Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  Where could the DEA agents lure LeRoux and be sure that he would be arrested? Western Europe was out of the question. London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna were clean, scenic, and orderly, but their well-developed legal machinery could chew on extradition proceedings for years. Also, DEA agents could attract unwelcome attention from local politicians, American diplomats, and, not least, CIA officers who competed bitterly with the agents for sources and glory.

  In places with legal systems in survival mode, DEA agents could make things happen. Local officials didn’t have the luxury of time. If a criminal from some other country showed up, they just wanted him gone. Bad guys were willing to go to such places and wouldn’t see the law coming.

  Cindric and Stouch had Jack propose a meeting in Accra, Ghana. The DEA had an office in Accra and an agent, Joe Kellums, who had made good connections with the cops.

  LeRoux said no.

  How about Guinea? They could meet in Conakry, the broken-down capital city. They thought it sounded like the kind of dark, sexy place LeRoux would like. He would have no idea that Milione and Brown had developed a solid relationship with some of the cops there.

  LeRoux wasn’t interested.

  What about Liberia?

  LeRoux liked it. Loved it. It had just the right mix of political anarchy, modern communications, and good air and sea connections. He could use the Liberian ship registry, which was cheap and easy, to flag his growing fleet of yachts and the cargo ships he intended to buy for his arms business.

  For the agents, this was excellent news. Milione was sure that Fombah Sirleaf, head of the Liberian National Security Agency, and stepson of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, would execute a clean arrest—no wavering, no screwups, no torture. LeRoux could not know that Milione and Brown counted Sirleaf as a personal friend, dating from 2010. At that time, Sirleaf’s agents had picked up intelligence that Colombian cocaine trafficking rings were in Monrovia, trolling for powerful people they could bribe to let them use Liberia as a transshipment point between Colombia, Europe, and New York. “For a fledgling democracy, that kind of criminality would have tremendous impact on our national security,” Sirleaf said. “We truly had to send a strong message that we weren’t going to tolerate it.”

  Without resources to investigate and prosecute the traffickers on his own, Sirleaf contacted DEA agent Sam Gaye, who was posted in Lagos and covering West Africa. Gaye showed up with Milione and Brown. They had Sirleaf fitted with a DEA wire. Sirleaf invited the Colombians and their African middlemen to his home and, with the tape rolling, agreed to join their payroll. The traffickers laid out their plans to land six tons of cocaine, worth about $150 million on the street, in Monrovia, break it up, and ship it in smaller lots to New York and Europe.

  Sirleaf and his men arrested a Colombian, two Ghanaians, three Sierra Leoneans, and their Russian pilot. President Johnson Sirleaf ordered them expelled to the custody of Milione and the 960 Group. “The Republic of Liberia is officially closed for business to the narcotics trade,” she said. Milione and Brown flew them to New York, where they were prosecuted and convicted in federal court in Manhattan.

  “In a place where bribes to government officials used to be as routine as the crow of the rooster every morning,” New York Times correspondent Helene Cooper wrote, “the actions of Fombah Sirleaf still have Liberians shaking their heads in wonder.”

  Ever since, whenever Milione and Brown went to Africa chasing Colombians, they made it a point to stop by Monrovia. On some limpid nights, they could be found at Fombah Sirleaf’s home, listening to his favorites, Mozart and Everclear, and sharing tidbits about all the intriguing new faces showing up in West Africa.

  Chapter Nine

  Dazzle Him

  A STING IS A SEDUCTION. WHETHER IT’S AN ARMS DEAL OR A FLIRTATION, the tradecraft is pretty much the same. Be desirable, but play it coy. Let the target do the pushing. The more he wants it, the more he feels like a winner when he thinks he’s getting it.

  You know you’re doing it right when he starts acting as if it’s his idea.

  The agents had to get LeRoux to think the Monrovia meeting was his brainstorm. He had to show up in the Liberian capital in person. That was going to be tricky, because LeRoux much preferred to use proxies for all major transactions. Jack told them how he had mocked Viktor Bout for doing a deal himself in Bangkok, face-to-face with people who turned out to be DEA informants.

  What exactly would this weird, security-obsessed mogul find so irresistible that he would break his own rules and travel to Monrovia himself? How would the agents manipulate him into thinking he thought of it?

  Milione didn’t believe the answer was too complicated.

  “He’s a criminal,” he said. “He wants to make money. It’s power, it’s access. He’s looking for another country he can corrupt and be safe in and make money in. It’s a money stream for him and a base of operations.”

  “I don’t think so,” Cindric said.

  “Nope,” Stouch said. “This guy isn’t your average crook.”

  Sure, the agents said, he liked money, but he didn’t love it best. From all that Jack and others said, what he truly loved were his ventures. He loved finding angles that no one else had thought of.

  And there was that volcanic rage boiling in him. What was novel, fascinating, and outrageous? What would make him infamous?

  “Blood diamonds?” Cindric asked. The idea might play into the image he liked to cultivate as a cruel swashbuckler.

  Stouch had a source who, he thought, could help. While investigating Colombians in Sierra Leone and Togo, he had befriended an Israeli gold and diamond merchant who had spent years in Sierra Leone and Panama, dealing in both commodities and laundering money in the Mideast and Europe. The Israeli sent Stouch some photos of uncut diamonds. Stouch had Jack show them to LeRoux.

  No deal. LeRoux wasn’t interested in blood diamonds. He had been there and done that—a few diamonds, a lot of gold. Now he was into arms, meth, and coke. He told Jack to focus on getting those end-user certificates for shipping arms.

  “Holy shit, what are we going to do?” Cindric groaned.

  “Meth?” Stouch said. “Chemicals?”

  “Yeah, why not?” Brown shrugged. In the United States, trafficking large quantities of methamphetamine carried a mandatory minimum penalty of ten years and a maximum of life.

  They pitched the scenario to LeRoux in a succession of emails they wrote for Jack to send LeRoux. The first message said that Jack’s family had some rich friends who owned jewelry stores in major cities in northern Europe. Through them, Jack had met an Israeli businessman who brokered gold and diamonds and, as a sideline, laundered money in Liberia for some Colombian drug traffickers who were trying to set up a lab in a remote part of the country.

  “These people want not to deal with the Mexicans anymore,” the email said. “They think they can make money doing it themselves.”

  “He’ll like that,” Stouch said. “He knows the Mexicans will fuck them.” LeRoux had dropped hints to Jack of a run-in with a Mexican smuggling family that controlled the Juárez/El Paso border crossing he wanted to use to have a proxy move a load of Tramadol pills into the United States. He grumbled to Jack that the Mexicans were low, dishonorable characters, in contrast to the Colombian traffickers, whom he revered as the gold standard in organized crime.

  Through LeRoux’s several attempts to get into the cocaine trade without a Colombian partner, his esteem for the Colombian traffickers of the Miami Vice age had risen to mythic proportions. To turn a profit in cocaine, he realized, a person had to master a range of skills and economic sectors, from agriculture to chemistry to shipping to banking. The Colombians had done it all, in the 1970s and ’80s, before cell phones, GPS, Skype, and encrypted email. They had created a multibillion-dollar global industry out of a handful of seeds, a few go-fast boats, and Cessnas. They had balls like watermelons.

  LeRoux must have figured out by this time, the agents theorized, that he
couldn’t beat them, so he’d better join them. Carving out his own cocaine pipeline was taking too long. Better to forge a strategic partnership with a Colombian cartel. In exchange for cocaine, he would offer the cartel the benefit of his connections in Africa and Asia, the biggest untapped markets for just about everything, legal and illegal. They would gain access to North Korean meth, plus his own brainpower. He was pretty sure the Colombians didn’t have anyone like Paul Calder LeRoux.

  “It’ll appeal to him that the Colombians are trying to do their own entrepreneurial thing in Africa and ship it out from there” to the United States and Europe, Stouch said.

  Cindric agreed, congratulating himself on finding such an ingenious partner. All that college psychology was coming in handy. To inflame LeRoux’s desire for the deal, Cindric wrote a second email to go out under Jack’s signature. It said that the fictional Colombians intended to ship partially refined cocaine to Liberia and finish transforming it to the fine white salt everyone recognized. Colombian cartel slang for the halfway-there stuff was permanganato. This was their term for coca paste, the raw extract from the coca plant, stabilized with potassium permanganate. The formal term, in Spanish, was permanganato de potasio.

  Jack told LeRoux that the beauty of permanganato was that it was legal to ship. This wasn’t strictly speaking true, but it was close. The stuff could be made to resemble ordinary toothpaste, and customs and border authorities didn’t look for it. Cindric and Stouch were improvising off their perception that LeRoux was voraciously curious, driven to master all the minute tricks of the trade. If the Colombians had a gimmick to slip the surveillance net, he would want to adopt it for his own smuggling ventures.

  More important, Stouch said, “He would think that it would give him access to Liberia and an opportunity to exploit and buy another third world country to grow his criminal network.” If he thought some Colombians had bought the Liberian leadership, he would want to get in on that deal and piggyback on their control, using the relationship to make a profit for himself.

  To underscore the fictional Colombians’ special interest in Liberia, Cindric wrote another email for Jack to send LeRoux. This message said that in addition to refining cocaine in Liberia, the Colombians also wanted to produce an unnamed product. To do it, they were in the market to buy industrial quantities of pseudoephedrine, red phosphorus, iodine, and a few other items. They hadn’t figured out where to buy these chemicals yet or how to get them to Liberia. They also wanted training for their “cooks,” who were accustomed to making cocaine but were inexperienced in making other products.

  When LeRoux got this email, he realized, from the list of chemicals, that the Colombians intended to manufacture meth. And he spotted an opening to cement a strategic partnership with a Colombian cartel. Cindric’s message was devised to make LeRoux think that Jack had tapped into some Colombians who were novices at making meth. It was designed to bait him into offering these fictional Colombians his superior expertise, plus all the ingredients for meth. The scenario would appeal to his vanity and his vision of an immensely lucrative underworld coalition, a superpower in which he would be at the helm, shoulder-to-shoulder with a regal Andean godfather.

  To get there, he had to dazzle the Colombians. He had to assume that they were proud to the point of arrogance. They didn’t know what they didn’t know. He had to show them, with a tour de force, that he could bring important added value to the table, something no one else in the Asian underworld could do.

  He told Jack to tell them that he had a far superior formula for meth. He listed the ingredients in his recipe and said he could deliver them to Monrovia.

  “Best we give them a package which is chems + training,” he wrote Jack.

  The “package,” he wrote, would include not only the chemicals themselves but also a “clean room,” meaning a mobile laboratory where Colombian cooks—trained by LeRoux’s people—would stir up sparkling batches of crystal meth. He attached a design.

  The minute Cindric opened that email, he could see that LeRoux had taken the bait. They had captured his imagination. He was hot—hot!—to do the deal.

  His response demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of the fine points of meth manufacturing. Cindric showed it to DEA chemists, who concurred that the email proved that he was a meth maker of some sophistication and experience.

  The dilemma remained—how could they be absolutely sure LeRoux would come to Monrovia?

  It was Jack who nailed the landing. Spending time with two experienced criminal investigators like Cindric and Stouch had sharpened his gut and developed his intuition. Jack would never master all their tricks, but since he knew the stakes for an undercover operator were life or death, he paid attention and caught on fast. He learned to interpret LeRoux’s body language, his grunts and stutters, to sense his uncertainties and feel his obsessions.

  Jack told the agents that the Boss was intensely focused on doing the Colombian deal. The timing was critical for him because he was in the middle of his move from Manila to Rio and was feeling a bit vulnerable. His ambition to be bigger than Escobar and Bout hung in the balance.

  When he next spoke with LeRoux, Jack chose words he believed would punch LeRoux’s buttons.

  “It would be disrespectful not to meet the guy,” Jack told the Boss. He said it quietly and without emphasis, but he made sure LeRoux heard and digested the word “disrespectful.” The lore about the Colombians, which LeRoux had absorbed, was that you never, ever disrespect a Colombian if you value your life. Imagine how disrespected the Colombian representative would feel if, after going to all the trouble to fly to Monrovia, LeRoux stood him up and sent a marginal instead!

  LeRoux got it. He knew how peeved he felt when he had to talk to marginals. Jack knew that he knew. His trick worked like a charm. LeRoux promised he would definitely be in Monrovia.

  Between LeRoux’s email to Jack about the meth deal and Jack’s description of LeRoux’s state of mind, Cindric was positive the sting was going to work. He exhaled. He telephoned Stouch and Brown and exulted, “We got ’em!”

  One more hurdle had to be cleared. Jack had to meet with LeRoux in person and discuss the Colombian deal on tape. U.S. attorney Preet Bharara and his assistants in the Southern District of New York, who prosecuted all 960 Group cases, wouldn’t take the evidence to a grand jury and seek an indictment until the agents could show that Jack and LeRoux were conspiring face-to-face. They had to be able to prove that LeRoux was personally acquainted with Jack and spent time with him. On the stand, a good defense lawyer would raise questions about Jack’s veracity. Why should a jury believe that Jack really knew LeRoux? Jack could say anything. That didn’t make it true. There were the emails, but they were digital documents, easily doctored. In the digital world, anybody could pretend to be anybody else. The agents had to convince a judge and jury that LeRoux was truly personally involved with Jack in major crimes. The agents had to have a massive pile of proof that LeRoux was, in the language of the court, guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Cindric and Stouch launched a subtle campaign to maneuver LeRoux into summoning Jack to Rio for a personal meeting. They crafted an email designed to play to LeRoux’s arrogant view that Jack was not an independent thinker, but a puppet, completely dependent on LeRoux for orders. They had Jack inform LeRoux that he was flying to Panama to meet the Colombian cartel representatives. There, he hoped to cement the Monrovia meth/lab/cocaine deal. But he needed LeRoux’s guidance before the meeting so he’d be sure to say and do the right thing. Jack’s email said:

  I think it would be better if I meet with you first, as there are a few things that we need to talk about and plan things out correctly, and I need your personal advice before I walk into a meeting with those guys.

  On April 29, 2012, LeRoux responded by ordering Jack to meet at his apartment outside Rio on May 11.

  Bingo! Cindric and Stouch were elated. LeRoux had totally fallen for it. They decided to push the edge. How far would he go? Th
ey had him on conspiring to deal in meth. Would he also conspire to sell arms?

  Milione and Brown liked the idea. Small arms drifted around the planet the way factory pollution wound up in polar bears. Rival groups captured them and used or traded them. Many of the arms LeRoux had acquired for his Somali militia were probably already in the hands of African militant groups al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. A few might have made their way to the big Middle Eastern terrorist groups—Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the al-Nusra Front, and Hezbollah.

  They decided to up the ante. Would LeRoux sell SAMs—those diabolically effective shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles? If he did, he was looking at twenty-five years in prison, mandatory, and possibly a life sentence.

  Cindric and Stouch decided to have Jack tell LeRoux that he had a prospective buyer for arms, the Shan State Army, a rebel group that opposed the military regime in Myanmar. Shan tribesmen supported themselves and their insurgency by growing opium, refining it to heroin, and smuggling it to market through Thailand. The agents happened to know a Westerner who bought weapons for the Shan State Army. He gave them an authentic Shan State Army weapons wish list.

  They figured this scheme would appeal to LeRoux because he had made noises about expanding his operations in Southeast Asia. He might jump at a chance to add the Shan State Army to his list of customers for arms.