Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  They also agreed not to charge LeRoux with conspiring to sell surface-to-air missiles to terrorists. As a practical matter, they would have had a hard time making that charge stick because LeRoux didn’t physically acquire the weapons nor deliver them to the fictional Shan State Army representative.

  Even so, making a plea agreement with a man like LeRoux was not an easy decision for a U.S. attorney, especially Bharara, who prided himself on his reputation as Manhattan’s most ferocious gangbuster. When the deal became public, and it would, it would be hard to explain why he okayed a deal with a man who admitted that he was responsible for a string of murders. But Bharara and his assistants did it anyway because LeRoux was about to deliver something they considered of greater value: a team of contract killers, assembled by a forty-eight-year-old Kentuckian named Joseph Manuel Hunter.

  Or, as Hunter liked to be called, Rambo.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hunting Rambo

  WHO WAS JOSEPH HUNTER?

  The agents knew a few facts about him, but was he the cold-blooded, robotic killer LeRoux and Jack described?

  Or was LeRoux exaggerating to get himself off the hook? LeRoux knew that the worse the agents perceived Hunter to be, the more valuable they would consider LeRoux’s help to bring Hunter in.

  On paper, Hunter’s U.S. Army record was unblemished. An entry in his personnel record, dated March 18, 1991, said:

  Staff Sergeant Joseph M. Hunter selected as the Distinguished Graduate for the . . . Class 3-91. This high honor was won in very stiff competition with all the students in an academic/leadership environment. His sustained superior performance, his determination to excel, coupled with his intense desire to accomplish all missions was an example for the remainder of the class. This individual is now ready for positions of higher responsibility.

  But a person could change over two decades. The way to find out what Hunter had become was to observe him closely when he was making decisions to commit violent acts. “We get to see them when they think nobody’s watching,” Milione said. “But we’re watching. There’s a certain purity to seeing them for what they really are.”

  To do that, the agents needed to put someone wearing a wire across the table from him. Cindric and Stouch decided to play on the cover story that LeRoux had relocated to Rio in order to forge an alliance with a Colombian transnational organized crime group.

  The head Colombian would be played by Diego, the suave former trafficker who had been on the DEA payroll for years. He was a perfect fit for the part, having already immersed himself in LeRoux’s operations and associates as he prepared for his previous role, as the fictional Colombian cartel rep who lured LeRoux to Monrovia. Diego’s chubby buddy Geraldo, also a reformed Colombian trafficker, naturalized American citizen, and longtime DEA informant, would pose as Diego’s lieutenant.

  Cindric and Stouch concocted an email for LeRoux to send Hunter from “Brazil”—actually the federal building in Manhattan—that he should get to Bangkok to meet his new Colombian partners. The email said:

  The meeting in thailand is for the colombians to meet and discuss what they need for their personal protection while travelling and what will be expected of the people hired. These guys are business people. i am working with them on several projects out of south America and in Africa. they asked if I had someone who could help them with the personal protection when they travel and for security assessments on jobs.

  The black jobs will be discussed and planned. The security guys will need to be capable guys who are willing to do black ops jobs, but initially it will be personal protection and security assessments. They need to be able to travel without issues

  The tools for jobs will be arranged on our end. In some countries it may not be good to have certain tools so there are no detention issues. Tools for black ops jobs will be provided by me and my partners.

  Let me know if you can meet the partners in thailand and speak with them regarding these things. They are going there on other business and plan to be there around the end of January. I will send you the cash necessary for travel and expenses. Let me know if any of the guys you plan to use will travel with you to meet the partners so I can send money for their travel and expenses also. the future housing and transportation arrangements can be organized through contacts in that country when needed. Organize your visa so there are no issues.

  Hunter didn’t question the story. He knew that LeRoux was doing business with a Colombian group. He also knew that “black jobs” meant contract murder.

  Hunter agreed to meet Diego and Geraldo on January 26, 2013, at the Landmark Hotel in Bangkok, a sleek, impersonal tower with more marble than a necropolis.

  Hunter arrived looking nervous. He had long believed that LeRoux might have him killed for some imagined slight. He feared he might be looking at his executioners. The two Colombians encouraged this impression. Diego shot him a look that could slice open an envelope. Geraldo was stout and merry, but in that menacing way that signaled that he’d laugh while blowing somebody’s brains out.

  Settling into three leather chairs in the bar, Diego and Geraldo nodded politely as Hunter stated that he didn’t party. He didn’t care about fine food. He didn’t chase women. He didn’t want a drink. They ordered soft drinks and water and got down to business.

  Diego and Geraldo said that they had been partners with LeRoux in drugs and gold mines for several years. They were moving a lot of cash and looking for security to protect their people. They were good in South America, where the right-wing death squads served as their guards and enforcers, but they needed a security team for Asia and Africa. The work involved drugs, weapons, money, and killing. They would pay bonuses for contract killings.

  Was Hunter interested in “bonus jobs”?

  He said he was.

  The audio and video recorders hidden in the Colombians’ clothing captured Hunter’s affirmative answer and his monologue on his favorite subject, himself:

  Served 21 years in the Army. You probably heard of 1st Ranger Battalion. Long range surveillance 32nd Airborne. I retired as a commander of a special reaction team. We focused mainly on entries. I fought in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and then I went to Iraq three times as a civilian contractor. I worked for two companies. Triple Canopy and DynCorp. And my military training, Ranger School, I’ve been through various amount of training. Highly specialized, most of it was dealing with entry. I used to be a Heckler & Koch instructor, specialized in the MP5, what they call a master MP5 instructor, a master pistol instructor, I’ve been to intelligence school, a course called intelligence and combating terrorism . . . Everything, been to LAPD advanced SWAT School, TEES—Tactical Explosives Entry School.

  Hunter paused for breath. “All that—but I’m not an operator anymore. Now I’m a handler. So, are you looking for guys?”

  “Let’s talk about what you have,” Geraldo said, encouraging him toward specifics.

  Hunter said he had been recruiting some new mercenaries for his security team. To prove to the Colombians that he was professional and thorough, like any first-tier security company, he went to pains to demonstrate his vetting process. He pulled out a stack of resumes. The first belonged to Dennis Gögel.

  “Okay, this guy right here is the number one guy I recommend,” Hunter said. “. . . He’s a sniper qualified in the German military. And he’s ready to go for anything, and we want this guy working for us . . . Afghanistan . . . lots of trigger time . . . He was recommended to me from a friend of mine that is an American sniper instructor. . . . He’s gonna do great things for us.”

  The second resume was Gögel’s friend Michael Filter, also a former German army sniper and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. The rest of the candidates were veterans of U.S. or NATO military services.

  “I picked them because they are sniper qualified and that gives us opportunities for other stuff,” Hunter said. “And they are motivated. They want to get in with Paul.”

  “Money is a motiv
ation for everyone,” Diego said dryly.

  Geraldo said he and Diego would make decisions after they ran background checks on the candidates. He said they had to be sure that the men would keep their mouths shut “because they will see a lot of things.”

  “Things” was understood to mean violent deaths.

  “Exactly,” Hunter said. “Yeah, we make good money. But, like myself—you know—I miss what I used to do. It’s the same way with these guys.”

  He said he told his men, “You’re not a door buster any more. Now you’re a magician. . . . You go and do stuff that nobody knows how it happened.” He had picked up LeRoux’s trick of planting subliminal hints that he had supernatural powers.

  Cindric and Stouch waited in a Bangkok hotel room for the informants to wrap up the meeting and deliver the recording devices.

  “Christ, they all want to be Jason Bourne,” Cindric said when he listened to the recordings. “They have a troubled life and they’re in a tug of war for their souls. They romanticize. Too much TV. Too many video games.”

  After a long email chain with LeRoux, Hunter scheduled a meeting with Diego and Geraldo in Phuket for March 8. Cindric and Stouch took the two informants to Phuket several days ahead of the meeting. They were met by Pat Picciano from the DEA Bangkok office and some technical people, there to help the Thai police install a closed-circuit video and audio surveillance system inside Hunter’s safe house. On March 8, Picciano had Bee, his Thai assistant, pose as a chauffeur hired by the Colombians to collect Hunter at the Phuket airport.

  Later that day and over the next few days, Hunter went to the hotel where Diego and Geraldo were staying, at first alone, then with three of the mercenaries—Gögel, Filter, and Slawomir Soborski, an ex-commando from Poland.

  Diego and Geraldo told the mercenaries the same story they had given Hunter earlier—that they represented a Colombian trafficking group and were looking to hire security to protect their business. They said the security team members would be involved in moving drugs, weapons, and money and would be asked to kill untrustworthy members of the organization.

  After meeting with the Colombians, Hunter and his men returned to the safe house, sat down in the common room, and had a roundtable discussion about the Colombians’ proposal. The surveillance system recorded Hunter explaining who LeRoux was and how he had partnered for years with the Colombians. The DEA summary of the tapes said, “Hunter detailed all of the jobs he did for PCL to include weapons trafficking, surveillance, intimidation, and murder.”

  Working for LeRoux was good money, Hunter said, but no one should steal, or Hunter would find him, by which he meant, kill him. He told the men what happened to Dave Smith—dead because he stole from LeRoux. He explained that “bonus job” was code for contract hit.

  Hunter’s performance on the surveillance tape answered the question—who was Rambo Hunter? What kind of man was he when he thought no one was watching?

  The tape made clear that Hunter was somber and purposeful. He didn’t celebrate the act of killing. He was not a crazy serial killer who got something like an erotic thrill from killing. He treated killing just as a car mechanic would regard cleaning a carburetor or changing brake fluid.

  Cindric and Stouch watched the tapes and realized they had solid gold evidence. The agents had instructed Diego and Geraldo to repeat the meaning of the term “bonus jobs” several times. The reason was, if the case came before a jury, it had to be crystal clear that every man in the group knew that he was being asked to commit murder and had made a conscious decision to do it. As they watched the tapes, the agents didn’t think any judge or jury could see and hear them and believe that these men didn’t know they were agreeing to kill strangers for money.

  Over the next couple of days, Diego and Geraldo met with each of the mercenaries individually and, with their recorders running, asked each man if he understood what he was being asked to do. Each mercenary said he was in.

  Diego and Geraldo gave the men their first assignment for the LeRoux-Colombian partnership. It was a simple task—to guard one of LeRoux’s yachts, supposedly loaded with guns or drugs. The purpose of the job was to produce evidence that Hunter and his team willingly and knowingly participated in a drugs and arms smuggling conspiracy.

  Cindric, Stouch, and the informants returned to the States, thinking the plan was going smoothly. Then a snag developed. The agents took LeRoux to the federal courthouse, went through their routine, and opened his email. They spotted a message from Hunter, dated March 18:

  There are strange issues here at the house. The guy that picked us up at the airport, came to the house a couple of days before we arrived with three other thais and tried to break into the safe. Do not know if you are aware of that. Also, received a call from a woman asking about the owners car, wanting to know when it will be back. I did not know what she is talking about, because there was never a car there. The maid, said the same guy came and took the car and said he was taking it to the shop and not to tell anyone.

  The agents sat down with LeRoux and then talked with Picciano, who was back in Bangkok, and tried to piece together what had happened. They determined that the maid, hired by Hunter to clean the safe house, had relayed a mangled version of the facts. It was true that Bee, Picciano’s Thai helper, had led the Thai cops to the house a few days before Hunter arrived. He stood by as the cops installed the bugging system. It was also true that Bee and the cops opened the safe, looking for LeRoux’s fake passport.

  Cindric and Stouch cooked up a response, which they emailed to Hunter under LeRoux’s name. The message informed Hunter that Bee was a local handyman who did odd jobs for LeRoux at the house. In an email dated March 19, 2013, they wrote:

  the guy that picked u up at the airport . . . is the one that handles small things for us locally, there was a 4x4 at the house, it was bought about 5 years ago, i told [him] to take it to get it repaired, they will repair it and return it to the house to save on transportation costs, relax the maid, our guys opened the safe because smith left my passport in that house somewhere (the one the house is registered under) that is what we were looking for (if u find it let me know it is a venezuelan passport)

  Hunter wasn’t convinced. He swept the house, poked his head up into the attic, and spotted the electronics controller box that led to the closed-circuit video system. He pulled the plug.

  He returned to his computer and fired off a frantic email to LeRoux:

  We found the cameras and DVR Recorder and stuff in the house!!! The guys will not return back to the house, they want to rent another house, asking for 30K for that. They are hesitant now about the job and want to know whats going on!!! I will continue to stay in the house, the guys go to another one. They also, want their pay up to 10K each, as the job has already went from protecting funds to all kinds of stuff and now their [sic] freaked about the house. They are requesting bonus work ASAP. These guys will do anything if you let me handle it, but this situation now causes problems.

  “Oh fuck, did this whole thing get blown?” Cindric said. He looked at Stouch, and both men started to panic. How could they fix this? Could they fix it?

  Yes, they could, LeRoux said. He was calm, as usual, even smirking.

  “Ah, it’s normal,” LeRoux said. “I always have security cameras in my stash houses to keep an eye on things.”

  The agents relaxed a little. It might work. They had to try it. What choice did they have?

  They sat LeRoux down in front of his laptop and stepped out of camera range as LeRoux rang Hunter on Skype. What Hunter had found, LeRoux said blandly, was an ordinary home security system. As a homeowner, LeRoux would be crazy not to have one, since he might have very valuable contraband inside. What was he going to do, call the cops? Besides, Phuket was full of thieves because it was full of blind-drunk tourists, begging to be robbed.

  Hunter didn’t buy it. He’d seen the cameras and he didn’t think they were routine.

  “I know who they’re from,” he
growled. “It’s the Colombians.”

  “No, no, no, you’re just seeing the security cameras,” LeRoux replied. But if Hunter wanted a different house, LeRoux said, he could rent one and LeRoux would pay.

  LeRoux ended the call and turned to the agents, laughing.

  “Guys, it’s just as good,” he said. “He thinks it’s the Colombians.”

  “Paul had such street cred as a bad guy that even when things could potentially look like cops, nobody believed it,” Cindric said. “We had the fat man. He trumped everything. He was such a bad guy, nobody would believe he was working for law enforcement.”

  Hunter was not too freaked out to try padding his expenses. He asked LeRoux for $30,000 a month to rent a house. The agents and LeRoux knew that he could rent a big beach house for $2,000 a month. Hunter said he wanted to raise the gunmen’s pay to $10,000 a month. LeRoux agreed. Later, the agents learned that Hunter told the men they were getting a raise to $9,000 a month. Hunter had skimmed $1,000 a month from each of them.

  The good news was, the DEA tech in Bangkok had downloaded the security system shortly before Hunter discovered it. Hunter’s speech describing the dirty work he had done for LeRoux had been preserved.

  The next step was to give the mercenaries riskier assignments. The agents didn’t think it would work to ask them to go from zero to sixty—murder—in a short span of time. They had to become accustomed to obeying orders.