“Yeah, I do.”
“Don’t be like that; all we want to know is stash locations.”
“I ain’t telling you shit.”
“You look a little thirsty. I got some grape Nehi here.”
The kid looked doubtful but thirsty.
“Come on, man, ain’t nobody gonna know. It’s just for us to know.”
“Gimme that Nehi.”
The kid took a gulp.
“Deaf Jojo is slinging big dope.”
The kid finished off the soda and ate a sugary snack and told them all about Jojo—the crack dealer—his stash locations and how he operated. When he was done, he asked, “What’s gonna happen to me?”
“We’ll no-paper you,” Clearwater said. “You spend the night in jail tonight, we cut you lose tomorrow.” This meant that Clearwater would not file formal charges against the kid. The record would look as if the arrest never happened.
Clearwater helped Cindric discover one of his finest talents—what cops called “the gift of bullshit.” Before long, Cindric could bullshit his way into just about any place, and he could also spot a fellow bullshitter at a hundred yards.
He became Sonny Crockett, sort of. As a plainclothes detective and narc, he was soon playing roles that fit his rosy-cheeked, round-faced look. He pretended to be an ex-con who worked as a handyman at the Laurel racetrack, with a side hustle dealing meth and PCP. While undercover, he delivered more buy-bust operations than anybody else in his unit. DEA recruiters signed him up in 1996.
After a rookie stint in Newark, New Jersey, in 1999, he transferred to the DEA office in Washington, D.C., and was assigned to the inner-city drug task force, where he partnered up with the disciplined, unshakable Stouch. Pac-Man taught Ironman to forget about straight lines. Sometimes things go sideways and that’s okay. Ironman taught Pac-Man intellectual rigor and finesse. As they went to other assignments, they stayed in touch.
In the summer of 2008, Milione recruited Stouch for the 960 Group’s Africa team. Two days after he joined, the younger man found himself on a plane for Sierra Leone. He had no idea how to work in a foreign environment. “All I knew was the streets and how criminal minds function,” he said. “It was enough.” He looked for people who knew how the smuggling underground functioned and convinced them they had a better shot at staying alive if they worked with him.
The group ran a series of successful investigations in Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Liberia and disrupted a major Colombian pipeline that was spinning off cash to AQIM—Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb—one of the successor groups to Osama bin Laden’s organization. AQIM was based in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In late 2011, the Africa team was rewarded for its triumphs with a bigger budget and more work. Milione was looking for another agent to join it. Stouch called Cindric. Milione interviewed him and liked what he saw—a street guy who could talk to crooks in a language they understood, who could flip them and send them back inside the criminal network as confidential informants. Milione sized up Cindric as a passionate, extremely bright guy, a little rough around the edges—someone who could sometimes get distracted, abruptly changing lanes and taking an off-ramp. But Stouch would be there to pull him back, keep the investigation organized and moving forward, and play devil’s advocate.
The important thing was, Milione could see that Cindric and Stouch would stay out there in the cold until they got whoever they were after. Like all good criminal investigators, they were obsessed. That was true of all of Milione’s agents. “The work is the vice,” he said. “Not prostitutes, not gambling, not drinking. It’s the work.”
Cindric and Stouch saw the 960 Group as their opportunity to achieve the goal every agent dreamed about—to discover a new untouchable.
The definition of “untouchable” was, as Stouch put it, someone who is “constantly and overtly under the nose of global law enforcement but can’t be touched. They have established so much power through wealth, political corruption, and permeating fear that their circle is virtually impossible to penetrate. Either everyone knows about them but can’t get to them, or they may be invisible.”
The way to tell if you had a bona fide untouchable was this: when you brought him in, other agents and cops would ask who the hell the perp was, and then, when they heard the story, raise a mug of draft in envy.
The talented Mr. LeRoux was the best candidate for untouchable they’d run across, even better than Viktor Bout, because he was on the way down when the 960 Group fixed on him. LeRoux was on the way up.
Cindric and Stouch hit the Internet and searched out everything they could find about LeRoux and anyone associated with him and his businesses. They started with La Plata Trading, the Manila-based front company that had paid for the Somalia project. La Plata Trading, it turned out, was the owner of record of the Captain Ufuk, the scow seized for gun-running on Bataan Island in August 2009.
Three people connected to the Ufuk had been killed, execution-style, after the seizure: Bruce Jones, the captain of the Ufuk; Noemi Edillor, purchasing manager for La Plata Trading; and Michael Lontoc, a well-known competitive sharpshooter and manager of Red, White and Blue Arms, the consignee of the arms seized from the Ufuk.
None of the stories in the press in the Philippines and East Asia mentioned LeRoux by name, but an associational analysis by the agents and their intelligence analyst, Carol Dillon, connected the dots and showed he was behind both Red, White and Blue Arms and La Plata. His subordinates were turning up dead. What was that about?
The agents contacted the DEA’s Manila office. Agents there had heard of Paul LeRoux for several reasons. First, DEA Manila had received cables from the Minneapolis DEA office, asking about LeRoux and RX Limited. Second, the DEA agents in Manila had made inquiries about LeRoux to the Australian Federal Police officers posted to the Australian embassy in Manila. Because LeRoux was an Australian citizen by marriage and carried an Australian passport, that nation had a legal interest in him.
Third, and most intriguing, the Australian police had recently received some emails written by an anonymous tipster who wanted to blow the whistle on LeRoux. The email author signed himself or herself Persian Cat. He or she claimed to work for LeRoux in Manila and to be directly involved in handling LeRoux’s financial affairs, including the financing of the Captain Ufuk and its cargo of arms. The person also claimed to have information about Southern Ace and the mysterious drugs and arms operation in Somalia that was the subject of the U.N. Security Council investigative report.
The Australian cops shared the emails with the Manila-based DEA agents, who forwarded summaries to Cindric and Stouch with a note cautioning that the content “remains unidentified and uncorroborated at this time. However, much of the information is plausible and consistent with other verified information.”
Persian Cat said LeRoux had paid millions of pesos to police and officials in the Philippine Department of Justice to cover up his involvement in the Ufuk gun-running affair. Persian Cat claimed that LeRoux had personally ordered the murders of Jones, Edillor, and Lontoc. “The source believes they themselves will be a next target for assassination . . . ,” the summary said. “The source notes that other people in the organization would like to turn on LeRoux but will not, as a result of the LeRoux apparent power.” The whistle-blower clearly hoped to trigger an investigation that would lead to LeRoux’s prosecution and imprisonment.
Persian Cat included a long list of bank account numbers, front companies, and properties in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Djibouti, Singapore, Congo, Israel, Zimbabwe, and Somalia. There was a list of Filipino officials allegedly bribed by LeRoux.
Persian Cat’s most sensational claim was that LeRoux was dealing with Iran in violation of international sanctions. Persian Cat also said that LeRoux had sent an emissary to Beijing to arrange arms purchases from NORINCO, the Chinese government’s military weapons manufacturer.
The anonymous Persian Cat emails did not rise to the level of evidence tha
t could be used in a courtroom. Prosecutors required live witnesses and plenty of corroborating documents. But they were a gold mine of leads. The emails, taken with the other material the agents were finding, encouraged them to believe that LeRoux was worth a hard look, and they contained some specifics they could check out.
Cindric went online again and pulled up a report by a Washington watchdog group, the Sunlight Foundation, summarizing a lobbying report filed by a Canadian consulting firm led by Ari Ben-Menashe, a notorious Israeli power broker whose name had cropped up during the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration.
The Sunlight Foundation reported that between 2007 and 2009, Paul Calder LeRoux had paid $12 million to Ben-Menashe to use his influence with Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe to help LeRoux acquire a large tract of land seized from white farmers in Zimbabwe. (The agents later learned that the Israeli didn’t deliver, so LeRoux, Smith, and Hunter discussed kidnapping Ben-Menashe from his residence in Canada and waterboarding him until he returned the money. The scheme proved logistically challenging and was dropped.)
Cindric and Stouch could see only the bare bones of the LeRoux/Ben-Menashe/Mugabe affair, but it reconfirmed that LeRoux was worth pursuing. Not many business people were willing to take a $12 million loss on anything, especially farmland in Zimbabwe. The purchase was a substantial capital investment for a lone-wolf entrepreneur. Add to that loss LeRoux’s apparent loss of $3 million from the Southern Ace venture in Somalia, and LeRoux looked like a high roller who was taking crazy chances.
He was nothing like the familiar dope kings—the Escobars and El Chapos of the world. The Latin traffickers were hillbillies and party animals, but when it came to finances, they were conservative. They knew where every peso went, and they punished anybody who lost a single load or a few dollars. They wanted time-tested, trend-proof sure things. Take away the prostitutes and bling and they were predictable and boring.
LeRoux had to be a gambler—another name for an entrepreneur, really—and if that were the case, he must still be in business. Gamblers never quit.
The question was, what was he doing now and where was he doing it? Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t likely to be boring.
Cindric went into his mantra. What you believe, what you know, what you can prove.
He believed that LeRoux was “a really good bad guy.” The task was to move the needle to know, then prove.
“We need a source,” Cindric said.
“Yep,” Stouch replied.
Cindric called Atallah back.
“Hey, Rudy, we need a fucking source,” Cindric said politely.
Atallah gave Cindric the name and contact information of a man who knew something about the African mercenary world—Joe Van der Walt, a former South African military intelligence officer who was director of Focus Africa, a Pretoria-based company that offered security services and risk management to corporations, mainly oil and mining companies in Africa and the Middle East. On the side, he had taken up the cause of stopping wildlife poaching. The same routes were used by smugglers of drugs and also guns, human body parts, drugs, gold, blood diamonds, and timber.
Cindric called Van der Walt. Yes, he had heard a few things about LeRoux. He would try to help. But, he warned, LeRoux was not to be trifled with. He had friends in high places in Pretoria.
“This guy’s got a long reach,” the South African said. “We’d better meet in Botswana.”
Brown, Cindric, and Stouch flew to South Africa, picked up Warren Franklin, an agent in the DEA Pretoria office, and on January 19, 2012, drove over the border to Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. Not long after they checked into their hotel, Cindric’s phone rang.
“Hey, Tommy, come on out front!” the caller boomed. “I’m the big ugly guy with the beard.”
Van der Walt wasn’t ugly, but he was enormous, with a barrel chest, ruddy face, and shock of red hair and beard. He and his partner, Nigel Morgan, a veteran of Britain’s elite Irish Guards and, more recently, a specialist on corporate investment in Africa, led the agents to the hotel bar, where they talked into the night.
Van der Walt and Morgan had done some investigating. Based on notes and documents turned up by database searches and public sources, they believed that LeRoux was building a multinational criminal empire—a big one, but they didn’t have proof, only some bits and pieces that needed connective tissue.
“He’s a ghost, no real Internet footprint,” Van der Walt said.
LeRoux was rumored to run a smuggling network across southern Africa. He had been spotted traveling in and out of South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Somalia, trading in a variety of drugs, arms, gold and diamonds and god-knows-whatever. They suspected him of laundering cash through the gold and diamond markets. He seemed to be behind at least a half-dozen paramilitary “security” companies that hired white mercenaries and sold protective services to prominent African figures, some legitimate, some in organized crime. Nobody bothered him, so they heard, because he had bought protection from high-level figures in the South African government and probably also Zimbabwe.
Physically, the South Africans said, they’d heard that LeRoux was a hulking great beast, a man mountain. Van Der Walt and his mates were, like many Afrikaners of Dutch and English descent, big guys, and very intimidating. If they thought LeRoux was more enormous and scarier, well, that was saying something.
When Cindric got back and told the story to Clearwater, his old sergeant said, nodding, “Fat Cobra.” Fat Cobra was a villainous character in a Michael Douglas/Albert Brooks comedy they had taken in a few years back. LeRoux, whatever else he might be, was definitely fat, elusive, and venomous. The nickname fit, but Cindric and Stouch felt a little silly saying it out loud, so they modified it to a more prosaic shorthand—The Fat Man. As in, “hey, do you have a license plate for The Fat Man?” By any name, he was just what they were looking for—a fantastic creature nobody had corralled. He was out there somewhere, daring them to find him. Cindric and Stouch could manage cold, hunger, fatigue, and being scared shitless, but neither one of them could pass up a dare.
Chapter Eight
“We’re Way Beyond Birthdays”
LANDING AT DULLES AFTER THEIR TRIP TO SOUTHERN AFRICA, BROWN, CINDRIC, and Stouch headed straight for Milione’s office to brief him on what they had learned. Halfway through their report, he interjected, “That’s kinda funny. You won’t fucking believe this but . . .”
Not an hour earlier, Mark Nemier and Anthony Benedetto from the SOD’s Internet Crimes Section had been in Milione’s office, seeking help for an investigation launched by DEA agents in the Minneapolis office against a shady Internet pharmacy called RX Limited. Nemier and Benedetto thought that RX Limited might be the biggest illegal online pill-peddling operation the DEA had ever encountered. The Minneapolis agents had done a lot of digging and learned that the figure behind it was a man named Paul LeRoux. They had come to Milione seeking help to determine who this LeRoux guy was and whether he could be charged with violating U.S. criminal laws. The problem was that the pharmaceuticals sold by RX Limited were mostly sleeping pills and tranquilizers. Sales without valid prescriptions were illegal under the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, enforced by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA was almost toothless. Unless the drugs involved were dangerous chemicals such as opioids and were on the Controlled Substances Act list, they weren’t even in the DEA’s jurisdiction.
Cindric and Stouch knew nothing about the case in Minneapolis. Brown knew a little, but he hadn’t paid much attention to it. In the SOD, there were hunters and gatherers. The 960 Group agents were hunters, after big game. An Internet pill merchant didn’t make their cut. But now, Milione put two and two together and realized that the suspected arms merchant and mercenary king who had piqued his agents’ interest might be the same person the Minneapolis agents had identified as the owner of RX Limited.
Meanwhile, SOD boss Derek Maltz had gotten wind of the Minneapolis pill case because of
the extraordinary amount of money involved. The agents in Minneapolis calculated that between June 2007 and August 2011, RX Limited and its subsidiaries had shipped nearly three million drug orders. The company had one of the biggest accounts on FedEx’s books, the shipping bills running half a million dollars a month. Bank records from Hong Kong showed that RX Limited had deposited and withdrawn $276 million through a single bank in Hong Kong. The total in sales was probably much more.
But making money wasn’t a crime. Neither the Minneapolis agents nor the SOD Internet Crimes unit had come up with solid evidence that RX Limited and its proprietor were engaged in a criminal enterprise worthy of a trial on the American taxpayers’ dime.
Maltz thought evidence might turn up if the SOD agents worked it harder. When Maltz roared, people scrambled. In his fifties, the SOD chief had eyes like flares, a downtown New Yorker’s seismic profanity, and a flamethrower rasp. He sprayed paragraphs, pounded his desk for emphasis, and bellowed, “Or am I fuckin’ crazy?” No one said yes, though some wanted to. Every week Maltz made it a point to stick his head into the cubicle occupied by Nemier and Benedetto and bellow, “Hey, big boys, when are we going to step in and fucking DO IT? Hey, what are we doing? WHAT ARE WE DOING?” After yet another lacerating session with Maltz, Nemier and Benedetto showed up in Milione’s office looking for help. By pure coincidence, they appeared on the same day Brown, Cindric, and Stouch returned from southern Africa.
Milione put his foot down. The 960 Group did not do pill cases, period. If the LeRoux in the Minneapolis case was the same LeRoux in Africa, they would certainly find out. But the 960 Group would not take over the Minneapolis case itself. Pill cases were complex, frustrating, and almost always a waste of time. An investigator could spend years in a paper chase accumulating documents, unraveling interlocking corporations and business fronts, and making charts, graphs, and Excel spreadsheets. Even then, prosecutors would rarely seek indictments for peddling pharmaceuticals because of the slim odds of winning convictions. “We will focus on him strictly as a target for selling drugs and arms,” Milione said. By drugs, he meant hard drugs—heroin, cocaine, and meth.
Hunting LeRoux Page 17