LeRoux fully embraced the Silicon Valley playbook—experimenting, staying loose, making snap judgments, persevering when something looked promising, pivoting when he smelled a loser. All these qualities cast him as textbook entrepreneur. “He thinks big,” said Jeff Reid, a business professor at Georgetown University and founding director of the university’s Entrepreneurship Initiative. “He looks for unique angles. He tries new things. If there’s a market there, sounds like he’s going to find a way to get it.”
If LeRoux had only managed to come off as less cold-blooded, even if he had to fake it, he could have been putting down avocado toast and bacon jam with tech titans in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, nicknamed Billionaires Row. But people didn’t exhilarate him. He was happiest alone, plotting his schemes in his sterile penthouse.
Jack obeyed him, grudgingly but diligently until the summer of 2010, when an IED planted by al-Shabaab blew up near one of the Land Rovers Jack’s militia used for patrolling the Galkayo camp perimeter. Five militiamen suffered burst eardrums and wounds from flying glass. There was no medical facility nearby. Jack contacted LeRoux and asked what he should do.
“Bury them in the desert,” LeRoux said and laughed.
What did he mean? Bury them alive? Or let them bleed out, then kick sand over them?
Either way, Jack was shocked. This was callousness even for LeRoux. Jack threw all five of his men into a Land Rover, got them to an airstrip, and persuaded some khat smugglers with a beat-up plane to take the wounded men to the hospital in Djibouti. As it turned out, one of the wounded men was a cousin of the president of Djibouti. (Some 60 percent of the Djibouti population consisted of ethnic Somalis, including the tiny nation’s chief executive.) The Djibouti leader saw to it that all the wounded men were treated well. All survived their wounds and were never billed for their hospital stays.
When Jack related the happy outcome, LeRoux was unimpressed. The militiamen were marginals. He really couldn’t understand why Jack had bothered.
Late that summer, LeRoux faced a threat to his own security. Bruce Jones, the captain of the tramp merchant steamer Captain Ufuk, had started giving interviews about the gun-running deal. Jones had contacted a reporter for the Manila Bulletin and was talking about what he called the “Bataan smuggling syndicate.” He named, among others, Dave Smith. He didn’t name LeRoux, but LeRoux was only one step from Smith.
On September 21, 2010, Jones and his wife, Maricel Aramay, were driving through Angeles City when two men on motorbikes pulled up next to their Toyota SUV and shot them. Jones died of multiple wounds from a .45-caliber handgun. Aramay was wounded but survived. Although they staged the ambush in broad daylight on a busy city street, the gunmen were not identified or charged.
According to court records, LeRoux eventually admitted that he ordered Smith to have Jones killed. Later, he said, Smith told him that Jones would not be a problem anymore.
Shortly after the Jones murder, LeRoux sent an email to Jack. “I need to talk to you. Take the first plane to Hong Kong.”
Jack obeyed, but he was as frightened as he had never been, confronting al-Shabaab or random gunmen in the marketplace. Working for LeRoux was like trying to sleep with a bad-tempered black mamba in the house. You just never knew when you put a foot on the floor whether a venomous snake was curled up under your cot and would choose that moment to strike.
No doubt about it, LeRoux was frustrated and angry that Jack didn’t have the landing strip and warehouses up and running. He didn’t understand—didn’t want to understand—the logistics of moving heavy equipment, steel girders, rebar, and the rest of what it took to make a port and transit zone work.
Never having spent time in the field, LeRoux thought all the building equipment he ordered would appear at the construction site in a matter of weeks after he ordered it. He didn’t count on the time it took to haul the stuff overland from Djibouti.
“It was a complete logistical nightmare,” Jack said.
LeRoux decided he should buy landing craft and send the building materials and equipment by cargo ship.
Jack had negotiated a deal with the pirates to land equipment and arms on the shore. But there were still waves, weather, and boulders to contend with. The conditions made transit and landing difficult, requiring many hands.
Fact was, Jack wasn’t exactly dragging his feet, but he wasn’t pushing hard, either. He had been hoping that LeRoux would reconsider the tuna fishing business, but realistically, he knew that the fish story was just that, a fable meant to lure him into LeRoux’s web.
“He was talking to me about taking over countries!” Jack said. “Establishing his own state. Taking over an island!”
Jack had stayed on, fearful of and resenting LeRoux but taking his orders. He knew that he was now deeply enmeshed in LeRoux’s conspiracies involving drug trafficking, gun-running, kidnapping, and maybe a coup. If LeRoux’s people got caught, he would be culpable, too. He could wind up in a stinking cell with a beast like Dave Smith. LeRoux would vanish. He always did. And when the coast was clear, he’d start up a new business, and he’d get another Jack.
To make matters worse, just before he landed in Hong Kong, Jack read about the assassination of Bruce Jones. The Manila newspapers, which were online, were playing it as a sensational murder mystery. Jack had met the affable Jones in the bars in Subic Bay. He guessed, correctly, that Dave Smith had tagged the Captain Ufuk debacle on the happy-go-lucky Englishman and then, when things went wrong, LeRoux had Jones terminated.
LeRoux confirmed as much when they met in an empty restaurant in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong. Again, LeRoux refused to order food. Again, he expected Jack to fly straight back to Africa.
This time, Jack poured himself a glass of free water and got right to the point. “What happened to Bruce?”
“Ah, when you play with fire, this is what happens,” LeRoux said with a smirk. “This is what happens when you screw with the company.”
“He thought so much of himself, that he was so powerful, he could make you disappear, no matter who you were,” Jack thought. “This was lunacy.”
Jack had heard tell of other violent deaths of people associated with LeRoux, RX Limited, and the Captain Ufuk. He didn’t know names and details, but having lived with Hunter and his mercenary team, he didn’t think they were getting paid for simple strong-arm duty.
Jack resolved to break away. He had been thinking about it for a while. It was like a terrible marriage. He had gotten hooked on the adrenaline rush of the daily drama. LeRoux had seemed to sense this. He stood frozen, a deer in the headlights.
A woman jolted him into action.
Jack had met Anya in October 2009 on one of his supply-buying trips to Djibouti and Dubai. The thunderbolt struck him. She was a woman, not a girl, educated, refined, with a responsible job with an international corporation.
After a string of failed relationships, and because he was working in the Somali desert, he wasn’t looking for romance. But it struck like a thunderbolt. When they started talking on a long flight to Addis Ababa, he was drawn to her killer smile, and she seemed to like his dry sarcastic humor. Feeling shy, he screwed up his courage and offered his email address. To his amazement, she took it. A couple of weeks later, when he was back in Somalia, his email pinged with a message from her. They made a date in Dubai. They strolled around, peered in shops, and parted. The next day, they met on the beach and talked for hours, and Jack told her his rambling life story.
Which went like this: His father dumped him in the pool when he was five. By fifteen, he was a national champion. It was an isolating sport, not like football or even tennis. When other boys his age were goofing around, breaking arms and legs, jumping off walls and out of windows, chasing girls, learning to drive, and generally learning about life, he was in a lap lane, hearing nothing but the water and his coach and father shouting.
He hated every cold dawn in the chlorine haze, every practice, every stroke. He was furious with his pare
nts for dragging him to swim practice. He especially resented and feared his father, an engineer, nuclear plant safety inspector, and, on the side, a wine connoisseur with a collection of 1,500 bottles. Behind closed doors, his father was a drinker and chain-smoker who wouldn’t tolerate disagreement from his four sons, particularly the rebellious Jack. When Jack balked at the daily trip to the pool, his father beat him, kicked him, stubbed cigarettes out on his back, and once waved a gun and threatened to shoot him.
When Jack turned eighteen, he did what young men do—he ran away to sea. He joined the navy of his nation and became a diver in a unit that searched for unexploded World War II–era mines in the North Sea and the English Channel. For an adrenaline junkie, there was nothing like the thrill of plunging into the murky depths and bumping up against a Nazi bomb. Jack and his mates found at least two a month.
In 1990 and 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, Jack worked in a joint operation with the U.S. Navy’s Mine Countermeasures force in the Gulf, searching for mines planted by Saddam Hussein’s forces and helping the U.S. Navy SEALs.
He kept up his training while in the navy and made the national swim team for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. He didn’t get much practice time and was out of the competition after the first heats, but he could always say he was an Olympian.
Soon after he left active duty, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Jack, at that point twenty-four, slept next to him for six weeks, watching over him, bathing and changing him day and night until his body gave out. He yearned to hear his father say, just once, “I love you.” That never happened. Jack wasn’t sorry for his vigil. He believed in filial duty. He forgave his father. “I was the son who said no to certain things, and oh boy, did I pay the price, but hey, it made me what I am today,” he said.
Jack used his father’s modest bequest to start a construction company. He loved building and found he was good at it. He worked seventeen hours a day to keep the company in the black in a tax system that was close to confiscatory. He married a pretty gymnast who turned out to be a perfectionist. After he filed for divorce, his nerves shot, he was done. He sold the company and took off for the Philippines, intending to explore the world. And he did. It had been an education, but not the kind he had expected.
Jack figured Anya would run away. She was smart, frugal, independent, and beautiful. She had a bright future. What did she want with a guy like Jack? But she stayed. They went to his hotel, talked deep into the night, shared a chaste embrace, and fell asleep.
After that, he left his Lord of the Flies–style encampment in Galmudug and met her in Dubai. They did not make love for three months, but when they finally did, there were more thunderbolts. As he put it later, “I experienced the virtues of the Kama Sutra.”
He confided in her about everything—about the pirates, smugglers, his divorces, and LeRoux. “I’m working for a genius sociopath,” he confessed.
They met in Dubai, and he filled her on the meeting with LeRoux in Hong Kong. She listened for a while, then said gravely, “You have a decision to make. You can have a decent life and explore the world with me. Or you can have a life of extremes without a guarantee of what the next day will bring.”
“She made me see reality,” Jack said. “I always knew what he was and what I had gotten into, in a way, but you’re stuck in it and you only deal with people in the business. It was very boxed-in at times, as there you are, in the desert, with a few foreigners telling their life stories and two hundred fifty Somalis who have had nothing for twenty years. She did great by talking sense into me and making me realize there is much more in life.”
In October 2010, Jack got himself to Djibouti and caught a ride on a UN relief flight to Dubai. Anya met him there. He told her that he was finished with LeRoux. They went out on the balcony of the short-term flat they had rented and had a little ceremony. They lit candles, poured glasses of good red wine, and burned all the forged passports Jack had collected from various African and Asian countries while working for LeRoux. They let the ashes drop on the cement floor and blow away.
From Dubai, Jack emailed LeRoux that he was quitting. He didn’t tell him much, only that he wanted no part of the drug trade and that he was going to take advantages of opportunities in legitimate business elsewhere.
Once he got a little psychological distance from LeRoux, he realized that he was very angry and bruised. He did something out of character. He went on the CIA website, found the “Contact” page, and fired off an email, saying that if somebody in the CIA was interested in LeRoux, he had a few things to say.
When he cooled down, he realized that ratting out LeRoux probably wasn’t good for his health. He was somewhat relieved when he didn’t hear from the CIA. LeRoux evidently wasn’t a priority for American intelligence.
Jack found a job in Dubai, although he didn’t like the place because, underneath the façade of conservatism and piety, Dubai had replaced Switzerland and the Caymans as the world money-laundering capital. “All the biggest criminals in the world can do whatever they want there,” he said. “They all use the system—Paks, Afghans, Somalis.”
When LeRoux got Jack’s email resigning, he was livid. He sent two men to replace Jack in Galmudug—a white South African mercenary named Shaun Wright and Mischeck Dzichaunya, a black Zimbabwean who had been a senior police officer in the Mugabe regime and who helped LeRoux with his yachts and ran his boat repair yard.
They didn’t get along with the Somali leaders, and they neglected to pay the Galmudug militiamen, so all of them took off, leaving the Galkayo base unprotected. The coastal base was barely started. With the venture collapsing, LeRoux was losing his entire investment of about $3 million to date.
LeRoux blamed Jack. After a month had passed, Jack got a message from Leo that LeRoux had put out a hit on him. That very day, Hunter was in Dubai stalking him. Jack pictured himself staring down the barrel of Hunter’s gun, with LeRoux standing nearby or listening via Skype, savoring the sound of Jack’s head cracking like a melon.
Jack knew that Hunter was a follower, not a leader. If LeRoux had told Hunter to kill him, there was no way Jack could talk Hunter out of it. Jack had to fix things with LeRoux.
Jack telephoned LeRoux and asked him to call Hunter off. The conversation didn’t go the way Jack had hoped.
“You can walk away, but you cannot hide, you’re going to die,” LeRoux snapped. “If people cheat me, then I make them disappear. You know you can’t hide from me. I’ll find you anywhere in the world. You know you’re going to die.”
“But I didn’t cheat you,” Jack protested. “If you put a hit out on me, I’ll take you down.”
“If I go down, you go down,” LeRoux snarled, and hung up.
Toward Christmas 2010, Jack decided to try again to make amends. He didn’t want LeRoux as an enemy for life. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for Hunter or worrying about an attack on Anya.
He emailed LeRoux copies of his financial records for the Galmudug operation. They were meticulous and proved he could account for every penny of LeRoux’s expenditures.
A couple of weeks after that, LeRoux called. He wanted Jack back. He was sorry.
“I know you didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Anytime you want a job, call me. I can always use good guys like you. I need people I can trust.”
Sorry? Jack was touched. He had never known LeRoux to apologize about anything. LeRoux habitually shifted the blame for anything bad to somebody else. He regretted his decisions, sometimes, and changed his mind, but sorry? This was the first time Jack had heard the word out of his mouth.
Trust? That was even stranger. Jack remembered very well that LeRoux had declared he could trust no one.
In his next breath, LeRoux blamed Dave Smith. He said that he had caught Dave Smith telling a lot of lies about Jack. Smith had been jealous of his access to LeRoux. Smith liked to control everything, but LeRoux hadn’t let him control Jack.
“The
gray pigeon who was behind all the stealing has been taken care of,” LeRoux said, with his mirthless chuckle. “He won’t be driving a fancy motorbike again.” He referred to Smith’s beloved Italian-made MV Agusta.
Jack assumed that by “taken care of,” LeRoux meant that Smith was dead. He guessed right. Later, he got the details.
As LeRoux later told the story, he suspected that Smith had double-crossed him by stealing $5 million worth of gold bars from him. Smith was supposed to collect the gold and hide it, but he never told LeRoux where he put it.
Instead of asking Smith directly, LeRoux started playing detective. He questioned a girl Smith had dumped. She told him that Smith had stolen the gold and, not only that, he had also been plotting to kidnap LeRoux, torture him, squeeze him for cash, then kill him.
LeRoux, white-hot angry, fixated on Smith’s associate, Henry Chu. LeRoux knew that it was Chu who was in charge of hiding the guns Smith had unloaded from the Captain Ufuk. LeRoux thought that Chu might have hidden the gold for Smith. Or he would know where it was.
LeRoux asked Chu to come to one of his houses in Batangas Province on the Philippines coast. While they were talking, LeRoux shocked Chu with a Taser gun. Marius, a white South African, threw Chu into the water. Marius was a big guy with a dark thatch of hair and white mustache and beard. He had once been a South African cop and was now a biker who advertised on LinkedIn as a “risk manager” offering “protection services.” In other words, he was a professional goon.
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