Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  “I’m sick and tired of this shit,” he said. “I’ve done this before. I CAN’T DO THIS.”

  “It’ll work out,” Cindric said, and tried to believe it himself. The air smelled of diesel from generators that ran day and night because there was no central power. The walls were specked with bullet holes. He imagined the place during the civil war, with the sickly-sweet smell of blood and rotting flesh in the air.

  They sat for a while in silent despair.

  “Fuck it,” Stouch said finally. Time to shake it off. They went down to the bar, ordered beer and shots, sang Get Down on It along with Kool & the Gang and other eighties, late-disco-era dance favorites, and chatted with the bartender and waitresses. They closed the place down.

  They got up the next day, wrote some more emails for Jack to send to LeRoux, and waited. And waited.

  Finally, on September 25, 2012, a week after they arrived and four days after the expulsion order was signed, LeRoux texted Jack that he and Cayanan were heading for the Rio airport, on the way to Monrovia.

  Milione and Maltz flew in from New York on a rented Bombardier Global Express executive jet that, assuming all went well, would deliver LeRoux to custody in New York. More agents from the 960 Group and from posts in the region filtered in to help.

  The agents set up a command center in a room in the Kendeja. Milione, Brown, Cindric, Stouch, and the newly arrived agents went over the arrest plan and sketched it out on a white dry-erase board. As Milione urged, they kept the plan simple because it would be easier to remember and there would be fewer chances of screwups. It went like this:

  Jack, accompanied by some of Fombah Sirleaf’s men from the Liberian National Security Agency, would meet LeRoux and Cayanan at the airport and whisk them through, bypassing the usual border control line. This little flourish was meant to signal LeRoux that Diego had bribed the cops, Liberian border control, and everybody else who mattered.

  Outside the terminal, the “corrupt cops” would hand off LeRoux, Cayanan, and Jack to a chauffeur—in reality, another National Security Agency agent—who would deliver the honored guests to their hotel, the Palm Spring Resort, a gated, secured affair, apricot-painted concrete, with a view of the Atlantic, a pool, and a casino. It was about seven miles from the Kendeja. The paint, inside and out, was dingy, but rooms were comfortable, by Liberian standards. The agents picked it for its location, well away from town and from the sights and sounds of police and DEA activity.

  LeRoux and Cayanan would have second-floor suite with a balcony. The room was L-shaped, with a king-sized bed, a minibar, a flat-screen TV, and Wi-Fi. Jack had a standard room below them on the ground floor, with a view of the parking lot. The room next to LeRoux’s suite would be occupied by DEA agents.

  DEA agent Matt Keller from the 960 Group would handle the overnight shift in the surveillance room, listening to the feed from a bugging device planted in the room. It was like a baby monitor. Keller needed it to make sure LeRoux didn’t slip out of the hotel during the night. The agents assumed that LeRoux would sleep off the long flight from Rio. The next morning, LeRoux would meet with Jack, and then Jack would escort LeRoux to Diego’s hotel and introduce them. In their meeting, LeRoux and Diego would put the finishing touches on the North Korean meth/cocaine deal. At that point, the NSA men would move in, arrest LeRoux, process him, and expel him to DEA custody. Happy ending.

  Only, stuff happened.

  Before LeRoux landed, Keller, Joe Kellums, an agent posted to the DEA Accra office, and the Liberian agents went into LeRoux’s suite to plant the bug, which was hidden inside a clock the team had brought from Washington.

  PFFFTTTT! FUUCCCK! As soon as the clock’s plug touched the wall socket, the thing blew up. The voltage from the hotel generator was greater than American voltage, and it fluctuated unpredictably.

  Kellums looked at the clock melted around the bug and turned to the Liberian agents. “You guys have anything?”

  The Liberians went back to their office and returned with a gizmo made in China. It was a big ugly clunker, about the size of an old-fashioned walkie-talkie. Kellums turned it over in his hand, then stuck it in a vase under some flowers and set it up in LeRoux’s room.

  LeRoux shambled off the plane, wearing a blue polo shirt the size of a pup tent, khaki shorts, and flip-flops. He and Cayanan went straight to their room.

  An hour or so later, Keller called Cindric and Stouch from the surveillance room. He held his cell phone up to the audio feed from the bug. The fat man was in heat. Even over the cell connection, Cindric and Stouch could hear Cayanan screaming.

  “FUCK ME, LEROUX! FUCK ME, LEROUX!”

  Then came a cascade of thumps, bumps, growls, yips, and creaks. It sounded as if somebody were shooting a bondage movie during an earthquake. How did a 110-pound woman handle loud, rough sex with a man the size of a baby grand? Cindric started laughing. Keller did not.

  “Thanks, guys. I gotta listen to this shit all night,” the younger man snarled. “You OWE me.”

  Cindric and Stouch slept better than they had in weeks.

  Keller didn’t sleep at all. He wasn’t supposed to. The bugging device didn’t record anything, only broadcast sounds to the surveillance room so Keller could tell if LeRoux slipped out the door. Finally, LeRoux’s humping and grinding gave way to very loud snoring. He sounded like a rhino with indigestion.

  Deep in the O-dark hours, Keller heard LeRoux speaking. After moving from Manila to Rio, then flying to Monrovia, his body clock must be totally confused. Keller felt a glimmer of sympathy for LeRoux. If the guy knew it was his last night of liberty, surely he’d be out clubbing. Of course, from what Keller had heard, he didn’t like to talk to people. Still, he might have liked a cocktail. Keller would have liked a cocktail. He popped a bottle of water instead.

  The next morning, while LeRoux and Cayanan were at breakfast, Kellums joined Keller in the surveillance room. They saw LeRoux’s room door open and the maids preparing to make it up. They were changing out flowers in vases in rooms along the hall. If they lifted LeRoux’s vase, they were bound to find the bug.

  Kellums dashed into the corridor, did a pirouette around the maids, and, channeling Nathan Lane’s drag queen in The Birdcage, began gushing about the wonderful lotions, marvelous soap, and gorgeous flowers. He twirled into LeRoux’s room, declared that he absolutely had to have those glorious blooms in his own room, snatched up the bugged vase, and stuck the flowers on his head like an Easter bonnet. They were plastic, but he acted as if they were fresh from a palace garden.

  Kellums had been a sniper with the U.S. Army Rangers in Iraq and had served with the DEA contingent in Jalalabad, a heroin smuggling center in Southeast Afghanistan. In the war zone, he grew out his black beard and hair and looked like a Cajun moonshiner. Nobody would take him for a dancer.

  “What was that?” Keller asked.

  “I pulled out my crazy,” he said. “We all have it. We just don’t go there.”

  After breakfast, LeRoux dropped Cayanan at their room and met Jack at 10 a.m. in the hotel cafe for a prebrief before their meeting with Diego. The breakfast room was supposed to look Chinese. Its red-orange walls and gilded fixtures glowed oppressively in the wet heat.

  LeRoux, who had changed into another gigantic royal blue polo shirt, didn’t seem bothered. He had good news to share. Jack had rarely seen him so pumped. He had been trying to make a deal with the Iranian Defense Industries Organization to supply small arms for his Amazon-style arms business. He had just gotten word from the two emissaries he sent to Tehran that the deal was a go.

  All he had to do was come up with an African military officer and an end-user certificate with a lot of official-looking rubber stamps. These would provide cover for the arms sales, in case anyone questioned the Iranians about the buyer. This was the breakthrough LeRoux had been after since 2008.

  “Everything we want, even bigger shit, is available in Iran,” LeRoux rejoiced. “And there’s no questions asked! They will d
eliver to us in any Muslim country anywhere in the world—Indonesia, for example. But we need to fetch up with a general or some fucking lieutenant from an African country, and they front the deal. It doesn’t have to be a Muslim country. Just fetch up with a fucking general or a lieutenant with some official paperwork.”

  “What about here?” Jack asked, meaning, what about a Liberian military officer.

  “Yeah, that’s fine,” LeRoux said. “If we can fetch up here with a general, all these items we want are available. I mean, the stuff they have for sale is unbelievable. They will deliver the goods anywhere in the world, no problem. The prices are higher but the bullshit is less.”

  LeRoux was practically giggling as he gave Jack instructions.

  “Work on getting me a guy I can show to the Iranians,” he exulted, “because I’m telling you, my friend, everything you want . . . even shit the Russians won’t sell us, we can get there, even seven-meter-long rockets the size of this room! They sent me a catalogue! It’s unbelievable, you can fucking buy whatever you want!!”

  LeRoux said there was one item the Iranians wouldn’t sell—SAMs, which he needed to fulfill the Shan State Army order. If a passenger airliner were knocked out of the sky and the killer missile were traced back to Iran, the blowback from the international community would be terrible. Officials in Tehran evidently didn’t want to fade the heat.

  China wouldn’t sell SAMs, either. LeRoux had tried through Lim, the Chinese Triad rep, to buy small arms from Poly Technologies, the behemoth manufacturing company owned by the People’s Republic of China. The company made, among many other things, large quantities of good-quality, inexpensive infantry weapons for the People’s Liberation Army. On the side, it sold small arms to nearly all comers. (In 2014, the U.S. government would blacklist Poly Technologies for illicit arms sales under the Iran, North Korea, and Syria Nonproliferation Act.) But it wouldn’t sell LeRoux SAMs for the same reason as the Iranians cited—blowback.

  Unfazed, LeRoux said he thought he could get SAMs from Russian or Serb mafia gun-runners. His face was alight with anticipation. He badly wanted to pick up the Shan State Army as a client. The group occupied contested real estate in the Shan Mountains north of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos. Shan buyers would always have money to spend because they had a renewable resource. Their one cash crop was opium, China White, the champagne of heroin.

  Opium flourished in the Shan hills in the heart of the Golden Triangle. Shan tribesmen and Nationalist Chinese had been cultivating agribusiness levels of opium since 1949. A big bump in production occurred during the Vietnam War and again at the turn of the new millennium. Now, however, the Golden Triangle couldn’t compete with Afghanistan in terms of quantity. But aficionados still considered the quality of Myanmar heroin unrivaled and would pay top dollar for it, so it was making a comeback. The numbers and possibilities excited LeRoux.

  LeRoux turned to the arrangement he wanted to make with Diego. He had found a source in Mumbai for pharmacy-grade meth chemicals—pseudoephedrine and ephedrine. He said he could buy a ton of the meth precursors for $1 million or so and sell it to the Colombians for $50 million.

  “It’s like gold dust,” LeRoux told Jack. “Like gold dust! Let’s take the first delivery. Something like one metric ton to begin. A thousand kilos. First order.”

  The only tricky part would be avoiding naval patrols around India and Africa. He had studied government surveillance of maritime shipping lanes and thought he knew how to navigate around areas that were being watched.

  “Not the Malacca Straits!” he said. “That area is very heavily monitored. Anywhere in the South China Sea, like Thailand, Vietnam, but not in in the actual Chinese waters itself. In international waters.”

  LeRoux had plans for the cocaine he expected to get from Diego’s organization.

  “I need as much [cocaine] as he can supply,” he said. “I have at least a demand for 200 units a month to 1,000 units a month.” He calculated that he could sell the coke to the Chinese Triad for $20 million to $50 million a ton.

  If he moved as many tons of chemicals, meth, and cocaine as he anticipated, he would quickly enter the rarified circle of drug billionaires. Only El Chapo and maybe three or four other kingpins had attained billionaire status, an achievement that enhanced not only their professional reputations but also their untouchability.

  LeRoux and Jack pushed back their chairs to head for the meeting with Diego at his hotel, the Golden Gate. On their way out the door into the downpour, LeRoux turned to Jack, handed him a couple of U.S. hundred-dollar bills, and told him to find a cheap laundry in town.

  “These fuckers charge crazy money,” he grumbled. “It’s like, two bucks for a shirt here.”

  “It’s Africa,” Jack sighed with feigned sympathy.

  “Cheap bastard,” Jack said to himself. “Fatty’s making millions and he won’t pay a lady who makes a dollar a week to wash and iron a shirt?”

  At the Golden Gate, Jack introduced Diego. The Colombian, dressed immaculately in a crisply ironed collared shirt and neatly creased slacks, rose and solemnly offered a manicured hand, like a Spanish grandee. He flashed his professional smile, which he had perfected over years of playing the part. It was the body language of a man who was slightly interested, slightly chilly, and wanted to signal, “I know everything, so don’t mess with me.”

  LeRoux lowered himself into an overstuffed leather sofa, sat up as straight as his belly would allow, and put on his London manners. He apologized profusely for a delay in shipping the mobile meth lab. “If you have any problem assembling it,” LeRoux said, “I’ll send guys in—like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  Diego said he was curious. Why was LeRoux using the Philippines as a base?

  “It’s the best shithole we can find in Asia, which gives us the ability to ship anywhere,” LeRoux replied airily. “We can ship to Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and the prices are very good. For the product that you’re manufacturing [cocaine], in Australia it’s around $150,000 a kilo. If we move the other one you want [meth] to Japan, it’s around $100,000 a kilo. It’s the best position in Asia, and it’s also a poor place, not as bad as here, but we can still solve problems.”

  Diego said he was impressed with the quality of the meth in the sample LeRoux had supplied. “It is awesome,” he said.

  LeRoux nodded proudly. “That stuff comes from the North Korean government. They can make it. They don’t care there. They have a building this size to make it,” he bragged, sweeping his hand to suggest a hotel-size lab. “We can get around six hundred kilos a month.”

  LeRoux explained that he was getting the meth through one of the Chinese Triads, which smuggled it out of North Korea and brokered it to the outside world. He thought he could talk the Triad rep into lowering the price, if he would sell his organization 200 kilos of Colombian cocaine a month, which it would distribute in Asia.

  “If we give them good quality coke, I don’t see how we need to pay more than $20,000 or $25,000 maximum for the meth,” LeRoux said.

  Diego nodded and, to flatter his subject, said that he had heard that despite his success and wealth, LeRoux chose to live modestly. LeRoux, who never did get irony, responded happily that he drove an ordinary car, not a “fancy” one. By ordinary, he meant his Range Rover, which cost $90,000 or $100,000 in the United States and at least double that in the Philippines. He launched into a long rant about how he had killed his lieutenant, Dave Smith, for spending ostentatiously and driving a Lamborghini and Mercedes around Manila.

  “You know what really pissed me off?” LeRoux said. “His yacht was bigger than my yacht.”

  He jumped subjects again, to Iran. He was buying guns from Iran, but he needed some end-user certificates. Could Diego help him?

  Diego, baffled at this twist in the conversation, changed the subject back to the meth transaction. His instructions from the DEA agents were to seal a deal for meth. He was not supposed to allow LeRoux to wander off into uncharted territory.<
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  Diego said his organization would take delivery on one hundred kilos of North Korean meth to start with. It would be distributed in New York through the Colombians’ outlets there.

  LeRoux nodded. Done, he said.

  Diego stood and offered his hand. LeRoux, rising, took it, motioned to Jack and headed back to his hotel suite.

  Diego went to the DEA control room in the Kendeja to hand off his recording devices. As the agents hooked them up to a computer to download them, he collapsed into a chair and popped open a bottle of water.

  “Holy shit, this guy is talking about all kinds of crazy shit,” he gasped. “He was talking about making people disappear. Talking about Iran!”

  That was LeRoux, Stouch said—grasshopper mind, but he wasn’t a fantasist. He was eager to please the Colombians. He thought they enjoyed killing as much as he did. Or maybe, Stouch thought, LeRoux was a bit nervous in the presence of a real Colombian and wanted to let Diego know that he, too, killed mercilessly.

  Stouch called Brown to fill him in.

  “What are we waiting for?” Brown said. “What more are we going to get?”

  “What do you think?” Stouch asked Cindric.

  “If you think it’s good, I think it’s good,” Cindric said.

  Cindric went outside, met the two Liberian National Security Agency agents assigned to carry out the arrest, and escorted them into the command center. They were both about six feet two inches tall and 250 pounds, lighter than LeRoux, but all muscle. They looked as if they spent a lot of time in the weight room.

  “We will take care of this,” the senior officer said.

  “The arrest will be very anticlimactic,” Stouch whispered to Cindric. “Just hang out in the back and let them do their thing.”

  They took a convoy of SUVs over to LeRoux’s hotel. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. The air was heavy as a wet, woolen overcoat. Cindric and Stouch followed the Liberian agents to the second floor and stood a short distance behind them as they knocked on the door to LeRoux’s suite. Brown trailed some steps behind.