Bobbing in the surf, trying to catch his breath from the Taser shock, pleading for his life, Chu screamed that Smith’s friend Chito had helped Smith hide the gold. Marius fished Chu out, handcuffed him, then shot and killed him. He attached the body to an anchor and sank both.
Chito met a similar end. Confronted by LeRoux and Marius, Chito gasped that Smith had sold the gold through a broker. LeRoux and Marius took Chito to Batangas, threw him in a small boat, headed out to sea, stunned him with a Taser, and threw him in. As he begged for his life, Marius shot Chito dead and sank his body with an anchor. LeRoux and Marius celebrated with a beer or two on the beach.
LeRoux told Smith, still unsuspecting, to meet him and Marius at the safe house in Batangas. The pretext was that they had to dig a hole and bury a safe loaded with $2 million in ill-gotten gains that belonged to a “friend.” The story didn’t make a lot of sense. Who would bury an entire safe? If you did it, how would you hoist it out of the hole later? Gravity wasn’t going to be on your side. Besides, what was wrong with a secret bank account in Hong Kong or Macao?
Smith didn’t question LeRoux. He started digging. While he was down in the hole, sweating in the muggy heat, Marius pulled out a 9mm pistol and shot him in the head. Smith, confused but still conscious, waved his arms, and shouted, “Why? Why? Why?” Finally, he dropped to the ground. Marius shot him several more times, until his gun jammed. Then LeRoux stepped up and shot Smith with his MP5 machine gun. As Marius whacked his gun, a pack of dogs approached, evidently drawn by the smell of warm blood. LeRoux chased the dogs away and grabbed Marius’s gun, slapping it to unjam it. Marius grabbed it back, jiggled it, worked the slide, and finally cleared the spent shell casing from the ejection port. He shot Smith five or six times more in the head. LeRoux pulled out a MP5 submachine gun and fired more rounds into Smith’s corpse.
The experience didn’t improve LeRoux’s marksmanship, but he learned something about himself. He liked shooting. He liked killing. He took pleasure in thinking about Smith lying there in the hole, bleeding out, with feral dogs circling what was left of him. LeRoux wanted more.
LeRoux and Marius wrapped Smith’s body in a canvas tarp, hauled it onto a dinghy, motored into deep water, and dumped the body. Only, it floated. The tarp was holding air. LeRoux leapt into the water with a knife and stabbed holes in the canvas.
The body still wouldn’t sink. Marius grabbed the dinghy’s small Yamaha outboard motor and tied it to the body, which finally sank. LeRoux and Marius drove back into town and had a beer or two.
Just in case someone pulled up Smith’s corpse and the boat motor and traced the serial number, LeRoux filed a police report claiming that the motor had been stolen. His action betrayed his ignorance. As anybody who has ever seen a cop show knows, a good homicide investigator wouldn’t need the serial number of the motor to link the dead man to LeRoux. There were a dozen more ways to connect the dots, and plenty of witnesses. There were people who knew LeRoux and Smith and were aware of their odd working relationship. There were official documents such as boat and car registrations and real estate records. There were Sid’s regulars, who would notice that Smith wasn’t at his usual post at the bar. There were people who had done business with LeRoux or worked for him at RX Limited and now feared him.
There were Smith’s family and friends. LeRoux had repossessed Smith’s house, confiscated cars, clothing, jewelry, weapons, and other personal possessions, and interrogated Smith’s widow and Smith’s girlfriends. Women who had lost everything might be tempted to talk.
What LeRoux had never grasped was that he couldn’t unplug people, disconnect their memory chips, and toss them in a recycle bin. For all his cunning, vision, and prescience as an entrepreneur, he hadn’t learned what most kids know by third grade. What goes around comes around.
Chapter Seven
Pac-Man and Ironman
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2011, DEA AGENT TOM CINDRIC FOUND HIMSELF leafing through a 417-page white paper from the United Nations Security Council about violations of the international ban on arms sales to warring factions in Somalia.
He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. The tome had come to him from a friend of his supervisor, Wim Brown, who was leading the 960 Group’s Africa team and applying to transfer to the DEA post in East Africa. The friend was Rudy Atallah, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and pilot who had been stationed in Africa for the Defense Intelligence Agency and had also served as the Pentagon’s senior expert on terrorism in Africa.
Atallah was now a corporate security consultant specializing in Somalia and the Horn of Africa. He maintained his relationships with the Pentagon and State Department and sometimes helped negotiate with Somali pirates for the release of hostages, among others, Richard Phillips, whose rescue would inspire the Tom Hanks film Captain Phillips.
Things had settled down a little since the worst days of the warlords. Atallah didn’t want to see Somalia blow up again or become even more inviting to jihadists. Also, helping the Somalis had become a personal mission for Atallah, a native of Lebanon who had fled to the United States with his family during his country’s long civil war. “Because Somalia was lawless for twenty-two years, I wanted to understand how people survive in an environment like that,” he said. “It reminded me of my childhood. I grew up in Lebanon during the civil war and saw a lot of bad things. Somalia was similar.”
When Atallah read the UN Security Council report, he sat bolt upright. It said that a mysterious company named Southern Ace had built a base in Galmudug, formed a militia of local men, and brought in tons of weapons. It said that the nominal head of Southern Ace was one Edgar Van Tonder, who had established the company in Hong Kong in 2007 for the “import and export of logging trucks and trailers and their spare parts,” but that “Paul Calder LeRoux also known as Bernard John Bowlins is a ‘silent partner’ in the company, and believed by law enforcement officials concerned by the company’s operations to be the actual owner.” (The reference to “law enforcement officials” was attributed to “a military source,” but the report did not identify which police and military units were supposedly “concerned.”)
For Atallah, the question was obvious: why did this LeRoux, or Bowlins, or whoever he was, want a base in Galmudug? Why would anyone try to get into a place that everybody else was trying to get out of? He figured that whatever Southern Ace was doing, it was up to no good. It sure as hell wasn’t logging. Galmudug had no trees. It was all desert.
“Paul Calder LeRoux’s name was always a mystery,” he said, “so I couldn’t let go.”
It frustrated him that the CIA and DIA didn’t seem to know much about LeRoux and didn’t seem to be doing anything about him. Atallah couldn’t find out much from the open sources, but he was sure about this: because LeRoux was moving arms, he contributed to the expansion of corruption and instability in the region. “He needed to be removed,” Atallah said.
But removed how? Not incinerated by a drone. As Atallah well knew, U.S. military and NATO rules of engagement forbade summary executions of noncombatants, including bomb makers, weapons traffickers, and other common criminals. The military called individuals who were in the webs of corruption underlying wars “malign actors.” Under the U.S. military Code of Conduct, they had to be remanded to the custody of civilian law enforcement officials and prosecuted in civilian courts in their countries or in the United States. Trying anyone in Somalia was not an option.
What about the DEA? Atallah had met Brown and Milione when they were investigating Viktor Bout. He was impressed by their adroit work in the cases of Bout and terror financier Monzer al-Kassar. Not only had the agents located the arms merchants, but they had also mounted complex undercover operations to gather enough evidence to indict, apprehend, and bring them to trial in an American court, where they were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms.
Maybe, Atallah thought, the 960 Group was the right bunch to take LeRoux down. “When they [DEA agents] go after someone, t
hey don’t hold back,” Atallah said. “Other organizations like the [Central Intelligence] Agency have too many layers of bureaucracy to go through.”
Brown introduced Atallah to Cindric and Stouch. They were between cases and looking for something involving drugs, arms, and terror. Atallah said he might have something for them. Why not take a crack at this strange dude LeRoux? He emailed the Security Council report to Cindric.
When Cindric got to page 267, he saw what Atallah was driving at and started underlining. It said that Southern Ace, backed by Paul LeRoux, was trying to use Somalia as a production and transshipment hub for drugs and arms. The company, financed by a Manila outfit called La Plata Trading, was trying to develop strains of “hallucinogenic plants, including opium, coca and cannabis” that would grow in Africa. No one had ever succeeded in growing coca suitable for cocaine production outside certain defined elevations and climatic conditions in the Andes. But if anyone could, he could cut out the Colombians and Mexicans and make a play for the cocaine market in Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and Japan, where cocaine commanded sky-high prices. He could disrupt a big segment of the transnational underground economy. Adding heroin and hashish to the mix would not be difficult, since they were made from the processed resin of opium poppies and cannabis, two crops that could adapt to more climates and terrain and could be grown in greenhouses.
The Security Council report said that in early 2011, as suddenly as they had appeared, the Southern Ace bases closed down and its militia disbanded.
Cindric emailed the Security Council report and the results of a quick Google search to Eric Stouch. He wanted Stouch to drop everything and jump on this find. He fished his cell phone out of his khakis and hit his partner’s number.
“If half the stuff I’ve sent you is true, he’s a real bad guy,” he said happily. “He’s a real fucking bad guy. Paul LeRoux is a target. He is a righteous target!”
“I’ll read it,” Stouch said peevishly. “Okay? I’ll read it.”
Cindric could almost hear Stouch’s eyes rolling. Stouch’s motto was “No wasted motion.” He was never sure Cindric wasn’t squandering time and energy on some interesting but distracting tangent. But in a few moments, he called Cindric back, and his tone had softened. “Okay, okay, you’re right,” he said. “If half of this is true, he’s a target.”
“He’s in!” Cindric said to himself. “Score!”
Stouch was coldly analytical, stoic, hard to read, hard to rile, and impossible to impress. His friends called him Ironman because he was a fanatical triathlete. Once he locked on to a target, he didn’t let go, a habit he picked up helping his dad, a farmer in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Nobody worked longer hours in worse weather for less money, and loved doing it, than a farmer.
Stouch played football for his small college, where he studied psychology. He thought about becoming a sports psychologist or a teacher until he took a criminology course. The curriculum included ride-alongs. He spent a night in a Philadelphia graveyard, hanging out with cops hunting a parole violator amid gunfire, heroin deals, and hookers and johns having stand-up, shoulders-to-gravestone sex.
“It was madness and I loved it,” he said. “I loved the action and wanted more of it and, of course, I thought I could be doing something admirable.”
Stouch started out as a cop in Baltimore, the heroin capital of the States, with 360 or so homicides a year. He loved detective work—investigating murders, rolling around stairwells and corner stores with guys with guns, getting shot at, punched, spit on, and called names. He was fascinated with the process of solving a crime like a picture puzzle, by reconstructing the facts and trying to understand what drove someone to take another’s life or sell himself or herself for fast cash.
He signed on with the DEA in 1999, was assigned to Baltimore, and, because of his experience on the streets, went to an inner-city drug task force in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. There he met a man he called “this lunatic agent Tom Cindric.” The chemistry was instant.
Cindric was a talkative charmer, except when he lost his temper and got scary. Unlike his partner, who had little patience for information he didn’t need to know, Cindric genuinely wanted to know everything—everything. He could quiz people for hours about how to shoe a horse or build a barn or make stuffed cabbage or whether kettle bells were better than free weights and who made the best barbecue. One minute, he was talking about how to field-dress a deer. The next, he was praising Martha Stewart’s recipe for blueberry jam. (“No pectin!”)
Cindric’s father, Thomas Cindric Sr., had been a mathematician and master code-breaker with the National Security Agency. His early promise was spotted by none other than Branch Rickey, the same man who, as president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had broken Major League Baseball’s color line by fielding Jackie Robinson. Rickey had moved on to the Pittsburgh Pirates and in the 1950s met Cindric Sr., then a penniless math prodigy at the University of Pittsburgh. (The family patriarch, Cindric Sr.’s dad, was a tough-as-nails émigré from Croatia, living in rural Pennsylvania and scraping by with whatever work he could get, including bootlegging.) Rickey gave Cindric Sr. a part-time job that helped him pay tuition. To finance the rest of his undergraduate studies, the young mathematician joined the U.S. Air Force ROTC program, became an air force officer, earned a graduate degree in advanced math at the American University in Washington, and in 1965 went to work for the National Security Agency, the supersecret spy agency that intercepted the communications of foreign governments and people of interest.
Senior NSA officials moved Cindric Sr. up fast. He culminated his career as dean of the National Cryptologic School, which trained intelligence officers in the art and science of cracking Soviet codes. The responsibility of preventing Armageddon weighed heavily on him. Throughout the Cold War, he labored into the night and over weekends, chain-smoking and pacing, consumed with intercepting the messages of the nation’s enemies, especially the Soviets. He fretted over how many secrets were being missed by all those fabulously expensive electronic listening posts and eyes in the sky that captured Soviet signals intelligence and relayed them to NSA antennas inside Fort Meade in rural Maryland.
Tom Cindric Sr. died of a heart attack in 1987, at the age of forty-seven. He left a widow, Mary Cindric, an NSA administrative assistant, and three children, the eldest of whom, Tom Jr., was a twenty-year-old student at the University of Maryland.
Tom Cindric Jr. didn’t inherit the math gene, but his father left him some of the qualities that went with it—curiosity, skepticism, nervous energy, and discontent. Whenever he was working a criminal investigation, Cindric could hear his dad’s voice in his head, admonishing, “Believing means nothing! Feeling means nothing! What are your FACTS? To understand what the other side is doing, you have to have the FACTS. Don’t believe everything you hear. Triangulate. Don’t assume. Probe. Question yourself and everybody else. Facts are all that matter.”
The paradox was that you never get all the facts. Like the old story about the blind men and the elephant, you could come up with a theoretical picture that made perfect sense but was dead wrong. The solution was to work harder and get more facts. Not more theories—more facts.
Cindric boiled all this down to a mantra: “There’s what you believe, what you know, and what you can prove.” Proving anything took a tremendous act of will and commitment of time. That was why he didn’t sleep much.
In college, Cindric was all testosterone and anger, which the football coach at Maryland channeled into a fearsome outside linebacker for the Terps.
After he graduated, he thought about going to law school, but who he really wanted to be was Miami Vice’s Sonny Crockett, an undercover narcotics detective who’d been around and had the scars to show for it. He had spent his high school years watching Miami Vice and emulating Crockett’s style. He even bought a white sport coat, though it wasn’t Armani like Crockett’s. And he couldn’t find South Beach pink T-shirts like Crockett’s, and
he didn’t have Don Johnson’s cheekbones and hard-ass stubble.
But he could fight. He took a job as a bar bouncer. He got into more than a few brawls. When he straggled home with a split lip and bloody hand, his mother wept. “I didn’t raise you like this,” she said, grabbing peroxide and gauze. Then she told him to get a real job. A neighbor who was a cop helped him apply to the District of Columbia police force in 1990.
Despite the fights, he had a clean police record and, if there’s anything the D.C. cops needed during the worst of the crack epidemic, it was a guy who could take care of himself in the bleak projects of Southeast Washington.
The local drug dealers nicknamed him Pac-Man, after the mean, reckless rookie played by Sean Penn in the 1988 police drama Colors.
His sergeant, Rick Clearwater, saw his potential as an investigator and took him in hand. “You need to learn how to talk to people,” Clearwater said. “That’s your next step.” Clearwater took him to a convenience store, where he grabbed three bottles of grape Nehi and some packaged snacks.
“You never go wrong with grape,” Clearwater said. “That’s how you get them to talk.”
“I gotta buy them myself?” Cindric gasped.
“Worth every penny,” Clearwater said with a nod.
They drove to the district police station and settled down at an interview table with a scrawny young man who had just been arrested.
“Hey, we got you something,” Clearwater said.
“I got nothing to say to you,” the youth said to Clearwater, then turned to Cindric. “Fuck you, Pac-Man.”
Cindric started to say, “Fuck you,” but a look from Clearwater stopped him. The sergeant gave the young suspect his best fatherly smile, all the while watching him with keen eyes. Clearwater’s hobby was making custom rifles, a craft that demanded careful attention to detail. He brought the same attentiveness to his appraisals of petty crooks. “You don’t have to be like that,” he said sweetly.
Hunting LeRoux Page 16