Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  The agents gave LeRoux his personal laptop so that he could demonstrate what he had done for Iran. He proudly showed off videos of small prototype missiles created by his engineering team.

  He also demonstrated videos of a drone his engineers had made. He said it could be outfitted to deliver explosives.

  What was striking about his demeanor was his lack of remorse. It didn’t matter to him that his handiwork might eventually play a part in flattening the soaring skyscrapers of Tel Aviv and destroying the priceless world heritage that was Jerusalem. That awful prospect actually seemed to amuse him. He wasn’t even motivated by practical considerations. In the worst-case scenario, unrelenting Iranian missile attacks on Israel could kill his business associates and employees and destroy his server array there. Yet he expressed no concern about these possible misfortunes to his company or his people. He loved the Iranian missile guidance project, and nothing and no one else. His only regret seemed to be that the project was still a work in progress and had not achieved its terrible ultimate goals. He took solace that the Iranians might still achieve precision-guided rockets and missiles by implementing the technology he and his team had shared with them. If they succeeded and acknowledged his contribution, he implied that he would be very happy indeed. He might even win a place in infamy, if the Iranians gave him proper credit. That was a long shot, though.

  LeRoux talked to the lawyers and agents through the night and into Friday, September 28, 2012. He tried hard to seem upbeat and reasonable.

  “He’s very self-assured,” Stouch said. “He can turn it on and turn it off. He can be very charming, depending on who’s in the room.”

  LeRoux worked especially hard to win a smile from Lockard, who would decide whether he got the plea agreement he wanted. He was disappointed. Lockard gave him his standard poker face. Everybody got Lockard’s civil nod that gave nothing away.

  Lockard, Cindric observed, was “passionate about what he’s doing, but if you want to see his pulse go up or down, forget it.”

  By the afternoon of Friday, September 28, LeRoux and the agents had been awake for close to sixty hours. LeRoux was still full of energy, but the agents had to pack it in or they’d start drooling. They adjourned the session, bid the lawyers good-bye, and checked LeRoux in at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal holding facility for pretrial detainees in Brooklyn.

  They took the train to Washington, saw their families, did their laundry, hit the sack, and were back in Brooklyn Sunday night.

  The next week’s drill went like this. Every day, Cindric and Stouch drove LeRoux from the Brooklyn lockup to the Marriott for his meetings with the prosecutors and defense lawyers. Brown usually joined them, and sometimes other agents from the 960 Group stopped by. Cindric and Stouch decided to do the interviews at the Marriott rather than the courthouse because the hotel afforded more privacy. They didn’t know whether LeRoux might have underworld connections in New York who might spot him walking in and out of the courthouse interview rooms.

  The walk through the Marriott lobby and trip in the elevator was the trickiest part. The agents threw a jacket around LeRoux to hide his gray (not orange, gray) prisoner garb, but they forgot to consider what might be going on in his head until an elderly woman stepped into the elevator next to him. They gave each other a look and sideways nod that said—watch out that he doesn’t grab this poor lady and make a scene. If he did, they’d have to knock the crap out of him in front of her, not to mention the hotel staff and everybody in the lobby. They could make him let her go, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

  Their fears were groundless, as it turned out. LeRoux was on his very best behavior. Not because he had repented but because he was creating a character, a genial, courteous Paul. This was an act for their benefit and for the benefit of Lockard and eventually, the judge who would sentence him. Fine. Polite Paul made life easier for everybody.

  DEA technical specialists set up LeRoux’s email and text channels so the agents could monitor the messages and respond as LeRoux. LeRoux supplied them with his passwords and encryption keys so they could read all his incoming and outgoing messages.

  They maintained the fiction that LeRoux was carrying on business as usual from Brazil. No one on the dark side could know that he had gone missing and might be in custody and talking. During their sessions, they gave him his laptop and let him answer routine inquiries promptly. The DEA techs recorded his keystrokes so he couldn’t pull any tricks. The agents arranged to pay his staff out of his bank accounts in Hong Kong, so everybody stayed happy and productive and nobody started looking for him.

  He often exchanged messages with Cayanan. She believed that he had faked his kidnapping in Monrovia to freestyle through brothels someplace.

  “How’s Cindy the dragon lady?” Cindric would ask, though he knew, because he had cloned LeRoux’s email.

  “Aw, she’s killing me this week,” LeRoux would groan. But he seemed to enjoy her scolding. They had a spiky relationship. She wrote that she might go to law school. She’d be a fine lawyer, the agents agreed.

  Great debriefings don’t just happen. They depend on keeping the person content, relaxed, and talking. Stress makes people shut down. Cindric and Stouch spent hours thinking about how to develop rapport with this strange, perverse character. They knew that on an IQ test, he would leave them in the dust. It was incredible that the stars aligned so that they had found him and reeled him in. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, like a guy sitting in a Starbucks when a drunk driver plowed through the window. Now that they had him, they had to figure him out, because he was obviously spending every waking minute figuring them out. They had to stay a step ahead of his connivances. They had to become the friends he relied on to meet his every need. They had to think upside down and backward—and fake love for him, knowing that love wasn’t a word in his lexicon.

  “His confidant, brother, mother—whatever he wants you to be—you become,” Cindric said. “We said, ‘We care about you. We know it’s a business decision for you.’”

  They got him Diet Cokes and Big Macs. When he started to sag, nothing cheered him up like a big, sloppy burger with a glob of Special Sauce.

  As they wrapped up the first weeks debrief, Cindric and Stouch concluded that things had gone smoothly—for LeRoux. He played the queen-for-a-day game adroitly. He seemed to think he was well on his way to securing his liberty. And he might be, except for one thing.

  He didn’t want to talk about the murders.

  Chapter Twelve

  All the Pieces on the Chessboard

  LEROUX WAS WILLING TO ADMIT USING HIS SECURITY TEAM TO HARASS and threaten people. But when it came to acknowledging that people had been killed on his orders, he dismissed the stories as “exaggerations.”

  He would say something like, “I just told so-and-so to deal with that problem.”

  Or, “I don’t know anything about that. That was Dave Smith.” Smith, of course, was conveniently deceased.

  Or, “That was Hunter.”

  His tells appeared whenever the topic of murder came up. He got cottonmouth. His answers shortened to a few syllables. He tightened up, slumped, and fidgeted.

  As the days wore on, the agents stopped all pretense of friendliness and bore down on him. They could not and would not use the techniques of military and CIA interrogators to force confessions—stress positions, sleep deprivation, loud music, or threats of physical harm. It was an article of faith among law enforcement—DEA, FBI, local police, and the rest—that brutal measures didn’t get at the truth. People under extreme stress would say anything to get their interrogators off their backs.

  They deployed other techniques. Stouch liked to use logic. He showed LeRoux how his answers made no sense. He wore LeRoux down like his old running shoes.

  “What do you mean Monday? You just said Sunday. Which is it?” Or, “You said you were alone. Now you’re saying you were with Smith.” Or, “Okay, Marius shot first? Or the other guy? Make
up your mind. You seem confused. Let’s start again.”

  Cindric used emotion. When LeRoux denied something, Cindric roared, “Come on, Paul, you’re full of shit. You’ve gotta give it up.”

  To which Stouch would respond, slightly more reasonably, “Come on, Paul, we’re trying to help you here.”

  Brown didn’t join in. Sometimes he uttered pleasantries to lighten the mood. Cindric and Stouch didn’t want the mood lightened.

  “You know, guys, he all but admitted it,” Brown said at one point.

  “Come on, Wim, gimme a fucking break,” Cindric snorted.

  Brown understood very well what they were up to. He disagreed. He thought the agents were being too rough on LeRoux. He didn’t see the point of browbeating the man about crimes beyond the reach of American law. Whatever the truth was, he didn’t think it all had to be on the table the first week.

  Cindric and Stouch thought it did, because LeRoux was a manipulator. Engaging in a contest of wills with the agents was like oxygen to him. Whenever Brown suggested that the guys slow it down, Cindric snarled, “Fuck that! He knows he did these murders. He’s gotta be honest. Fuck him until he gives it up. We know he ordered them. You can just tell. He’s a fucking liar. He’s not telling us everything. FUCK HIM.”

  “We need to establish our position, our control,” Stouch said. “He’s a smart guy, probably a lot smarter than us. But at this game, I think we’re ahead of him. We can read him. We know it and we want him to know. You talk to enough bad guys and guys who have killed, and you just know.”

  It was going to be tricky for the prosecutors to make a plea agreement with a confessed murderer, but there was no way around it. DEA agents had a saying. A deal with the devil is better than no deal at all.

  “Mike, I just hope you’re prepared,” Stouch told Lockard. “He killed them.”

  “Really? You think so?”

  “Oh no, he did it. It’s just whether he’s going to admit to it now.”

  On the night of Friday, October 5, 2012, after the lawyers and Brown left, Cindric and Stouch escorted LeRoux back to the Brooklyn lockup. On the way, both agents got up in LeRoux’s grill, so close he could tell their eyes were bloodshot, and they came at him from both sides, bad cop/bad cop, in stereo.

  “Look, Paul, we’re going to get to a point. . . . If you get a cooperation agreement, people are going to come in and talk about you,” Stouch said. “And, if we find out you did things we don’t know about, you’re fucked.”

  “Paul, you’re not telling us everything,” Cindric said. “You’re not telling us about the murders.”

  “We don’t believe you,” Stouch said. “You gotta have a come-to-Jesus moment with yourself because all that time we spent together is hanging out there now, because we’re going to find out. You’ve survived by manipulating, but we see through you. You’ve got to make a decision.”

  “This is how this works,” Cindric said. “You’re going to take the weekend, and I want you to think about it. If you’re not honest with us and we find out about these murders and you’re in a cooperation agreement, you’re FUCKED. No matter what good work you did, you’re FUCKED because you’re going to violate your cooperation agreement. I understand HOW hard it is. It’s not easy to admit you did this, but if we’re going to get to where we need to get to, you gotta do this.”

  LeRoux stared wordlessly as they handed him off to the guard who would take him back to his cell. The agents headed for Penn Station and took the train to Washington.

  Come Monday morning, LeRoux sat down at the table and said, “Guys, I talked to my attorney.”

  They were looking at CEO Paul—controlled, in command, not at all defensive, but pragmatic. He had weighed the odds.

  “I’ve had some time to think,” he said, “and I’m ready to talk about a few things.”

  LeRoux launched the story of each homicidal episode, speaking briskly and remorselessly, as if ticking off his latest mergers and acquisitions.

  He admitted to paying for the hit on Bruce Jones, the captain of his gun-running ship, the Captain Ufuk. He said Dave Smith had given the contract to John Nash, a sinister British character who skulked around Subic Bay and Angeles City. LeRoux said he also paid Nash to kill Jones’s lawyer Joe Frank Zuñiga, officially missing since June 2012. Nash had showed LeRoux a cell phone photo of a plastic-wrapped corpse that he said was Zuñiga, or what was left of him. LeRoux said that Nash told him the body had been “disposed of.” (In May 2014, the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation arrested Nash. NBI director Virgilio Mendez was quoted in the Philippine Daily Inquirer as saying that Nash had rammed an NBI vehicle while trying to escape and was considered an “alien who poses national security risk”; Mendez added that Nash was under investigation for links to an “international gunrunning syndicate operating in the Philippines” and that he had been found to be using the identity of a deceased person, from a California death certificate. NBI officials contacted by the author declined to say how the Nash investigation was resolved, citing their agency’s “confidentiality rule.”)

  LeRoux described the deaths of Dave Smith and those in his circle in glowing detail. He spent a lot of time obsessing about Smith.

  “If that son of a bitch came back as a poodle,” LeRoux crowed, “I’d get out of the car right now and kick him square in the ass.”

  There was nothing funny about a murder, but at the thought of Smith, the gaunt, meth-head executioner, as a poodle, Cindric started laughing so hard he had to clutch his stomach—for a moment. As LeRoux continued to talk, laughter turned to horror. LeRoux was all vengeance and retribution. He had no love or loyalty to give, yet he had expected complete devotion.

  The agents could see that LeRoux had thoroughly enjoyed killing Smith. The event had whetted his appetite for terminating more of his problem workers.

  LeRoux said that in early 2011, when Hunter returned to Manila after spending Christmas with his family in Kentucky, LeRoux told him that Dave Smith had been executed for stealing, that he, Hunter, was the new chief enforcer, and that he was to organize “kill teams.”

  According to LeRoux’s statements, incorporated in his plea agreement filed with the federal court, Hunter’s first kill team was “Christophe”—Chris for short—DeMeyere, a Belgian veteran of the French Foreign Legion who had worked with LeRoux and Dave Smith since 2005, from the earliest days of the RX Limited, and an enormous dark-skinned New Zealander who called himself Mack Daddy or sometimes Daddy Mack. (The author’s efforts to locate DeMeyere and Mack Daddy for comment have been unsuccessful.)

  LeRoux gave Hunter names of people he wanted dead.

  Nestor Del Rosario, LeRoux’s lead emissary to Iran, was on the list. Sometime in 2011, according to his plea agreement, LeRoux came to believe Del Rosario had embezzled between $2 million and $4 million. LeRoux confronted him and told him that if he had stolen, he was a dead man. Del Rosario took that as his cue to disappear. The agents did some checking of their own and concluded that Del Rosario was probably Persian Cat, the tipster who had approached the Australian police and through them, the DEA.

  Next on the list was Noemi Edillor, the thirty-one-year-old purchasing manager at Red, White and Blue Arms.

  LeRoux said he sent a gofer named Tony to the Red, White and Blue Arms arsenal to find a Smith & Wesson .22 pistol with a silencer and deliver it to Hunter.

  Edillor sometimes acted as a real estate agent, so Hunter alleged in his plea agreement that he told Demeyere and Mack Daddy to contact her about buying a property. On June 23, 2011, he alleged, they met her at the gate to her subdivision and shot her dead. The Manila newspaper reported that were no witnesses and no arrests. Hunter thought his kill team handled the job with finesse. “They shot her at the door,” he boasted in a conversation captured by a Thai police/DEA bug. “Left her there, but it was raining that day so no, there was no people out and they did it perfect, no problems.”

  As commandos and professional killers knew, killing some
one in the rain was good tradecraft, because the storm muffled the sounds of cars, footsteps, screams, the clicks of silencers and gunshots.

  But the job wasn’t perfect, as LeRoux wasted no time pointing out. “I wasn’t happy,” he grumbled later. “it was only by luck that there had been no witnesses. . . . Essentially, the kill team . . . had just got lucky because on that day it was raining.” He told Hunter he was not going to pay DeMeyere and Mack Daddy their bonuses until he saw proof that Edillor was actually dead.

  Hunter was furious. What did LeRoux know about killing? The only person he ever personally shot, as far as Hunter knew, was already a corpse. Hunter sent LeRoux a blistering email with a link to an online news report about the Edillor murder. It quoted her husband as saying that he personally found her bloodied body on the street near the gate.

  “There is your fucking proof,” Hunter wrote in an email discovered by the DEA agents after Hunter’s arrest. “Have my guys money tomorrow. They’re running around doing your crazy shit and you insult them. Have everyone’s money tomorrow . . . both their pay and bonus money. No more bullshit.”

  Hunter’s uncharacteristically sharp rebuke must have startled LeRoux, because he paid up, shut up, and raised Hunter’s salary from $12,000 to $15,000 a month. And then he added more names to the kill list.

  Two of the names were Dave Smith’s widow and their son. LeRoux was still stewing about Dave Smith’s treachery. Just knowing that Smith died horribly wasn’t enough. LeRoux wanted his family wiped out, too. In one of his few displays of compassion, Hunter told DeMeyere not to do it.