LeRoux particularly wanted the Triad reps to help him get his hands on a PRC-made missile or a North Korean missile or guidance system assembly, so he could reverse-engineer it. He figured that access to either or both systems could do much to inform his precision-guided missile project for Iran.
He bragged that even at the excessive prices demanded by the Triads and the North Korean supplier, he could turn a profit. “You know, that shit, you can flip it for $150,000 a kilo depending on the market,” LeRoux said. “The market is more than gold. The price in Australia is $150,000 a kilo. Japan is around $190,000 a kilo. So, if they need it in Asia, we can supply them as well, no problem . . . we have fifty units [of North Korean meth] just buried in the ground for a rainy day, you know what I’m saying? It’s more valuable than fifty kilos of gold.”
LeRoux said he had lined up a British chemist and an American chemist who would come to Liberia to give instructions to the Colombian cocaine cook on how to make meth. (Evidently, Reuven, the aide he had ordered to find a meth cook, had come through.)
LeRoux told Jack to find out how the Colombians smuggled contraband into the United States. He was curious because he was looking for a better route for the opioids he wanted to ship from Mexico into the United States.
“The oxys and the roxis are selling like crazy in the States,” LeRoux said. Oxy was street slang for oxycodone, a synthetic opioid painkiller sometimes sold under the trade name OxyContin. “Roxi” or “roxy” was street talk for Roxicodone, a related trademarked opioid pill.
LeRoux told Jack that he was shipping opioid pharmaceuticals via Canada and Mexico, but his methods were costing too much. He complained that Texas law enforcement was aggressively checking trucks and cars, not only at the border but also on at highway checkpoints inside the United States.
“We have the stuff in Texas, okay, but it is still hard to get it,” LeRoux complained. “It is like another fucking border. Believe me. I mean, what you really want is the stuff in Florida, in New York, and in California.” LeRoux would do just about anything to avoid dealing with the Mexican smuggling families who controlled the plazas, meaning, the various smuggling corridors.
He paused to indulge in a racist rant about Mexicans. “We lost a million dollars on a deal with the Mexicans,” he grumbled “. . . Low level crooks who don't keep their word and start ripping off people and fucks up the whole business. . . . I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Mexico, but it’s a strange fucking place. . . . They don’t work, dude. Real lazy strange people.”
By contrast, he declared, the Colombians were the most evolved form of transnational organized crime.
“They seem like real business men and of their word,” LeRoux said.
The Colombian networks had extensive wholesale and distribution networks in New York and Miami. LeRoux hoped the Colombian cartel rep would advise him how to bypass Mexican smugglers on the south side of the Southwest border and the Texas cops on the north side and get his product up the East Coast.
“I like this Liberian deal very much, man,” LeRoux said. He was practically drooling over the prospect of a deal with a Colombian group. “We will be a good partner for them. Anything they need. We know, we don’t fuck people. And we won’t rip them off. We have money. There’s no problem.”
By the way, he said, he was shifting to a new financial model. “Wires are easy, but we end up with a huge paper trail. It’s dangerous,” he said.
LeRoux told Jack that Hong Kong Organized Crime-Triad Bureau had recently seized $20 million of his gold bars. These, accumulated through various gold buying operations in Africa, had been held in a Hong Kong safe house in the name of Edgar Van Tonder, the South African who had also served as LeRoux’s front man for Southern Ace. Most businessmen who lost $20 million would be drinking wine from the bottle, but LeRoux sounded merely irritated.
“Every day there’s a fucking problem,” he said, in a conversational, almost jocular tone. “Actually, the problem is too much wiring. Too much money moving around banks. We need to move to a better structure this year. Cash.”
“Cash?” Jack said.
“Yeah . . . moving cash as cash. It’s becoming too crazy—these fucking banks, too many regulations. Too many questions, seizing money. Fucking delaying things, a lot of bullshit goes on. Too much shit, my friend, but we have solutions. Don’t worry.”
LeRoux said he was going to ask the Colombians to give him cash in five-hundred-euro notes.
“It’s surprising how much money weighs, dude,” he explained. “A million dollars is a good couple of bags. You know, it’s like two bags.”
“Wow, that’s a lot to ship, that’s true,” Jack said, wondering where the conversation was going.
“The euros, it’s, what, a fifth of the amount for the five-hundred-euro note, something like that.”
LeRoux’s numbers were dead on. He was obviously experienced at packing large sums of cash into suitcases. He knew that $1 million in 500-euro notes would weigh just five pounds and could easily be concealed in a small valise. By contrast, $1 million in $100 bills weighed twenty-two pounds and needed a small duffel. Which is why high rolling crooks the world over favored the 500-euro note, which they nicknamed the Bin Laden.
He remarked that 500 euros were worth about $650 that day. Again, dead on—the bank rate for 500 euros was $647.10, slightly higher for ordinary transactions.
He walked Jack to the door.
“All right, thanks for the Coke and the lovely receivement,” Jack said, trying to be sociable. “It’s a nice place here. Beach volleyball?”
LeRoux brushed aside his attempt at small talk. “Well, just remember what I said. Recommend that you get the stuff from India to begin with.”
By 10:10 p.m., Jack was back in his cab and on his way to his hotel in Rio.
He got up the next day and flew to Panama, where he met Cindric and Stouch and handed them the audio and video devices he had worn during the meeting.
In the hotel, Stouch took the video recorder to his room and downloaded it into his laptop.
“It’s dark,” Stouch said.
“Yes, but it makes the point,” Cindric said. “You can see him there. It’s fine. It’s not crystal clear video that you like.”
Cindric took the audio device to his own room, downloaded it, put on his headphones, and listened. It was sharp. And it was absolutely damning.
“It backs up everything we’ve read and said to each other,” Cindric said jubilantly.
They called Brown at SOD and filled him in. “This is great, this is perfect,” Brown said. “It shows that we have him! He’s willing to do deals.”
They needed one more piece of evidence—dope on the table. Talk was cheap. They had to get physical proof that LeRoux possessed a quantity of genuine crystal meth with intent to traffic it.
Jack contacted LeRoux and asked him to send him a sample of the North Korean meth, ostensibly to show the Colombians’ cartel representative.
“No problem, I’ll have Irish send it,” LeRoux said. He was referring to Phil Shackels, who was from Northern Ireland. LeRoux had hired him and his partner, Scott Stammers, an English kickboxer and hustler, to be the arms-and-drugs division of his expanding business empire.
Jack gave LeRoux a Monrovia address for “Global Resources and Services.” Jack explained that he had set it up as a front company for the cocaine and meth venture. In reality, Global Resources was a dummy corporation set up by Sam Gaye, who had retired from DEA and was now living in Monrovia, his birthplace, and working as a security consultant for the Liberian government. In the language of tradecraft, Global Resources was backstopped. If LeRoux became suspicious of Jack and had someone check Liberian incorporation records, they would show that business had been created exactly when and where Jack said he had done it.
In a week or so, Gaye phoned Cindric and Stouch to say that a parcel had arrived at the Global Resources mail drop. This was direct evidence of LeRoux’s drug trafficking conspiracy
and had to be handled according to established protocols.
Cindric and Stouch flew to Monrovia on May 31, 2012, to take custody of the parcel. Gaye drove them through the city to get to the mail drop. Nothing looked normal. As far as they could see in any direction, there was chaos—phone lines dangling to the street, scrap metal strewn about, and people living in shanties made of old packing crates. There was no electric grid. What little electric power there was came out of generators.
“Monrovia was beautiful at one time,” Gaye said apologetically. The civil war that had raged between 1989 and 2003 had ravaged his city and much of the countryside.
They followed Gaye into the mail drop, pushing through a crowd of men idling on the curb. They were the only foreigners around. They gripped their backpacks tighter and hoping they could get in and out without a hassle.
They collected the parcel and drove to Gaye’s house. Cindric slit the brown paper open.
“Fuck,” Cindric said. “It’s a photo album.”
He opened cautiously. It was hollowed out. Little packets containing five or six grams of crystal meth were hidden underneath the paper that lined the cover and the pages. Very clever.
The agents had to get the meth to the United States to log as evidence, first with the DEA lab in suburban Virginia, then with the federal court in New York. To do that, they needed a direct flight from Africa to the States, not one that required a change of planes in Europe. The paperwork required by European border controls was onerous.
There was one flight from Accra to JFK International that suited their purposes. They put the meth in DEA evidence bags and flew from Monrovia to Accra. They walked up to Ghanaian border control, showed their credentials, and declared that they were carrying contraband drugs as official evidence. The airport authorities waved them through. No, they said, it wasn’t necessary to search their bags.
After that, boarding the plane wasn’t exactly comforting. What other bags had the Ghanaian authorities declined to search? Luckily, nobody got aboard with a bomb. The agents landed at JFK, reported the meth to U.S. Customs, and flew on to Washington to deposit it with the DEA lab in suburban Virginia.
The DEA chemists said that LeRoux was telling the truth about the quality of the meth. The crystals were 99.6 percent pure methamphetamine. It must have come from a state-sanctioned manufacturing facility. A grab-and-go mobile lab like the one LeRoux wanted to sell the Colombians couldn’t make crystals like that.
There was something else interesting. The crystals in the packet contained a unique trace impurity, an organic chemical that served as a kind of signature. The DEA chemists had seen it just once before, in a batch of meth seized in South Korea and traced back to North Korea.
North Korea was stepping up its missile and nuclear weapons programs. The money had to come from somewhere. Meth was much in demand, especially in Asia. East and Southeast Asia and Oceania combined represented the world’s largest market for meth and similar chemicals, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
“We gotta get the grand jury,” Milione said. “We gotta take ground.” “Take ground” meant nailing down a federal indictment against LeRoux. That required the prosecutors to present the evidence to the federal grand jury sitting in the Southern District.
Cindric phoned Lockard, laid out the agents’ progress, and asked, “Grand jury next week?” This was shorthand for “Does the prosecutor think the agents now have enough evidence to support an indictment of Paul LeRoux?”
“Yeah, when you get back, we’ll take care of it,” Lockard said.
Lockard was as good as his word. He took the case to the grand jury promptly. He was a gentlemanly University of Virginia law school graduate who seemed to have memorized whole sections of the federal code and court opinions and who kept his cards close to his vest. Cindric and Stouch called him Atticus because he reminded them of the upright lawyer in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. He was a man of unassailable rectitude and a perfectionist, qualities that were essential in the exacting New York City court system. A prosecutor who winged it wouldn’t last an hour under a withering barrage from a high-priced Manhattan defense lawyer, nor could he or she withstand the scrutiny of a punctilious judge and a jury of fair-minded, skeptical citizens of New York.
Lockard and the other prosecutors in his unit served as a check and balance. To be innovative, agents couldn’t hang back and stick to time-tested, conventional methods. The crooks read court records avidly, especially when they were behind bars and had nothing to do but study how the DEA had operated in the past. On the other hand, the agents couldn’t swing wild or act like a cowboy, bending the rules. If they hit a legal land mine inadvertently, they could trigger a court case that might result in a negative legal opinion. They didn’t want to risk a decision that could gut Section 960 and other narcotics statutes. They relied on Lockard and his colleagues to show them where exactly the line was, so they’d know when they were about to go over it.
Cindric and Stouch planted themselves at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse on Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan. The agents weren’t in the grand jury proceedings themselves, but they stood by, in case Lockard and his colleagues needed, say, a photo or a document. Oddly, for June, the days were brutally hot, climbing into the nineties and close to 100 percent humidity. The stone and glass buildings reflecting off the pavement turned the city to a steam bath, straining the dated building’s air conditioning system.
On June 21, 2012, Lockard emerged from the grand jury room with a smile. The grand jury had just handed down a sealed indictment charging Paul Calder LeRoux with “conspiracy to distribute 100 kilograms of methamphetamine knowing and intending it to be imported to the United States.”
After all the travel and agonizing over the case, Lockard said the grand jury had voted out the indictment quickly, with no reservations.
“You had them at Somalia,” he said.
Chapter Ten
“I Just Don’t Want to Get on the Plane”
AMAZINGLY, THE DIPLOMATIC PROCESS WORKED THE WAY IT WAS SUPPOSED to. Officials at the U.S. embassy in Monrovia presented the indictment and federal arrest warrant to the Liberian Ministry of Justice. Since LeRoux was not a Liberian citizen, formal extradition proceedings were not required. Instead, he could be expelled as an “undesirable alien” pursuant to the Liberia Aliens and Nationality Law.
Liberian Justice Ministry officials prepared an expulsion order and sent it on to the office of President Johnson Sirleaf. Since she was traveling at that moment, the order was signed by the acting president, Brownie J. Samukai, the minister of national defense, and dated September 21, 2012.
All Cindric and Stouch had to do was get LeRoux to Monrovia, and agents from the Liberian National Security Agency would put him on a DEA plane.
Jack messaged LeRoux that the meeting in Panama was a success. He said he had set up the meet with the Colombian cartel’s man in Africa, a guy by the name of Diego. Diego would be played by a formerly high-ranking Colombian cocaine trafficker until he got arrested in the Midwest. He copped a plea, went to work for DEA, and became a U.S. citizen.
Cindric and Stouch cast Diego because he fit LeRoux’s idealized image of a Colombian cartel leader. Diego was tall and elegant, with salt-and-pepper hair, an aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and a commanding aura. He joined Cindric, Stouch, and Jack in Monrovia to wait for LeRoux and play out their climactic scene.
Only, LeRoux wasn’t in the air. Jack sent him an email drafted by Cindric and Stouch that everything was ready for the big Monrovia meet. LeRoux kept making excuses. There was only so hard Jack could push without arousing the Boss’s suspicions.
So they waited. It was monsoon season in Monrovia. The rain wasn’t the kind that cooled things off. They were staying at the RLJ Kendeja Resort and Villas, Monrovia’s finest hotel. It was luxurious, for Monrovia, but since the wars, the beach was dirty and the pool was dirty. Stouch insisted on swimming in it anyway, to train
for the next triathlon.
“You idiot, it’s gonna be like that show, Monsters Inside Me,” Cindric said. “God knows what you got growing inside you now.”
Stouch ignored him. He ran as often as he could, jumping animal carcasses and piles of garbage. The rain was a problem. It was unrelenting. It kept them confined to their room much of the day. One day, as sheets of water pounded onto their dingy balcony, Jack popped in to say that LeRoux had just advised him of another delay in his travel schedule. Stouch lurched forward, stared at the window, and melted down.
“I can’t fucking do this again,” he groaned. He had a flashback from four years earlier, when he had collapsed in the backcountry of Togo and gone into shock. He had been interviewing Colombian traffickers imprisoned by Togolese cops extorting bribes. He was so thin and fit that he had no body fat to cushion the effects of dehydration and sickness brought on by tainted food. He had woken up in a local hospital and roused himself long enough to protest, “I don’t want to die here.”
Wim Brown, his partner at the time, found a French charity clinic that looked cleaner, and Stouch allowed a nurse to insert an IV into his arm. When he woke up, the place was deserted, because it was November 4, 2008, Election Day in the United States. The news had just broken that a son of Africa would be the next American president. All the clinic employees were outside, chanting “Obama, Obama.” Stouch yanked the needle out of his vein and took off for the sad old hotel where he and Brown were staying. He crawled onto his bug-covered cot, drank a couple of bottles of water, ate a protein bar and a banana, and made a solemn promise to whoever was listening that if he got out of Togo alive, he wouldn’t be back. Now, here he was in soggy, stinking Monrovia.
Hunting LeRoux Page 21