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Hunting LeRoux

Page 31

by Elaine Shannon


  Business done, they went to the hotel bar, ordered beers, and talked about Africa, women, and French politics.

  Georges excused himself, went into the bathroom, peed, and sang Frank Sinatra’s signature song to himself—and to the bug.

  Regrets, I’ve had a few

  But then again, too few to mention

  I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption

  I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway

  And more, much more than this, I DID IT MY WAAAYYY.

  When Cindric and Stouch listened to the recording, they got Georges’s point. Diego had been the wrong man to talk to mercenaries. You can send a doper to talk to a doper but when you’re dealing with a merc, send a merc. Georges had done it his way and come up a winner.

  Back in the room with Hunter, Georges considered how he could establish control over him. Since his character was supposed to be LeRoux’s shadow—his eyes and ears on the ground—he needed to sound like the man in command. Having been a real commander in the fighter wing of the French navy, this wasn’t a stretch.

  Georges told Hunter sternly he would appreciate not being patted down and searched ever again. There was no sense checking each other. He understood checking “external” people, but not the team. They needed to protect one another and the mission, of course, but that didn’t mean they should suspect one another.

  “Well, it’s going to happen,” Vamvakias said sulkily.

  “I’m a straightforward guy,” Georges said. “I will need to report to Paul that there was a check. Do you have an issue with that?”

  Go ahead, Hunter said. “I am always going to do it my way.”

  “And so am I, my friend.” Georges smiled coldly.

  After more talk of the women of Phuket—“adult Disneyland,” the mercenaries called it—they left the bar. Hunter went off on his own.

  Vamvakias and Gögel turned to Georges and apologized for Hunter. They said the search was Hunter’s idea. They assured Georges that they trusted him, but they answered to a “higher power,” meaning Hunter. They made a date to meet the next day.

  Georges saw real fear in their eyes. It reinforced his initial impression, that they would follow Hunter’s orders. If he said kill, they’d kill, no questions asked. Georges gave them a wave of his hand and a wolfish grin and took his time making his way to the DEA agents’ room—where he slumped down, mentally spent.

  “Holy fuck, man,” he said.

  Cindric handed him a beer. He was sorry they hadn’t told Georges how the wire worked. It didn’t emit a signal. It captured sound and stored it on a chip. The advantage was that it was completely passive. The disadvantage was the agents couldn’t help Georges if shooting started. They all knew that even if he had worn a device that was transmitting, if somebody in the room had pulled a gun, nobody could get to the door and kick it in fast enough to save him.

  Georges shrugged and softened. He never expected anyone else to save him. He had gotten out of a lot of tight spots—Argentina, Mali, Ivory Coast, Malta, Sierra Leone, and so many other places—and he had some stories to tell. It was the life he had chosen, more interesting than that of his father, a schoolteacher. He worried that by chewing out Hunter, he might have blown the deal.

  The agents told him they didn’t think Hunter would walk away from the mission. Judging by the number of times he had begged for “bonus jobs,” he had to be desperate for cash. Sooner or later, one of the mercenaries would realize that Hunter was stealing. They could easily kill him on the spot and no one would care.

  Cindric and Stouch agreed with Georges that it was a volatile situation. All the guys seemed to be skating on a thin edge of reason, with the exception of Soborski, who had that thousand-yard stare that said he’d seen some things and could handle anything.

  The agents told Georges to go relax, if he could. He liked a good stiff Scotch. He wandered off to find one. The agents had more work to do, downloading the listening device.

  The recording told them they had another problem. Hunter was setting up the hit in Monrovia as a two-man job, with Gögel doing the sharpshooting and Vamvakias backstopping him. The agents had hoped Hunter would send Filter and Soborski to Monrovia as well. Leaving Hunter and two mercenaries in Phuket would be dangerous for the Thai police making the arrests.

  How about luring Filter and Soborski to Estonia? The DEA agents in Copenhagen had excellent contacts in the Estonian counternarcotics police and the SWAT team there. The Estonian government was eager to prove its worth as a recent addition to NATO and the European Union. How about sending the two mercenaries to Tallinn on a mission to guard Diego at a meeting with a Serbian trafficker? It sounded plausible.

  Cindric sent Hunter a text from LeRoux’s smartphone:

  We will need your two other guys around mid-Sept for a local surveillance job and then possibly in the Baltics for personal security for a meeting with the Serbs.

  They scheduled Takedown Day for September 25, 2013. They couldn’t space out the arrests because the men might have a signaling system, such as a sort of panic button on a cell phone that automatically broadcast a key word that meant “get lost.” They might have set up a negative signal—if someone didn’t call in at such-and-such a time, consider him compromised, and scatter. The same day, they would roll up LeRoux’s drugs and arms trafficking.

  Diego and Geraldo were deep in negotiations with Shackels and Stammers to buy North Korean meth and ship it to “the Apple,” meaning New York. During those meetings, which were recorded, Lim implied that the Pyongyang regime approved the manufacturing and sale of the meth.

  “The NK government already burned all the labs,” Lim said. “Only our labs are not closed . . . to show Americans that they [the North Korean government] are not selling it any more, they burned it. Then they transfer to another base . . . It’s only us who can get it from NK.” This information was notable because Lim and his Triad were dealing directly with meth producers inside North Korea. Lim was saying that the Pyongyang regime’s claims to the international community that it had clamped down on meth trafficking were false. The reality was, the regime was still sanctioning the manufacture and sale of meth by permitting certain favored North Korean lab operators to operate.

  LeRoux had already bought 100 kilograms of North Korean meth through Lim. It was being stored in Thailand and the Philippines. Lim told Diego and Geraldo that his Triad group was prepared to offer much more, drawing from a ten-ton stockpile of North Korean meth it had already warehoused. This was a mind-boggling amount that would bring in enough hard currency to finance, well, just about anything the North Koreans desired.

  Stammers and Shackels pronounced themselves ready to move massive quantities of meth for LeRoux. In a dry run to test the smuggling route, they shipped a container loaded with 4.7 tons of tea leaves from China to a warehouse in Bangkok. If it had been real North Korean meth, it would have been worth at least $300 million wholesale and several times that on the street. The dry run worked beautifully. Stammers and Shackels were eager to start shipping the real thing.

  Diego and Geraldo asked the four traffickers to travel to Phuket and meet them at a certain hotel on September 25, supposedly to make final preparations for a big shipment to New York.

  In mid-September, Cindric and Stouch moved into a Marriott resort on Phuket and set up their command center. They had long lists of details to coordinate, laid out in notebooks, computer files, and their whiteboard, propped against one wall, next to a map of the world.

  Every day at dawn, Stouch put in his thirteen miles, no matter what. He had a route down a path and along the beach, zigzagging around naked bodies, passed out or drowsily grinding on companions. One rosy dawn, a pack of feral dogs chased him and one bit him, drawing blood. Picciano took him to the emergency room, where the doctors started him on a series of anti-rabies shots.

  Cindric practiced his Muay Thai moves and ran wind sprints on a soccer field near the hotel. The
day before Takedown Day, some water buffalo wandered out from the woods while he was ripping across the grass. A hotel guard came out and shooed them away.

  There was something about the water buffalo that got to Cindric. He started giggling and couldn’t stop. Stouch ran up in time to find him tomato-red in the face and almost hyperventilating with laughter. He couldn’t explain, except that it was probably the tension that hadn’t let up for months. The care and feeding of the informants and sources demanded constant attention. LeRoux was worst of all. He was making nice for now, but they could almost hear those gears in his peculiar brain clicking noisily. What was he plotting and when would he spring it?

  What if the whole case fizzled like a dud firecracker?

  Suddenly Cindric stopped laughing, stood up, and turned to Stouch.

  “I had a vision,” he said. “It’s all going to be good.”

  Stouch rolled his eyes. A vision and a dollar wouldn’t buy you a cup of coffee in Phuket.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ninja Stuff

  THE VISION WAS RIGHT. THE GOD OF COPS HAD SMILED.

  Against the odds, three police forces, three justice systems, and three border control agencies did what they were supposed to do. Presidents, intelligence services, and defense ministers didn’t interfere. Airplanes didn’t break down. Nobody tipped off the bad guys. They were all where they were supposed to be, except for Hunter, and he wasn’t far, or armed.

  By dawn in New York on September 26, 2013, LeRoux’s enforcement and meth operations had been flattened like wings of an outdated factory after controlled demolition.

  The mercenaries and meth guys were in jail. Call center workers, pilots, and other gig workers, paid over the past year to maintain the fiction that LeRoux was in business as usual, were out of jobs and on the street. Houses, condos, and yachts sat vacant.

  A old-school businessman would weep to see his life’s work in shambles. LeRoux smiled. In the Age of Innovation, entrepreneurs didn’t go bust. They pivoted. They moved on to other ventures. He was ready to pivot.

  When Cindric told LeRoux that all his men and all his systems were down, he grinned and said, “Ah, it worked good. It’s good work.”

  He paused. “That’s good for me?”

  “Yep, that’s good for you.”

  At this point, all LeRoux wanted, all he needed, was a break. He had built a string of fabulously lucrative businesses from nothing, and he was confident he could do it again. But he had to get free, which meant he had to satisfy every demand of the agents and prosecutors so they would recommend to the federal judge hearing his case that he get another chance at freedom. The judge didn’t have to take the prosecutors’ recommendation, but if he or she did, LeRoux could get off with a sentence of twelve to fifteen years or so. Counting time served, he could be out in 2024, a vigorous fifty-two-year-old, and still very rich. The agents assumed he had secret stashes all over the place.

  LeRoux was desperate to get to sentencing and set a date for the end of his lockup. Hunter’s performance wasn’t going to make it easy. On the DEA flight from Phuket to New York, Hunter melted down. “I’m not a bad person,” he sobbed. “The people that I hurt deserved to be hurt. These people stole from my boss. They’re thieves. I felt like they had to pay.”

  He didn’t bad-mouth LeRoux. To the contrary, he spoke of the Boss almost worshipfully. Yet in his passive-aggressive way, he painted LeRoux as bloodthirsty. His utter loyalty to LeRoux was toxic, not only for his victims, but for LeRoux.

  Hunter said that shortly after he signed on with LeRoux, he stumbled into the middle of one of the Boss’s most durable vendettas—a feud with LeRoux’s own family. In 2008 or 2009, LeRoux’s cousins Mathew and Garry Smith, who, like LeRoux, were born in Rhodesia, had moved to South Africa with the general white exodus and had returned to Zimbabwe to pursue mining-related business, introduced LeRoux to their friends Steve and Andrew Hahn, who had a gold mine and expertise in the gold trade. LeRoux hired the Hahns to help him buy African gold.

  The Hahn brothers got involved in a losing gold-buying venture in Mali. They claimed they put down a big pile of LeRoux’s money to pay for gold that was never delivered. LeRoux didn’t believe them. He suspected them of faking the loss and swindling him out of at least $800,000, maybe more. He summoned them to Manila to explain. The Hahns blamed the Smiths. LeRoux doubted them. Instead of pursuing the facts in an orderly and legal way, he jumped straight to punishment. He told Dave Smith (unrelated to LeRoux’s Smith cousins) to set up the Hahns by planting cocaine in Andrew’s luggage. As the Hahns headed back to South Africa, Philippine border control authorities found five grams of coke in Andrew’s bag and arrested him at the airport. He languished in a Philippine prison for two and a half years, until he and his brother convinced the authorities to dismiss the charges.

  During Andrew’s incarceration, Steve Hahn returned to South Africa to figure out a way out of the dilemma. LeRoux sent Dave Smith and Hunter to South Africa to track him down and punish him for his role in the screwup.

  Hunter later recounted the story to Gögel and Soborski in a conversation captured by the DEA bug in the safe house:

  I said, “Steve, they want me to . . . to shoot you.” He’s like, “No.” I said, uh, I told him, “Don’t worry about it ’cause after I shoot you, everything is gonna be good.” . . . We had people go to his house and stay with him to watch, right? I said, “There’s no more people in your house. Nobody’s gonna bother you anymore. You know, this . . . your, your life will go back to normal.” He said, “Yeah. No problem.” . . . And then I was thinking, “You know, he’s saying that, right? But if I shoot him, he’s gonna go to the police and they’re gonna get me in the airport.” So I . . . made up a story because I was thinking about it for like three days. “How am I gonna get out before he gets to the police?” And I told him, “Steve, this is the deal. I’m flying from here to South Africa. When I get to South Africa, I have to make a phone call. I have two guys in a townhouse in your, in your town . . . .If I don’t call them back, they’re going for your family.”

  With that powerful inducement, Hunter claimed that Hahn allowed himself to be shot.

  When Hunter told the story to the DEA agents who flew with him to New York, he portrayed Hahn as remorseful and himself as a reluctant enforcer.

  “The guy said, ‘I know why you’re here,’” Hunter said. “‘I know you’re the enforcer, I know I was bad to your boss. Do what you gotta do.’” Hunter said that Steve Hahn held out his hand to be shot, so Hunter pulled the trigger. Hunter said that Steve Hahn thanked him for not killing him and even drove him to the airport so he could make his plane back to Manila.

  “I was sweating bullets until wheels up,” Hunter told the agents. He claimed he felt bad about the whole thing, but how else could the Boss maintain discipline? Call the cops? File a lawsuit? No, in his view, enforcers were a necessary and accepted workforce in the dark economy. Hunter rationalized that the Hahns knew the rules of the road. He claimed he saw Steve Hahn a year later, doing business with LeRoux in the Philippines, and Hahn said, “No hard feelings.”

  But around other mercenaries, Hunter showed no regret for the assault on Hahn. “He just told me he shot him in the hand [and] he dumped him off at a hospital,” Vamvakias said.

  Meanwhile, LeRoux shifted his attention to his cousins the Smith brothers. He sent three of his mercenaries—Dave Smith, Hunter, and Chris DeMeyere—to Zimbabwe to find and terrorize them for their part in losing LeRoux’s money. According to Hunter, he threw a Molotov cocktail into Mathew Smith’s house. No one was hurt, but the house burned. LeRoux hired South African hitman Marius to firebomb Garry Smith’s house in Johannesburg. He considered having Marius kill the Smith brothers but changed his mind.

  “I decided since they were family members, I couldn’t go through with it,” he said, somewhat sanctimoniously, since he mentioned that the other factor was, the hit man wanted too much money for the murders.

  LeR
oux left other strong-arm jobs to Dave Smith and his mercenaries. In 2008 or 2009, he suspected Moran Oz, who was managing the RX Limited business, of stealing. Hunter said he, Smith, and DeMeyere took Oz out on a boat, threw him into shark-infested waters, and shot into the water near him. After Oz begged for his life and promised not to offend again, the mercenaries pulled him out and let him straggle back to shore.

  Hunter told the investigators that LeRoux was open to all sorts of revolting moneymaking ventures. One was a money-laundering operation on behalf of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president-turned-warlord who terrorized his own country and neighboring Sierra Leone. (In May 2012, Taylor was convicted in The Hague of war crimes and sentenced to fifty years in prison.)

  Hunter said that LeRoux sent him to Pemba, Mozambique, on his private plane, with orders to go to a warehouse in Brussels, pick up $300 million amassed by Taylor, either stolen from the Liberian treasury or raised through the blood diamond trade, and deliver it someplace in South Africa. Hunter’s job was to guard the money. For some reason, LeRoux’s pilots, an Israeli and a Russian, left Hunter in Mozambique and flew on to Brussels alone. Hunter didn’t know what became of Taylor’s $300 million, if indeed it existed. LeRoux, who presumably would have received a sizable commission for securing the money, dropped the subject.

  On another occasion, Hunter said he traveled to Sri Lanka to buy a cache of grenades stolen from a military base. The deal fell through when the seller panicked.

  Hunter said LeRoux was starting up new operations in Yemen and North Korea. He didn’t know what they were, exactly. All he knew was, LeRoux was hiring people with the nerve to travel to Sana’a and Pyongyang, navigate the opaque cutthroat political factions in each hellhole, and emerge with a moneymaking deal for LeRoux.

  During his rambling and self-serving confessions, Hunter portrayed himself and his mercenary mates as loyal soldiers just carrying out orders. That they came from a capricious underworld tyrant didn’t matter to Hunter. The agents doubted that they could believe this man, who obviously had a fractured conscience and not much judgment.

 

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