The other survived.

  “Crazy,” Jack said, “but if you didn’t know how to handle people like that you don’t survive a day.”

  When Jack had to fetch supplies from abroad, he took a flight on a small Somali-owned transport service that made runs from Galkayo to Mogadishu and Djibouti with an ancient Russian-made Antonov AN24. The pilots were Romanians who seemed to survive on vodka-laced coffee. They liked Jack and invited him to sit in the cockpit when they buzzed villages.

  “They were always cracking racist jokes, smoking cigarettes in the cockpit, and doing flyovers to show me Mogadishu and Galkayo from above,” Jack said. “They were crazy people but the only ones who wanted to fly there. They were old-school, communist, racist, mentally disturbed pilots, and I guess the vodka helped.”

  The pilots weren’t the worst of it, though. “The really crazy guy,” Jack said, “was the mechanic walking around with a big hammer just in case something got stuck so he could bang it and get it working again.”

  Kibitzing afar from Manila or other safe houses, LeRoux communicated with Jack via Skype, puttering and nattering about every step of the construction. Once the Galkayo camp was set up, Jack started on the coastal docking facility for the fishing boats. It was on an empty spot on the coast, seven hours drive from Galkayo. He negotiated with tribal leaders along the road between Galkayo and the coast so he and his men could drive trucks through their territories. He hired fifty workers and another fifty militiamen. He had arms and equipment shipped to the coastal site and started construction.

  Every day and every night, LeRoux was on email and on Skype or some other encrypted communications platform. He sent Jack twenty emails a day about instructions, money wires, logistics, financial reports, and development plans. Jack responded with dozens of photos, because LeRoux insisted on seeing everything he was paying for. When the camp Internet went down, LeRoux and Jack continued communicating by satellite phone.

  LeRoux ordered ten fishing boats from a boatbuilder in Mogadishu, stocked them in Galkayo, and docked them at the coastal base.

  Jack met with leaders of the Somali pirates to negotiate a price so that LeRoux’s boats and vehicles could come and go to the coastal camp unmolested.

  “It is good you have an opening with them,” LeRoux texted Jack after the first meeting. “As u know . . . we are not there just for fishing. u need to become self-sufficient (in terms of money) while we ramp up the fishing and the other areas of business we interested in, that means oil, it means fishing, it means other businesses i will discuss with u in person. What we are doing now is setting the ground work for coopperation [sic] with all our friends in many profitable areas where we can help each other.”

  Jack and the pirates closed the deal in good time. “The pirate leaders are businessmen and mostly have families in the UK or Europe where they live a good life,” Jack said. “The tribe elders are the true leaders. When you have their grace, nobody will touch you. I had their highest respect and grace and so even the pirates were not able to take me. Daily people came and brought me goats as a way of saying thank you for providing more than 300 families an income and stability. When a Somali pirate or high-ranked politician wanted to come close to me, my locals warned them not to come too close to me or they would be shot, because these guys did not provide them with anything. I am not dead because I respected them and their culture, plus I gave them jobs and income.”

  Things were going so well that the tribal leaders had an initiation ceremony to induct Jack into the tribe. Jack donned a traditional sarong, which he found refreshing in the heat. The governor of the tribe presented him with a Russian-made, silver-plated pistol and anointed him Ado Sa’ad, meaning White Tribesman.

  Jack didn’t tell LeRoux about the ceremony and honor. “Some things you just didn’t mention to him, as he would have seen it as me getting too much power there and maybe tried to remove me,” Jack said. LeRoux wanted to be the one and only White Warlord. He didn’t intend to share the credit with a hired hand, not even over a campfire on the back side of nowhere.

  Jack was constantly trying to persuade him that the villagers’ respect and loyalty had to be earned, as Jack had earned it, but LeRoux stayed stony. When dealing with somebody of higher status, the Boss could be superficially charming, but when it came to people he considered inferiors, he dropped the mask and reverted to full Rhodesian. He didn’t appear to hate or recoil from people of color. He never used the n-word. He hired plenty of Filipinos and some black Africans. He simply didn’t see them as thinking beings equal to himself, and he didn’t care about their opinions and needs.

  In the summer of 2009, temperatures in Galkayo soared. The little schoolhouse was like an oven. Jack ran a cable from the generators to the school and set up fans. It seemed a small thing, but when he mentioned what he had done to LeRoux, the Boss became enraged and shouted, “Who is paying for those little monkeys?”

  “You!!” Jack retorted. It was crucial to the success of Southern Ace that the workers showed up, he said, and they wouldn’t if their children were miserable or sick with heatstroke.

  “If the people love you and respect you because they feel you genuinely care about them, then they will make sure you stay safe,” Jack said. “They understand very well not to bite the hand that feeds them.”

  If the laborers and their children felt mistreated, the elders would get angry and tell the militiamen to pull out. With no guards to stop them, al-Shabaab militants would overrun the camp. Then where would they be?

  LeRoux agreed, grudgingly, but he made it clear he didn’t care what the workers thought. He didn’t care what Jack thought, either. Jack could see that now. LeRoux was very bright and charismatic, but, now, after months of dealing with the man, Jack sensed there was something terrible and non-human coiled inside him, something with fangs and claws, spitting
venom. He could almost hear it scratching to get out. When it did, Jack decided he didn’t want to be there. He started to think about how to extricate himself. LeRoux was adding to his responsibilities—talking about moving the base of RX Limited to Somalia, where it would be less prone to American influence than the Philippines. LeRoux was worried that if American diplomats and the DEA leaned hard on the government of the Philippines to stop RX Limited, he could be extradited.

  “Basically, he was going to relocate and continue the same pill business,” Jack said. “LeRoux wasn’t a quitter. He relocated and started again.”

  He told Jack to obtain a Somali license to import and export pharmaceuticals. He wasn’t actually going to ship the drugs through Somalia, which would be tough, given that the only connections to the outside world were either a Humvee or drunken Romanians. He simply needed what looked like legitimate paperwork to show pharmaceutical wholesalers in the United States, Europe, and Asia so they would sell pills to RX Limited representatives anywhere.

  “As long as there is a valid license, most companies don’t care where it goes,” Jack said.

  Chapter Six

  Invisible City

  IN SEPTEMBER 2009, LEROUX TEXTED JACK TO GET TO HONG KONG AND meet him at the InterContinental hotel ASAP. They were going to pivot.

  Jack rousted out the Romanian flight crew. The mechanic pulled out his hammer and pummeled the Antonov here and there. The pilots had their preflight caffeine-and-hundred-proof breakfast and ran through their checklist.

  It was an eighteen-hour, four-airport trip—Galkayo to Djibouti, and from there, on less colorful airlines, to Dubai and then Hong Kong. Jack got to the InterContinental lobby around 10 a.m., ready for a little luxury or at least a shower.

  LeRoux wasn’t there. The front desk said he hadn’t made a reservation for himself or Jack. After about half an hour, LeRoux shambled in, dressed like a slob, as usual, in an oversize polo shirt and a pair of rundown slippers. The InterContinental was a five-star hotel. LeRoux was probably staying at a pied-à-terre he kept in the city.

  He motioned to Jack to follow him into the hotel restaurant, a white-tablecloth place that looked appealing but wasn’t open for lunch. He gestured for Jack to sit down at an empty table in the empty restaurant. No “How was your flight?” No “Are you thirsty? Hungry?” The answer would have been “Starving.” Jack noticed, wanly, that there was an inviting breakfast buffet down the hall, designed for the hotel’s Western guests. It offered everything he could want, everything he hadn’t seen in months—steak, eggs, home fries, smoked salmon, papaya, pineapple, croissants, brioche, Belgian waffles, and so much more.

  LeRoux wasn’t hungry. He had already had breakfast, probably an Egg McMuffin from McDonald’s Hong Kong, which he would have eaten while walking to the five-star hotel. He didn’t think about Jack, and he wasn’t about to spend thirty dollars on food for an underling.

  He got right down to business. How were things going for Southern Ace in Somalia? Jack was puzzled. Like LeRoux didn’t know? He had been briefing LeRoux twice a day by encrypted email. But he launched in on a description of the fishing camp’s progress.

  LeRoux interrupted. “The project in Somalia has to become self-sustainable,” he said. “We have to start looking for anything possible to start making money to pay for all the expenses.”

  There was no fishing business. It would take too long to turn a profit. He had more lucrative sources of income in mind.

  First of all, he wanted to sell hard drugs—heroin, cocaine, meth, opioids, and whatever else the market wanted.

  Second, LeRoux was going to green-light RX Limited sales of pharmaceutical opioids and start shipping them directly to customers. The call center workers said that customers in the United States were begging for the synthetic opioid, oxycodone, brand name OxyContin. It was the best-selling opioid prescription drug on the United States market, with sales zooming from 12 million pills in 1998 to 70 million in 2008. Hydrocodone, brand name Vicodin, an opioid painkiller, was almost as popular, with sales of 55 million pills in 2008. Both were highly addictive.

  LeRoux knew that selling opioids and other pills on the Controlled Substances Act list would give the DEA grounds to go after him. The DEA investigation in Minneapolis could be expanded to include opioids, a much more serious matter.

  On the other hand, he’d make a lot more money selling opioids. No customers were as loyal or free-spending as addicts. Pain relief trumped pleasure. Tranquilizers and sleep aids were enjoyable, but people could live without them. Addicts would give their last dollar, literally, for the drugs their bodies had to have, or suffer excruciating pangs of withdrawal.

  Routing the paperwork through a Somalia license was one way to keep his new opioid trade under DEA’s radar. Just in case the American agents figured out what he was up to, he was upgrading the security of his communications system. Heretofore, he had used a simple Gmail address—Johan588@gmail.com. In around 2009, he set up his own domain, fast-free-email.com, and gave all his men email addresses through his server. He encrypted their communications with two encryption protocols—SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). LeRoux himself was john@fast-free-email.com. Hunter’s email was Rambo@ fast-free-email.com.

  LeRoux wanted to cultivate opium, the raw material for heroin; marijuana; and coca, the feedstock for cocaine, in Somalia.

  He was going to start up a second, even more ambitious venture for small arms. They were going to take control of Galmudug and, on the coast, build a base for the biggest international arms business ever conceived. LeRoux thought arms were a sure winner. War was money. War was a growth industry.

  By definition, the black market in small arms was unquantified, but for LeRoux, the prospects were thrilling and irresistable—billions of dollars, doubling and redoubling as militant bands, guerrillas, warlords, death squads, and private militias cropped up like weeds and new conflicts flared up.

  At any given time, societies in a couple of dozen countries were locked in life-and-death struggles and would pay for light, portable, lethal goods. The demand from warlord factions and Islamist groups was apparently inexhaustible, and that wasn’t all. Wealthy people in places that weren’t in active conflict were plagued by robbers, kidnappers, and assassins. They all had to have bodyguards, and the bodyguards had to be equipped. He would be their supplier, no questions asked. Guns were as desirable as crack, crank, and smack. Demand would fluctuate from year to year, but it would never go away, because the postmodern, globalized world had entered an era of never-ending war. Colonial powers and authoritarian rulers had been replaced by chaos as globalization elsewhere left behind certain peoples and regions. Tribes, clans, and communities that weren’t engaged in an active conflict but might be drawn into one at any moment, wanted a stockpile of weapons for the defense of their people and territory.

  LeRoux was already exploring angles to get into the arms trade. He chartered his first arms dealership in Manila—Red, White and Blue Arms Inc. It was an indoor shooting range and gun club, with a store that sold small arms to collectors, gun enthusiasts, private security forces, and the Philippine National Police. Competitive shooting was a popular sport in the Philippines. A gun club was a good way to cultivate powerful men while sampling the marketplace.

  LeRoux observed that guns, like drugs, were addictive. Nobody who fell in love with them could stop at just one. Powerful people wanted rooms full of them, houses full. They would build private armies just to show them off. If a warlord, political power broker or business tycoon already had an army—call it a militia, guerrilla group, gang, or security force—he or she needed to equip it.

  People who looked at the arms trade from afar might imagine that it was all about exotic stuff, like nerve gas or anthrax, or big weapons systems, like cruise missiles and Predator drones. Such things showed up in the black market maybe twice a decade, but the workaday gun world was all about small arms, a lot of them. Volume was where the real money was,
and LeRoux was determined to lock down a piece of it. He set out to establish sources of inventory, fast—starting locally, expanding globally.

  Since there were no small arms manufacturers in the Philippines, LeRoux had to import them from someplace. To do that, he needed authentic end-user certificates issued by the Philippine government, with proper seals and stamps. He was already bribing police officials to protect his e-commerce pharmaceutical business from U.S. investigators. For the new gun business, he paid off more officials, those at the firearms and explosives division of the Philippine National Police, to issue end-user certificates that verified that the department was the official buyer of the arms. When the guns arrived, the police agreed to transfer the arms to LeRoux to sell to the real buyers.

  As a test run, LeRoux bought a shipment of SIG Sauer pistols made in New Hampshire. These were fine firearms, but even with a legitimate end-user certificate from the Philippine police, he ran into U.S. government export controls that involved a lot of paperwork. Long guns were practically impossible to export from the United States.

  LeRoux looked for less fastidious sources of supply. He compiled a list of countries that manufactured small arms for their military forces and might not be as punctilious about paperwork as the Americans. He started with Indonesia because it was near the Philippines and not too sophisticated.

  LeRoux sent Dave Smith to approach the Indonesian-government-owned arms factory, PT Pindad, to arrange a small test purchase—one hundred knockoffs of Israeli Galil SSI assault rifles and ten 9mm handguns, worth less than $100,000.

  To make the sale look legitimate, Smith provided Indonesian factory officials with end-user certificates from the Philippine police and the Republic of Mali. LeRoux and Smith had gotten the end-user certificate from Mali by sending Hunter and an Israeli RX Limited employee named Shai Reuven there to bribe a clerk.