“Room service,” one of the cops said in a low, rumbling voice. He sounded nothing like a waiter, but the gambit never failed. Cayanan dropped her iPad on the bed and answered the door.
LeRoux had changed into an orange polo shirt. He was sitting at the desk, his face fixed on his laptop screen.
“Mr. LeRoux! Put your hands up!” the senior officer shouted. “You’re under arrest.”
LeRoux jumped to his feet, leaving his laptop open and unlocked.
“What did I do? What did I do?” he shrilled. He had changed into his orange polo shirt and looked like the Great Pumpkin.
“Sir! Put your hands up!” the Liberian repeated, his tone sharpening.
LeRoux kept his hands down. Cayanan stood frozen to the spot.
“Don’t move,” Cindric called to her.
LeRoux lurched toward his computer. Cindric got to it first and snatched it so he couldn’t launch a command to wipe the machine’s data.
LeRoux slumped toward the floor, all passive resistance. The Liberian agents couldn’t get his arms together to cuff them. Stouch jammed his thumb under LeRoux’s jawbone, searching for the pressure point that caused blinding pain and submission, but no lasting damage. The big man didn’t budge. His pain threshold must have been off the charts.
“Fuck it,” Cindric said, starting toward LeRoux. The rain and the heat had gotten to him. Was he flashing back to his bar-fighting days? Brown saw Cindric’s face reddening and his fist clenching. He knew that look. Cindric was about to knock the fat bastard’s head off.
“Don’t do it, Tom!” Brown shouted.
“Sir! Quit resisting or I will shoot you,” the senior Liberian commanded.
Stouch was hanging on to LeRoux’s neck and shoulder, still looking for a pressure point that worked. He was starting to wonder if the man felt pain. LeRoux was trying to shake him off like a horsefly.
“If you resist, I’m going to shoot,” the Liberian said.
“Eric, move!” Cindric yelled. The Liberian was seriously fed up.
Stouch jumped back from LeRoux. He heard one of the other DEA men, he wasn’t sure which, shout to the Liberian, “Put that fucking gun away.”
The Liberian ignored him and shouted his warning again.
After what seemed like an hour, but was probably a minute, LeRoux loosened his arms and allowed himself to be cuffed.
Stouch sidled over to Cindric. “Really, it’s normally a lot more anticlimactic than that.”
“Fuck you,” Cindric replied. He turned back to face LeRoux.
“Mr. LeRoux, I’m Tom Cindric, a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,” he said. “We have a judicial expulsion order for your arrest.”
“You have been indicted for conspiring to import and distribute one hundred kilograms of methamphetamine into the United States,” Brown said.
LeRoux ignored them and turned to the Liberians.
“My brothers, we can work this out, we’re all Africans. Except for him,” he said, gesturing at Cindric. “Don’t take me to your police department. What can I give you? What do you need?”
“There is nothing you can give me, sir,” the senior Liberian said. He nodded to his partner, and they hustled LeRoux into an armored police SUV. Cindric jumped in behind them.
Jack, in his first-floor hotel room, was peering out of his window at the parking lot as the Liberian agents frog-walked LeRoux to their SUV. LeRoux was calm. Jack thought LeRoux must be collecting his thoughts, figuring that he could pay his way out, once they got to the police headquarters.
Jack heard knocks on his door. It was Stouch. His face was flushed with adrenaline. “Pack your bags and let’s go!” he snapped.
Jack obeyed. He trotted out to the parking lot and got into a police car, which delivered him to the Kendeja Hotel. The agents there took him to a room and made sure he locked himself in.
Stouch, meanwhile, collected LeRoux’s seized computers and phones, which he would give to the DEA techs to download and analyze. He sped off in a second Liberian National Security Agency SUV with Cayanan, who had been detained but would be released to return to Manila.
Stouch’s ride pulled into the National Security Agency headquarters—a dilapidated, three-story concrete affair with no elevator—about the time Milione and Brown arrived in their rental car.
As the three climbed the steps to the booking room, they could hear LeRoux shouting, offering bribes all around. He was demanding a Liberian lawyer. He wanted to see a Liberian judge. The Liberian cops were shaking their heads and doing their paperwork.
Through all this, Cindric dialed Jack and held his cell phone aloft. “Listen to this, you deserve it!”
This was the first time Jack had ever heard fear in LeRoux’s voice. The cops weren’t going to hurt him physically, but they had taken away his control. They didn’t want his money. If there was anything LeRoux needed, it was control. Now that he had lost it, he was close to hysterical.
When Cindric hung up, Jack threw his phone on the bed and did a face plant into the pillow. He’d forgotten what sleep was like.
Inside the building, the Liberian agents were winding up their paperwork. LeRoux, his voice hoarse with shouting, turned to Milione, who had been quiet up until now. LeRoux correctly divined from the agents’ deferential body language that Milione was the senior DEA man present. Cindric was the biggest, Stouch the fittest, and Brown the most clean-cut, but Milione was definitely in charge.
“I apologize in advance, but I really don’t want to get on the plane,” LeRoux said.
“I know you don’t want to get on the plane,” Milione replied. His voice was even and firm.
LeRoux, shackled now, went dead weight again. Underneath all those layers of lard, he was incredibly strong, with shoulders like a Russian power lifter and short hard legs.
It took four Liberian agents, plus Cindric, Stouch, Brown, and Milione, to hoist LeRoux and haul and drag him down three flights of steps to the parking lot in the steaming rain.
LeRoux collapsed in the parking lot, screaming that he was being kidnapped. The eight men dragged LeRoux to the door of the twelve-seat passenger van the DEA agents had rented for the occasion and shoved and pulled until LeRoux’s butt was on a seat. The Liberian agents climbed in next to LeRoux. The DEA agents surrounded them, and Carol Dillon, the analyst, hopped in behind, taking notes to document the expulsion for the U.S. court record. They slammed the van door shut and locked it.
Milione turned around to stare at LeRoux, nose to nose, like a football coach chewing out an unruly junior varsity player.
“Paul, just stop it,” he snapped. “You can’t act like this. It’s undignified.”
LeRoux snickered. All that stress and adrenaline came out as a man-baby giggle.
“I did apologize in advance,” he said. “I told you I wasn’t going to get on the plane.”
“Are you going to behave yourself?” Milione said sternly.
LeRoux snickered again. “Yeah, I will.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
He sniffled to suppress a laugh.
Cindric and Stouch saw Milione’s face harden. “You better not resist in this plane,” he said. His voice was still low, but his tone was one that the agents never wanted to hear directed at them.
“We are not going to have a problem on that plane,” Milione said. “You’re going to end up on the worst end of this. We’re not going to get hurt in this. You are.”
The agents knew that Milione would never abuse a prisoner or allow anyone else to do so. He said it was against the U.S. Constitution and just wrong. But, if he had to subdue someone to protect the lives of others, they were sure he wouldn’t hesitate to inflict real damage. Cindric said, “If you get in a fight with Lou, you better pack a lunch because it’s an all-day job.”
That was quite a statement coming from ex-bouncer Cindric, who practiced an aggressive kickboxing style called Muay Thai.
Th
e packed van trundled toward the airport. The rain was coming down again. The humidity in the van was close to 100 percent.
And then they heard a pop and felt the vehicle sag. They all knew the sound. Flat tire. What’s next? An earthquake? A flood?
The Liberian agents jumped out, jacked up the van, and changed the tire. They were good at it. Flats were commonplace on Liberian roads.
They got to the airport around 10 p.m. A short time later, they were strapping LeRoux into his seat. Once the airplane door was screwed shut, a new LeRoux personality suddenly appeared, one they had never seen before.
LeRoux took in the situation inside the plane, eyes twinkling like a computer rebooting. Cindric and Stouch watched LeRoux’s process, briefly mesmerized. They saw him reach his “aha” moment.
Jack! He’s working with them! LeRoux must have thought. Which means that the DEA has everything I said and wrote to Jack. I’m fucked. Okay, time to unfuck this.
His orange shirt, drenched in sweat and rain, stuck to his belly. His hands and feet were manacled. He reeked. They all did.
And yet this hot mess of a man in desperate need of a bath suddenly transformed into CEO Paul—magisterial, as if calling a board meeting to order. He was starting to assert command by sheer force of personality and ego. If he had been arrested by younger people or people who weren’t prepared for him, Cindric thought, LeRoux could have done it. He could have taken control of the room.
He squared his shoulders and smiled benevolently. “Well played, gentlemen,” he said.
He paused for dramatic effect. “But if you’re looking at me, you’re obviously looking for bigger things.”
“Not really,” Stouch said. “You’re the prize.”
“No, no, no.”
“What then?” Cindric said.
“Nation-states, gentlemen. Nation-states.”
Cindric shot Brown a look that said, Fuck, where is this going?
“What?” Stouch said.
“Iran. North Korea.”
Chapter Eleven
Queen for a Day
IT WAS ON.
“What have you got?” Cindric said.
“What are you going to give me?” LeRoux replied.
Cindric shook his head. “We can’t make any promises.”
“I need some assurances.”
“To be clear, this is not our first rodeo,” Milione said. “This team and others on the team who aren’t here brought down Viktor Bout. He was given every opportunity, and he decided to go to trial.”
This went on for two hours until fatigue and hunger set in. LeRoux asked for a Diet Coke and a sandwich, any kind.
The agents fetched themselves sandwiches and soft drinks. After his blood sugar bumped up to normal, Stouch turned back to LeRoux. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine,” he said. “Look, here’s how this works. I can’t make you any promises. Tommy can’t make you any promises. That’s our boss”—he pointed to Brown. “He can’t make you any promises.”
“That’s his boss”—he pointed to Milione. “He can’t make you any promises.”
“You see that guy there?” He pointed to Derek Maltz, whose black eyes were boring into LeRoux’s skull like carpenter bees. “He’s the boss of the whole group, and he can’t make you any promises. So you either talk to us now, or we’ll wait till we get to New York and we’re with the prosecutors.”
God, I hope he doesn’t talk because we’re both fucking exhausted, Cindric said to himself.
“Okay,” LeRoux said. “I understand.” Stouch read him his rights. He signed a statement waiving them.
He didn’t shut up for thirteen hours.
“Viktor Bout was a very foolish man,” LeRoux began.
He knew plenty about Bout. Specifically, that Bout was doing hard time for agreeing to sell 700 to 800 shoulder-fired, antiaircraft Russian Igla surface-to-air missiles—SAMs—to men who he thought were Colombian FARC guerrillas. Bout had advised the fake FARC guerrillas on tape that the terrorist group could use the missiles to take down American helicopters and kill American troops. The prosecutors used his words to argue for the maximum sentence under the law, life in prison. They didn’t get their way because federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin harbored deep skepticism about the sting and Bout’s culpability. “You may not like the business he is in—but he is a businessman,” she said during the proceedings. Even so, the judge acknowledged that she had had no choice but to send Bout up for the mandatory minimum of twenty-five years in federal prison. Bout was forty-five at the time.
LeRoux couldn’t count on getting a judge so lenient. He wasn’t willing to risk doing twenty-five years, much less life. He knew that his agreement to sell SAMs was on tape and in emails between him and Jack. He was sunk, unless he avoided going to trial on the SAMs charge. To do that, he would have to offer up evidence leading to more important criminals. He knew the mantra the agents and prosecutors lived by—flip and go higher. What leverage did he have?
LeRoux described multiple projects on multiple timelines. He sounded like a chess master playing a dozen opponents simultaneously. He had been darting among the chessboards, using people as his chess pieces. One board was about Somalia. Jack knew all about that, because he was LeRoux’s pawn in that game.
Jack had picked up bits and pieces of what LeRoux had been doing in Iran, North Korea, China, Brazil, the Philippines, and Africa, but he didn’t have the whole picture because LeRoux compartmentalized his business activities. Once LeRoux started talking, it was clear that he had created his own universe of games and pawns, a bewildering tangle to anybody except himself. The agents could see in his eyes that his mind was racing faster than he could form the words to articulate his vision. They struggled to slow him down to human speed.
“Okay, let’s whiteboard this,” Cindric said. “Who would you put up at the top of the whiteboard?”
“On the right, Kim Jong Un,” LeRoux said. He meant the Dear Leader of North Korea, with the strange hair and the nukes.
“On the left, Ayatollah Khamenei.” Khamenei was the Supreme Leader of Iran, presiding over a regime racing to develop the capability to build nuclear weapon and arming Hezbollah and other proxies to the teeth.
LeRoux launched into a stunning admission of a conspiracy the agents had not suspected existed. He said he had been helping Iran develop the capacity to build advanced navigation systems for its rockets and missiles—the weapons systems that most directly threatened Israel, Iran’s regional rivals in the Arab world and U.S. and allied forces in the region.
As LeRoux unspooled his tale, it started with a relatively low-key overture to Iran in late 2008, shortly after he founded Red, White and Blue Arms. LeRoux needed a steady supply of small arms—“heavy weapons, rockets, machine guns and explosives,” as he later put it—for his new venture. He intended to start with local sales and scale up quickly to regional, then global sales, much as he had done with his pharmaceutical business. He knew that Iran was unlikely to bend to Western pressure to refuse the sale. According to LeRoux's plea agreement he sent Nestor Del Rosario, a Filipino middle manager at RX Limited, and his assistant Rogelio “Ogie” Palma, to Tehran, with instructions to sound out the Iranian Defense Industries Organization, the state-owned military-industrial conglomerate. He thought that Del Rosario and Palma, who were slight, brown-skinned figures, wouldn’t seem threatening to Iranian officials, nor arouse suspicions. The Iranians were more likely to suspect a Brit, Australian, or white southern African like himself of being a spy for the CIA or MI5.
Upon their return, Rosario and Palma gave an optimistic assessment. They had met with the head of the DIO, and he had indicated interest. But they hadn’t closed a deal. It took them two more trips to Tehran to get a verbal commitment to make the purchase and a catalogue of Iranian small arms. After their third trip, in mid-2009, they returned with a long shopping list of specialized electronics components, high-performance materials, and technologies the Iranians wanted to buy through LeRou
x.
At the time, Tehran was struggling to enlarge and modernize its forces and weapons systems, which were outdated and depleted after the Iran-Iraq War. Iran’s progress was hobbled by draconian trade sanctions levied by the U.S. and international community aimed at forcing the radical regime to shut down its nuclear enrichment program and stop arming its militant proxies. Iranian DIO officials were always on the lookout for unscrupulous businessmen who would act as straw purchasers. Was LeRoux a good candidate? The Iranian shopping list appeared to be a test.
“The Iranians have been at this since 1980, and they’re very, very good at playing people who think they’re playing Iran,” said Anthony Cordesman, an expert on Iran’s military capabilities with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a highly regarded Washington think tank. “They’re always willing to see if somebody can come up with this stuff. There’s no risk to them.”
There were a few random items on the shopping list that could be used in nuclear devices. The request for an explosives formula using only unmonitored materials seemed destined for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—Quds Force and its proxies, among them Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Iraqi Shia militias, and the Houthis in Yemen. But most of the list consisted of missile parts and the technology to make them. The Iranians wanted, for reverse engineering, a Phoenix missile, an air-to-air tactical missile used until 2004 by U.S. Navy and Marines Corps fighter jets such as the F-14 Tomcat. They wanted a cruise missile design, also for reverse engineering. They were seeking fiber optic gyroscopes available only in the United States and Western Europe and enhanced guidance systems for missile navigation; and vibrations platforms and supersonic wind tunnels for missile testing.
LeRoux understood why. Someone like him, interested in military weaponry, could find terabytes of white papers about Iran’s military machine, plus the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion, repeated throughout the 2000s, that despite sanctions, Tehran had managed to assemble the largest and most diverse stockpile of ballistic missiles in the Middle East.
Hunting LeRoux Page 23