The next names on the kill list were of LeRoux employees and contractors. DeMeyere and Mack Daddy refused. They were done with LeRoux. DeMeyere said he was going home to Belgium, Mack Daddy back to New Zealand.
LeRoux didn’t want to talk about what happened next. Over many hours of prodding and prompting, he admitted that Hunter put together a new kill team and started going down the list. He knew that Hunter’s second kill team killed Catherine Lee, a real estate agent who had helped LeRoux find properties to buy and who, LeRoux believed, had skimmed during the deals. LeRoux claimed he couldn’t remember the names of the hit men who carried out the Lee murder.
The agents checked the Manila newspapers. Sure enough, the body of Catherine Lee had been found on a trash heap in the Manila sweat shop district, early on the morning of February 13, 2012. There were a few promising bits of evidence. Manila was a high-crime city, but this was no robbery. A gold ring was on the dead woman’s hand, a silver bracelet on her wrist, and a Nokia C3 cell phone in her purse.
There was something else, which the agents learned from a local police report. She had been shot at close range under one eye, then under the other. There was no way her manner of death could be taken as an accident or a case of mistaken identity. Two shots carefully placed under two eyes at close range meant she knew and trusted her killer. The killer got very, very close and then struck without warning. It amounted to a statement that said, to any LeRoux associates who were thinking about cheating him, “This is what you get if you mess with LeRoux. You’ll wind up as a corpse with no eyes, on a pile of garbage.”
Once he started talking about killing, LeRoux couldn’t hide his pleasure in his grisly memories. His face became animated and his eyes lit up. He was clearly proud of what he had done, and he wasn’t sorry.
“There were going to be more killings,” Stouch told Cindric. “He was just getting started. No question, there were going to be more. He’s like, ‘I’m smarter than everybody. I can do this and get away with it. I kinda like it.’”
The debriefings continued at the Marriott for another week, then moved to an interview room in the federal courthouse on Pearl Street. U.S. marshals escorted him into the federal courthouse cuffed. They put him into a holding cell and uncuffed him. From there, one of the agents immediately cuffed him and walked him sixty feet to the interview room, a small, windowless room with a conference table and chairs from the 1960s or ’70s; dingy, white walls; and light, brownish-greenish carpet ripped in the corners.
Once they were sure he was cooperating, Cindric and Stouch let LeRoux become CEO Paul. They always seated him at the head of the conference table and let him speak expansively. They asked his opinion and treated him like a consultant. These were psychological tricks, and he probably knew that on some level, but, as a mental survival mechanism, he allowed himself to forget for a few hours a day that somebody else was pulling the strings and he was returning to a cell at the end of each day.
One day, Keller from the 960 Group happened to walk into the witness room while all this was going on. Keller had not forgotten the night before the arrest, monitoring the bug in LeRoux’s hotel suite as LeRoux and Cayanan flung each other around. That was something Keller couldn’t unhear.
LeRoux glanced sideways and said haughtily, as if he were a CEO, rudely interrupted by some minion, “I don’t know if you know this, but me and the guys are working on a project.”
Keller shot Cindric a WTF look.
“Aww go with it,” Cindric whispered. “If he wants to think he’s in charge, fine.”
Keller complied, but he was glad to get out of there.
LeRoux warmed to agents, most of all Cindric, who could make him laugh. Cindric and Stouch didn’t think he had ever had a relationship with another adult man, but he was such a shape-shifter, it was hard to say which Paul was genuine. Sometimes they caught a glimpse of Orphan Paul, lonely genius abandoned by his parents. Occasionally they heard that with his lawyers, he had broken down and cried that his parents—they didn’t know whether he meant the adoptive parents or the biological ones—had betrayed him.
They resisted the urge to pity him. This was a form of street theater and he was a pro.
As Cindric and Stouch listened to LeRoux unpack his many schemes, they imagined all the ways they might use his position in the underworld to go deeper, darker, faster.
“Paul can get you to think that anything is possible,” Cindric said. “The world is your oyster. He really believes that, too.”
Even in the lockup, LeRoux still believed in magic, and he could still cast a spell over others.
Just for fun, Cindric and Stouch went with it. They kicked around ideas for using LeRoux as their agent of penetration into the chains of command in Iran and North Korea. North Koreans had been making meth for years to earn hard currency, but nobody had gotten deep into the inner workings of the Pyongyang pipeline. Nobody had proved that the regime itself used meth to finance its military activities, especially its nuclear program. All the circumstantial evidence suggested that this was possible, even likely, but as Cindric’s mantra went, “There’s what you believe, what you know, and what you can prove.”
LeRoux told the agents he was willing to go to North Korea, or, failing that, to arrange a meeting in a third country, and to wear a wire to collect proof. Who authorized meth manufacturing? Who supervised it? Who collected the money? What bank accounts and front companies were being used? And much more.
Cindric and Stouch also thought sending LeRoux to Iran. He said he had a standing invitation to visit the DIO there. They decided to have him pursue the connection. On October 23, 2012, they sent a letter on Red, White and Blue Arms stationery over his signature, addressed to the Marketing Department, Defense Industry Organization, Tehran. The letter asked for the price of 250 units of 5.56 cartridges, standard NATO rounds. He requested a DIO catalogue.
The tiny prospective order was a probe, and it worked. On January 29, 2013, a fax landed in LeRoux’s Manila office, which the DEA agents were monitoring. It was an invitation and an itinerary inviting LeRoux or his representatives to visit Iran. “Please inform us your view point that which field you like to cooperate with our organization,” it said. It was signed by Morteza Farasatpour, the DIO’s deputy managing director for commerce. (In 2017, Farasatpour would be blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department for aiding Syria’s chemical weapons program.)
The agents wanted to know much more about the Iranian war machine. They thought that LeRoux could open a new window into the DIO, its missile development, its activities in Syria and Lebanon, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, whose Quds Force provided training, supplies, and money to militants and terrorists in many countries. For instance, the agents wanted to know what happened to the coffee sweetener explosives formula LeRoux invented for the DIO. And they hoped to find out how Iranian engineers had made use of the missile navigation technology LeRoux’s R&D team had shared through the FTP server.
Their plans foundered on one reality—to use LeRoux’s talents, they’d have to put him out in the wild—set him free with a wire and a couple of cell phones.
Cindric put the idea to Brown. “We want to get him out,” he said. “Paul is a game changer as an informant. He’s got balls the size of grapefruits.”
Brown grinned. He belly-laughed. He slapped his knee. That was the best one he’d heard in months.
The agents, he said, were bewitched and beguiled. What DEA agent didn’t want to be Indiana Jones—plunging into forbidden lands, taking extreme risks, grabbing glittering prizes? Brown sure as hell did, and he knew that Cindric and Stouch did, too. So did everybody else in the 960 Group. If they didn’t want that life, they wouldn’t be in the group in the first place.
“Look, I’m with you guys, but it’s not going to happen,” Brown said. Still teary with laughter, he walked the agents around to Milione’s office in the corner of the second floor.
“Tom and Eric have a proposal for you.”
<
br /> “We want LeRoux out,” Cindric said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Milione said. It wasn’t a question. He caught Brown’s eye. Now they were both bent over laughing. Cindric and Stouch were aggressive, for sure, and immensely entertaining.
“Well, this is what we see, Lou,” Stouch said, putting on his serious face. “You can’t get to the devil using priests and nuns. If you want to get the next big bad guy, who do you go to? A Paul LeRoux.”
Milione regained his composure. “It’s not gonna happen, guys, but do you understand why?”
He went over the risks, which were monumental. They knew, they knew. But they pushed anyway. As they saw things, an agent’s job was to push the edge, and a supervisor’s job was to say, not so fast. Everybody in the room was earning his pay.
Milione sent them back to their beige cubicles with a kindly smile that they interpreted to mean that he also felt the pull of LeRoux’s spell and he’d do the same thing if he were an agent.
But he was the ASAC, assistant special agent in charge, and his answer was clearly Not only no, but hell no.
Once away from LeRoux’s reality distortion field, Cindric and Stouch had to admit that Milione was right. They would never sleep; never have a moment’s peace, if LeRoux were in the wild.
There was another reason they couldn’t stage long-running penetrations of Iran and North Korea. Close to Christmas 2012, LeRoux had given them a Holy Shit revelation. He started talking about Rambo.
Rambo?
“Yeah, he calls himself Rambo,” LeRoux said. “He’s one of my security guys. Joseph Hunter. An American. He took over after Dave Smith.”
LeRoux described Hunter as a retired American soldier who had executed a couple of people on LeRoux’s orders and was hiring more former military men for more contract murders.
Jack had mentioned that he was terrified of Hunter because he was LeRoux’s killing machine and had briefly stalked Jack on orders from LeRoux. But the agents had not realized the breadth and depth of Hunter’s involvement in assassinations until LeRoux spelled it out.
Once that happened, Cindric and Stouch reset their priorities. Here was someone using the soldierly skills his nation had taught him, at the expense of the American taxpayers, to expand the reach of a transnational organized crime network and to kill people.
They had to find and stop Hunter. LeRoux said that Hunter still held at least six or eight unfulfilled murder contracts, and nobody knew how many freelance gigs he was taking on. But they hated to give up on the other threads of the LeRoux empire, especially LeRoux’s North Korean meth operation.
They handed LeRoux off to one of the U.S. marshals, who would take him back to the lockup in Brooklyn. They took the subway back to Brooklyn and found a dim bar near their hotel.
“Shit, what are we going to do with all this?” Stouch said.
Cindric thought. And thought. Then he had an epiphany. He set down his beer.
“Let’s put all the pieces on the same chessboard.”
“I like it,” Stouch said. “How?”
“I don’t know but we’ll figure it out.”
They ping-ponged ideas for a scenario they could orchestrate. It was a lot like writing a play, only the stakes were higher.
“We’ll make Hunter put together a security team,” Stouch said.
“I fucking like that,” Cindric said.
“We can get resumes.”
“We’ll ask for people who speak English and can move around in Europe. We can draw the security team out and use that to our benefit.”
“That’s good.”
“They could do the meetings with the North Korean meth guys.”
“The security team could be protecting our Colombians and the North Koreans.”
“Okay, here’s how it works,” Cindric said. “Hunter becomes security for a Colombian organization.”
“They’re getting NoKo meth from Lim and Kelly,” Stouch said. Lim was Lim Ye Tiong Tan, the Chinese Triad rep in Manila; Kelly was Kelly Reyes Peralta, the bartender and meth distributor at LeRoux’s bar, Sid’s Pub. “Stammers and Shackels—they just won’t fucking go away,” Cindric said. “We’re going to have to do them on general principle.”
Stammers and Shackels were living in Thailand at the time, moving cocaine from there to Australia. Like LeRoux, they had a brainstorm a minute. The problem was, many of their ideas were bad.
Before LeRoux was arrested, they set up a meth lab in Shackels’s apartment in Manila. They hadn’t mastered the chemistry, so no meth was produced. Then they made a deal with a Cambodian general to set up a meth lab inside his country. The plan foundered when they discovered they didn’t have the right chemicals to make the meth solution crystallize properly.
LeRoux had a couple of false starts of his own, when he tried to move into cocaine, which in East Asia and Japan was an exotic and desirable commodity that commanded much higher prices than meth, which was commonplace. Between 2010 and 2012, he bought twenty to thirty kilograms of cocaine from a former Philippine National Bureau of Investigation official. The source said that the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency had recovered the drugs from a larger shipment of cocaine lost at sea and washed up in the Cimarron Islands. The cocaine turned out to be too salt-damaged to sell, and some of it was fake.
Then he arranged through an Israeli gangster to buy fifty kilograms of cocaine from the Ecuadorean branch of a multinational trafficking organization headed by Daniel “El Loco” Barrera, a ruthless Colombian trafficker who aspired to succeed Pablo Escobar and was known as “the last of the great kingpins.” Whatever hopes LeRoux harbored of cementing a long-term business relationship with Barrera foundered in mid-September 2012, when he was arrested in Venezuela and deported to Colombia. He would be extradited to the United States to face charges of trafficking in tons of cocaine and laundering tens of millions of dollars; he would be convicted and sentenced to 35 years in prison. LeRoux sent a yacht to Ecuador to collect the load of cocaine consigned by Barrera. After the cocaine was on board, the yacht set sail, but its mast broke in a storm. It had to return to port in Ecuador to make repairs. The cocaine was probably seized—LeRoux didn’t know for sure.
In early 2012, Stammers and Shackels put together a deal with some Serb mafia characters to buy 150 kilograms of Peruvian cocaine, intending to smuggle it to the Philippines and sell it to Lim for his Chinese Triad group.
LeRoux dispatched his yacht the JeReVe to Peru to pick up the cocaine. His plan was to have it transferred on the high seas to a larger vessel that could manage the perilous voyage across the Pacific to the Philippines. But just as the scheme was coming together, LeRoux got arrested and was not in a position to provide a suitable smuggling craft.
Stammers, Shackels, and the Serbs, unaware that LeRoux had been locked up and had switched sides, decided to make do with the JeReVe. The yacht, crewed by central Europeans, set sail from Peru, heading west toward the other side of the Pacific Rim. The yacht encountered treacherous waters in the South Seas and wrecked. In November 2012, authorities in Tonga found it on a reef at Luatafito Atoll in northern Tonga. Captain Ivan Vaclavik was missing, and there was a desiccated corpse in the hold, along with 204 kilos of cocaine—LeRoux’s 150 kilograms plus another 54 kilos the Serb mafia guys had gotten on their own. According to Australian and regional news reports, the Australian police identified the dead man through a passport found on the wrecked yacht and DNA samples as Milan Rindzak, a Slovak, the yacht’s first mate.
Stammers and Shackels were not discouraged. They filled up LeRoux’s inbox with proposals for elaborate trafficking schemes involving both drugs and guns. Cindric and Stouch read all their ideas. Some were cockeyed, but some would work. They had to be taken down, along with Hunter and the mercenaries.
“We can use them for transportation,” Stouch said.
“Yeah, maybe they can be the ones who move it to the U.S.”
They diagrammed the play on bar napkins. The next day, when the
y went to the courthouse, they laid it out for the prosecutors. Lockard and his colleague Rachel Kovner looked at them with eyes that Cindric thought said, You are fucking crazy.
“Okay, well, after all this is over,” Cindric told Stouch, “we’re going to be remembered like Babe Ruth pointing at the wall.”
Over the next few weeks, they refined and elaborated the scenario, seeking advice from Milione and Brown whenever they hit a pothole. The play would go like this:
Diego and his partner Geraldo, also a Colombian-American and an informant, would hire Hunter and his mercenary team to kill a DEA agent and his informant. Hunter would be told that the pair was interfering with drug deals cooked up by LeRoux and his Colombian cartel partners. Killing an American official, anywhere in the world, to interfere with the performance of his official duties was a federal felony punishable by death or up to life in prison. The law extended to foreign nationals who helped American officials—informants, translators, guides, and the like.
LeRoux said that Hunter and his mercenaries hung out in Phuket, the Thai beach resort. They were using a safe house he had recently bought there.
Thailand was an excellent place for the DEA to arrange a takedown. The DEA had cultivated the Thai counternarcotics police unit since the Vietnam War. Many Thai cops had been exchange students at the DEA Academy in Quantico, Virginia. DEA agents regularly partnered with the Thai cops and gave them equipment. The Thai cops could help them wire the safe house and other meeting places with video and sound.
The agents decided they would have LeRoux invite the meth ring to Phuket to pick up product and collect payment. The Thai cops could arrest them after Hunter and his mercenaries were in custody.
For safety’s sake, they would need to split up the mercenaries. That’s where Liberia came in. They could tell Hunter to send a hit team to Monrovia to carry out the contract assassination. They could rely on Fombah Sirleaf to make the arrests.
Hunting LeRoux Page 27