Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  To make the play realistic, Cindric and Stouch would need to phony up a target package that LeRoux would pass to Hunter. They’d need photos of the fictional DEA agent and informant.

  They invented a narrative, that the informant would be a Libyan boat captain. He would be Westernized, like many worldly young Mediterranean guys. His name would be Zaman—Sammy to his American friends.

  “Taj,” both agents said in unison. “He’ll do it.”

  Taj arrived at the 960 Group in March 2012. He was deep into an investigation that he hoped would result in the indictment and arrest of two of the biggest heroin kingpins in Afghanistan, quite possibly the world. Making cases against them would take him a while.

  “Sure,” he said. He would be one of Rambo’s targets. He had plenty of time to pose for a few snapshots.

  Who would play the other target, the fictional DEA agent they named Casich?

  “I’ll do it,” Milione said.

  “Really?” Stouch said.

  “Yeah.”

  “All right.” Nobody was going to tell the boss to stay back at his desk.

  “I wasn’t trying to be a hero,” Milione said afterward. “I knew we couldn’t pick an image from the Internet. I wanted to keep it in-house. I thought it was cleaner and easier. We didn’t want to use a random identity.” The gunmen might try to match a stock photo to a real person.

  Besides, he said, he was the only guy in on the team who had the time to play the role of Casich because it involved flying to Monrovia and posing for snapshots with Taj.

  That part wasn’t exactly true. As the ASAC, Milione had more to do than anybody else in the 960 Group. He was in charge of four groups of aggressive DEA agents. The fact was, if something went wrong, he didn’t want anybody else to be on the firing line. He was very confident he could take care of himself. Also, he was proud of the work Fombah Sirleaf was doing to professionalize the Liberian National Security Agency and he wanted to get to Monrovia to urge him on.

  Cindric and Stouch briefed LeRoux on the idea. He loved it. Other crime barons would balk at dismantling their hard-won empires, but to LeRoux, building and demolition were the same. Life was like chess. There were plenty of boards and chess pieces. He could get other hit men. He could get other traffickers. Money? He’d have to give up a pile of it, but he had accounts the agents would never find, and he could raise more money when he was released, and maybe even while he was in prison. The Internet was the gift that kept on giving. He lived for two things—a new project and power over others. This plan offered him both.

  Day after day, sitting in a bare interview room in the courthouse, LeRoux took his place at the head of the table, playing chairman of the board. He held his head high, squared his prison-gray-clad shoulders, and presided courteously, a master of the universe on his best behavior.

  Every session began the same way. The agents handed him his computer and watched as he tapped emails to Hunter and other employees they had targeted for arrest. He made sure that his people in Manila, Phuket, Jerusalem, and Rio were paid, supplies ordered, and equipment kept in good working order. In all, he authorized expenditures of more than $1 million, principally for salaries. He handed off his yachts to the DEA agents, to use in other stings. (In April 2013, Milione and his men would board one of them and lure a former navy chief of Guinea-Bissau, former rear admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, into international waters so that they could arrest him for facilitating the transshipment of Colombian cocaine through West Africa to the United States. He pleaded guilty and cooperated with the agents to identify other African officials selling access to Colombian traffickers.)

  It was easy to see why LeRoux’s weight had ballooned when he moved to Europe and became a computer programmer. Faced with a keyboard and monitor, he entered a trancelike state geeks call zombie mode. He could spend all day banging on his laptop without moving.

  Lunch came from a kiosk inside the courthouse. LeRoux was a man of simple and inflexible tastes. For breakfast every day, he had a plain bagel with plain cream cheese and a Diet Coke.

  Lunch was always a chicken quesadilla, hold the chicken, plus fries and a Diet Coke.

  “Why don’t you like chicken?” Cindric asked.

  “Ah. It’s okay, Tom. But I like the other stuff better.”

  He liked salsa, lettuce, pico de gallo, and cheese. He could have had those and chicken. He didn’t have to choose. He didn’t bother to explain.

  He drank Diet Coke or Coke Zero. Rarely, a coffee. Very rarely, a Sprite.

  The lunch lady knew his order by heart. The minute she saw Cindric or Stouch, she shouted, “Chicken quesadilla no chicken Diet Coke!” and she started slapping pico de gallo into a tortilla.

  New York pizza was, as everyone in the galaxy knew, the best in the world, so one day, Cindric and Stouch tried to reward LeRoux with a slice of the real thing. He barely touched it.

  “I like Domino’s better,” he grumbled.

  On another day, Cindric walked to a Shake Shack for a fancy burger dripping with trimmings.

  “Eh,” LeRoux frowned, “I’d rather have a Big Mac.”

  Why?

  “I like the Special Sauce.”

  They probed to find out if LeRoux was making friends inside the lockup. “When you’re in jail, do you talk to the other guys?” Stouch wondered.

  LeRoux said he did. He looked forward to meeting the white-collar defendants. He liked to play chess, and many of them knew the game. Especially the black-hat hackers. Of course, he could beat them.

  Most of the guys, though, were street criminals. They bored him. LeRoux expressed a low opinion of nearly all of the other prisoners, the American educational system, and most of all, the Kardashians. The prison TV was constantly tuned to the Kardashians’ reality show. He could not figure out why. Why weren’t the inmates trying to learn something to better themselves?

  When they talked, it was about sex. He got a kick out of impressing them.

  “I’ve got the most baby mammas of anybody in the jail,” he beamed. “I’ve got seven.”

  Seven women. And how many children?

  Maybe eleven? They counted them off. There were the four by Lillian, two by Cindy. Then, five more that he knew of by various other women. He said he could be off by a couple.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Cindric said. “One woman is enough for any man.”

  “Ah, I’m not married to Cindy, but she’s kinda like my wife.”

  “What about all the other women?”

  “Ah, I don’t know if all the kids are mine.”

  One day, he received an email from a woman in the Philippines. A photo of an infant was attached. The agents intercepted the email as usual and showed it to him.

  “Paul, you’re proud father to another baby,” Stouch said.

  LeRoux shook his head. “I gotta start getting these kids DNA-tested,” he said. “They’re getting uglier and uglier.”

  Cindric, who had a wife and two daughters he adored, must have looked aghast, because LeRoux said quickly, “Tom, you don’t realize it’s not normal until you’re not there. In Asia, it’s normal.”

  “It’s not normal for girls to wear numbers like cattle,” Cindric said. “It’s not normal to buy human beings.”

  “In Asia, it’s normal.” LeRoux shrugged.

  The agents left these sessions with splitting headaches, yearning for a beer and a shower. Keeping a step ahead of LeRoux and stroking his gigantic ego for six or eight hours a day was exhausting. It was like trying to train a wolf. He might look like a German shepherd, all furry and playful, but get distracted or stare at him too hard and you could lose a hand.

  Still, there was something about LeRoux that inspired the agents to new fantasies of badass.

  “How about this?” Cindric said. When they enticed Hunter’s mercenaries to Monrovia, they wouldn’t have the cops pick them off when they walked off the plane. That was the usual MO, since the targets to be arrested would be traveling
unarmed.

  Instead, the mercenaries would go to their hotel. The agents would plant Georges, the French pilot, inside Hunter’s team, posing as LeRoux’s man on the ground in Africa. Georges would escort them to a shooting range and hand out the banned Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine guns they coveted. Sirleaf’s men, in plain clothes, would be there to take videos of the men blasting away at human-shaped targets. If the jury had any doubts about the mercenaries’ destructive potential, the horrifying images would resolve them.

  “I like it,” Stouch said.

  “No, we can’t do that,” Milione said firmly.

  “Why not?” Cindric protested. “We can control them.”

  “NO! We’re not putting weapons in their hands.”

  “You guys have lost your fucking marbles,” Brown said.

  “You’re going to put FUCKING WEAPONS in their HANDS?” Maltz, the SOD chief, roared. “I like it! But HAVE YOU GUYS LOST YOUR MINDS?”

  Okay, Cindric said gloomily, no guns.

  Plan B was vanilla: lure the four mercenaries to Monrovia, get the Liberian cops to arrest them coming off the plane. Have the Thai police arrest Hunter and the meth ring in Phuket.

  Milione okayed the vanilla plan. Fewer moving parts, less chance of a screwup.

  As winter gave way to spring, Cindric and Stouch could no longer sit with LeRoux every day, as he tapped out orders to Hunter in Phuket, the RX Limited crew in Manila and Jerusalem, and Stammers and Shackels wherever they were. Other agents from the 960 Group divided up the watch. Two of the younger agents—Matt Keller and Taj—often pulled LeRoux-minding duty.

  Keller was immune to LeRoux’s force field. “He’s a scary man,” Keller said. “He’s at minimum a sociopath and probably a psychopath.” Keller was an abstract thinker who excelled at the thirty-thousand-foot view. He saw no need to cultivate this fat weirdo.

  Taj, on the other hand, relished his days with LeRoux. They were hard work-outs. As an undercover specialist, he was always dirt-level—eyeball to eyeball with someone who would enjoy killing him. His life depended on his ability to read his adversary’s mind. He had to customize every character he invented to be the person his target desperately wanted to please.

  LeRoux was the finest example of the deviant brain Taj had ever come across. As LeRoux wrote emails to his employees, Taj imagined the undercover scenarios he would run if LeRoux were his target. How would he crack him? How would he get into his head? Taj wanted to climb inside LeRoux’s mind and stay there for a while, like a kid playing with the best model train set or newest computer game on the market.

  “I’d love to spend two weeks with him so he could openly talk to me,” Taj said. “Imagine how much we can learn from him. Imagine talking to him, understanding his fundamental thought process, and how he thinks about people.”

  Taj was an instinctive actor who could bend himself into whatever form somebody else needed to see—dealer, shooter, muscle guy, schemer, student, immigrant, diplomat, and so on. He realized early on that his ability to play roles convincingly was the only thing keeping him alive. All that stood between him and death were his mind and instincts. On the street, there was no such thing as probable cause. No second chances. Drug dealers were unscrupulous. What was to prevent a bad guy from shooting him and robbing him of his $100,000?

  “Nothing,” said his partner and training agent, Gina Giachetti. “Nothing but you.”

  The lesson Taj learned was this. When you were undercover, you were on your own. Your backup team was there to cover top management’s butts. It would be six or eight seconds away, behind cars, trucks, and passersby. If a guy on the other side of the deal decided to take you out, he could, in two seconds. Survival was all about how fast you could think on your feet and whether you could eliminate issues and keep things calm. If things started going bad, you’d better be quick pulling your gun. Every time he went out on an undercover gig, Taj stuck his baby Glock 27 in the waistband of his jeans. It wasn’t much for distance, but at close range, it might stop somebody.

  He became adept at slipping into the skins of a mangy assortment of dirtbags—Crips and Bloods; Norteños, who were Chicanos from Northern California and spent most of their time menacing Sureños; Chicanos from Los Angeles; and Indian Sikh truckers who smuggled cocaine and meth to Canada in their eighteen-wheelers and smuggled ecstasy and BC bud, the expensive, potent strain of marijuana produced in southern British Columbia. When he screwed up, he covered by going all chingón. The word meant many things, but two meanings were big fucker and super badass. When his targets doubted him, he yelled at them that they were probably narcs and he was done with them. They inevitably apologized. Fooling them wasn’t about languages or cultural authenticity. All he needed was a little superficial knowledge and brass balls.

  Taj used his hours with LeRoux to practice on someone so different from anyone he had ever met. He heard that the prisoner didn’t like to talk to other humans and took that as a challenge.

  “I’m going to be spending today and possibly the following day with you,” he told LeRoux at their first session. “If you want to chat and take a break, I’m here.”

  “Great, good meeting you,” LeRoux said brusquely. “My computer, please.”

  Taj handed him his laptop. LeRoux sat down and started communicating with his men in the Philippines and Thailand.

  During the morning, Taj asked if he wanted a drink.

  “Yes, I’ll take a Sprite.” Curt, again.

  Taj fetched the Sprite.

  “What do you want for lunch?”

  “Chicken quesadilla, no chicken.”

  Taj knew that. He fetched it. LeRoux ate without speaking.

  But after lunch, LeRoux began to warm to the younger man. He took a couple of breaks to tell Taj stories about the Philippines, Cindy, how the Abu Sayyaf terrorists stole his island, and some of his dealings with the Chinese Triad and the North Koreans.

  “How do you feel being in prison?” Taj asked.

  “Well, you know, I’m here now,” LeRoux said. “They got me on meth charges, but I don’t see myself being here that long.”

  “Tell me about these guys you’re communicating with,” Taj said, referring to Hunter and the mercenaries.

  “They’re a bunch of junkies,” LeRoux sneered. “They’re pathetic, they’re money-hungry. They’ll do anything I tell them to do if I offer them money. We’re just trying to put this together. We can make this happen.”

  LeRoux could sense the kind of person his visitor would like to see, and he could become that person for a little while. For Taj, LeRoux acted humble and courteous, which were qualities Taj admired.

  LeRoux told Taj he identified as an Australian. How could LeRoux have possibly known that, outside of the DEA, Taj’s best friends in Afghanistan were Australian soldiers? Taj had deployed for several years with the Australian special operations troops because their area of responsibility was northern Helmand Province, which the DEA agents considered the home base of the Afghan heroin cartel, the Medellín of Afghanistan. Taj hadn’t told LeRoux anything about his past. LeRoux had that knack that a lot of criminals possessed, for guessing a man’s thoughts by throwing out words until he saw his quarry’s eyes flicker.

  When Taj looked at the undercover videos of LeRoux before his arrest, he saw a different man—a guy snapping orders and laughing as he dealt in instruments of mass murder. One role-player to another, Taj thought LeRoux was damn good.

  When normally under cover, Taj probed for something his target took pride in. He would act enthusiastic about whatever it was. The person would feel good and talk more.

  LeRoux was obviously proud of his intellect. So Taj flattered him for his brains. During a break, Taj said, “I hope things work out for you. I’d rather have a person like you out there in the world working for me than being in prison.”

  LeRoux beamed with pleasure.

  “You know what? I can do a lot of great things,” LeRoux said.

  “I think we’d
make a great team,” Taj replied. “You’re a smart guy. We need to work with people like you.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “No, I’m being serious. People like you are a great asset.”

  Taj had succeeded in penetrating his world.

  But, at the same time, LeRoux had gotten into Taj’s head. Taj mentioned that he was after a guy in the Taliban. Did LeRoux know anybody in the Taliban?

  LeRoux said he did. He was so persuasive that, for a moment, Taj wondered if he could use LeRoux to help with his unfinished Taliban heroin case. Maybe, if they released LeRoux to the wild, he could con the kingpin to a tropical paradise where Taj and his mates would be waiting. . . .

  No! Taj had to wrench himself back to reality, just as Cindric and Stouch had done.

  This was the old spider-and-fly routine. LeRoux looked harmless, sitting there in his gray prison jumpsuit, tapping on the keys of his laptop. But he was sending out invisible threads that aimed to convince somebody, maybe Taj, to set him loose.

  On February 4, 2013, LeRoux got the first part of what he was after—a plea deal. Lockard and Kovner wrote a formal sixteen-page memo to their superiors recommending that the Southern District enter into a cooperation agreement with him. U.S. Attorney Bharara approved the agreement.

  LeRoux would plead guilty to seven felony counts—conspiracy to import methamphetamine into the United States; violating Iran sanctions; money laundering; wire fraud; hacking; aiding and abetting a felon by paying a bribe in Africa to assist Kobi Alexander, a tech company executive accused of stock options manipulation in Brooklyn; and a violation derived from the Minneapolis investigation of RX Limited. These charges exposed him to a minimum of ten years in prison and a maximum of life; he hoped the judge would give him twelve years or so. LeRoux went into federal court on February 19, 2014, and entered his plea.

  The plea agreement said that LeRoux would not be prosecuted for conspiracy to murder seven people in the Philippines. The prosecutors concluded that the U.S. government had no jurisdiction over those murders. Murder was treated a local crime, with rare exceptions. A U.S. law enacted in 1996 to fight terrorism made it a federal felony, punishable by up to life in prison, to conspire to kill or kidnap anyone living overseas. To convict someone under this law, government prosecutors had to prove that the conspirators committed at least one act on American soil. The prosecutors had no evidence that LeRoux had traveled to the United States in years, so he could not be shown to have taken any action while on American territory to advance murder plots. The plea agreement contained an immunity clause that was no real concession to LeRoux, but the prosecutors could use it, if they chose, to fend off extradition requests from the Philippines government.