Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  Stouch read him his rights. Samia denied he knew anything about Catherine Lee. He told several conflicting stories about why he was in the Philippines. He said he wasn’t “Sal,” the cover name Hunter had used for him, and he didn’t know a “JT,” Stillwell’s cover name.

  After close to an hour of ducking and weaving, he said he wanted a lawyer. But he didn’t stop talking. He started regaling them with his many connections in law enforcement. He said his uncle and brother were police officers in Massachusetts, and he was a reserve deputy sheriff there. That shiny, official-looking badge in his pocket proved it.

  He added that just the previous week, he had been having beers with “a buddy of mine, another DEA agent” from Albuquerque.

  What was his buddy’s name? Stouch asked.

  “Joe,” Samia replied.

  So that was Samia’s get-out-of-jail card? Joe from DEA, no last name?

  “Joe,” Stouch repeated. He was struggling to keep a straight face. “Okay. All right, well, look, um, obviously it’s your right to, to stop this and, and request an attorney.”

  Samia tried another angle. “You want a job with the former chief of police of Roxboro? He moved to Iraq, doing a job in security.”

  No, Stouch did not want to go to Iraq.

  Samia asked to call another “good friend,” the county district attorney.

  “You can call whoever you like when you have your phone call,” Cindric said. He added that Samia was going to be prosecuted for murder in federal court in New York City, so he would need a defense lawyer who could practice there.

  “I’ve never even been to New York,” Samia said plaintively.

  While Cindric, Stouch, and Massey were parrying with Samia, they got a call from one of the deputies staking out Stillwell’s home, a double-wide trailer. Stillwell had walked out of his front door and was heading toward his vehicle, and the deputies were following him. Because they knew the trailer was packed with guns, the deputies planned to pull him over at a traffic stop. When they did, they found him armed, but he didn’t pull his gun. They delivered him to an interview room in the sheriff’s department. As before, Cindric and Stouch introduced themselves and read him a Miranda warning. Stillwell waived his rights and said he wanted to cooperate. He denied involvement in the murder. He admitted he had been in Manila but claimed he had traveled there “to get the hell away, my father had died the previous year, and I just needed stress relief—went drinking and whoring, basically.” He claimed that a month in the fleshpots of the mysterious East had wiped his memory nearly clean.

  Over the hours, as the agents revealed their detailed knowledge of his movements in Manila, he broke down in tears and finally confessed.

  “Did Adam Samia pull the trigger on that woman?” Cindric asked.

  “Yes,” Stillwell said.

  “Were you present?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it happen in a van?” Stouch asked.

  “It was in a vehicle.”

  “Who was driving the vehicle?”

  “I was driving.”

  “Were you shocked he pulled the trigger?”

  “Yeah.”

  Stillwell hung his head and sniffled that he was “a stupid idiot in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He gave permission for the deputies and some agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to search his home, where, he said, they would find “rifles, pistols, knives, suppressors, machine gun.”

  “Anything else there that we should know about?” Stouch said. “Is there any type of explosives there? Do you have any grenades?”

  “No, no. I have ammo, but . . .”

  “How many guns are we talking?” Stouch asked.

  “Over a hundred,” Stillwell said.

  “Oh boy,” Stouch muttered. He turned back to Stillwell and asked again if he was absolutely sure there were no explosives. He didn’t want the deputies to stumble into a booby trap.

  “I have powder for reloading,” Stillwell said. “I guess you can call that an explosive.”

  Stillwell’s trailer yielded 159 firearms. As the agents walked through it, their boots crunched on guns scattered all over the floor. They found a digital camera memory card, with Stillwell’s trophy shots of Catherine Lee’s bloody face and body still on it. Stillwell’s laptop at the Arsenal contained the same images. Stillwell had tried to erase the photo of Lee’s bloody head and target package for Catherine Lee from that laptop, but deleting all traces of a digital image is not easy. Thomas Song, an investigator with the Justice Department’s cybercrime laboratory, would pull up the digital documents and photo without much difficulty.

  At Samia’s house, the DEA agents, sheriff’s deputies, and ATF agents found about thirty guns, some legal to own, but also a .50-caliber sniper rifle that had been illegally modified to fire fully automatic, like a machine gun. It was set up on a tripod on the pool table. They found a laptop similar to Stillwell’s, with the target package for Catherine Lee. They found a massive pile of pocket litter connecting Samia to LeRoux—business cards, phone numbers, and travel receipts linking him to Hunter, McConnell, and O’Donoghue and a business card for Kelly Reyes Peralta, LeRoux’s North Korean meth broker. LeRoux’s name was written on one document. They found a password Samia used for communicating with Hunter—“joegoesbad-ass.” They found a lease for a condo in the Mayfield Park Residences, near the Catherine Lee murder scene in Manila.

  They found a Toyota Innova van key.

  Back in Manhattan, with Cindric and Stouch watching, LeRoux got on the computer and sent messages to his former employees in Manila until he located someone who knew the location of the Toyota van in which Catherine Lee had been murdered. Steve Casey flew to Manila and tried the key in the van’s ignition. It fit. Samia had saved the van key as a trophy.

  In April 2018, Hunter, Samia, and Stillwell were tried for the murder of Catherine Lee. Samia denied all knowledge of the crime and suggested that Stillwell had done it. Stillwell didn’t testify but stood by his confession, in which he fingered Samia as the triggerman.

  LeRoux testified against all three mercenaries. He admitted, while perhaps not every crime he had ever committed, nonetheless many crimes, including ordering the death of Catherine Lee.

  “The agreement requires me to tell the truth, not commit any more crimes, and testify if asked,” LeRoux said. He did not say he regretted anything he had done. The prosecutors saw no point in asking him to feign contrition. Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Donaleski told the jury, when vouching for his credibility, “He is a sociopath. He is evil. He has done horrendous things in his life. . . . We’re not asking you to approve of what he’s done, nor could you. We are asking you to listen to him. We’re asking you to listen to what he says, to think about how he said it, to consider whether his words are backed up by emails, by things found at Samia and Stillwell’s homes, by the other testimony at trial. Is what he told you corroborated? Because when you do that, you’ll see that what he told you is corroborated and is backed up.”

  On April 18, 2018, a jury found all three men—Hunter, Samia, and Stillwell—guilty of conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, murder through use of a firearm, murder-for-hire, and murder-for-hire conspiracy. Samia and Stillwell were also convicted of money laundering. LeRoux was taken back to the lockup in Brooklyn to await his own sentencing, which could range anywhere from ten years to life in prison.

  And when he got out, what then? On the stand he said he would not commit any more crimes. His eyes said something else. They were as deep and still and stony as a quarry lake.

  Privately, the agents wondered. Would anything stop LeRoux from more crimes except a bullet?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Burning It Down

  “HE’S RUNNING THAT FUCKING JAIL,” CINDRIC SAID.

  He was guessing, but his cop gut, which he trusted because it had been right most of the time, told him that a white Rhodesian/South African/Australian with a build l
ike a rugby player and an epic superiority complex had become a leader in a federal lockup in Brooklyn. It made no sense but that’s how it looked.

  Even in lockup gray threads, LeRoux still had that old black magic. His spirit had revived, and he had dropped some dozens of excess pounds. With his shoulders squared, his chin high, and his gaze even, he looked even more Brando/Kurtz than when the agents first met him.

  “He gets in there the first day,” Cindric said. “Somebody called him a snitch and shoved and punched him and he didn’t report that.”

  Why not? Because he planned on asserting command himself. He didn’t intend to share control with the U.S. Marshals Service. On paper, the Marshals Service was in charge of the Brooklyn facility. It was not technically a prison. It housed people who had been arrested for federal crimes and who had agreed to become witnesses. The practical effect of this situation was to place them in legal limbo. They weren’t inmates yet. Nearly all were awaiting sentencing, which would be contingent on their truthful testimony.

  Other prisoners in the lockup surely concluded that LeRoux was an important government witness. He came and went hundreds of times, always with an escort of deputy marshals. He didn’t get beaten up again. There was only one way to read his survival: as respect paid him by his fellow inmates. All the more remarkably, he got it without a gang or posse.

  “He doesn’t have to have a whole team around him,” Cindric said. “They just know he has power. Paul exudes power. It’s power to help people, power to hurt people. He’s playing chess when they’re playing checkers, and if they’re playing chess, he’s playing three-dimensional chess.”

  LeRoux had negotiated a bed in a favorable spot, out of the way of the air-conditioning system so it didn’t blow on him. He bragged that he had arranged to have ten egg sandwiches a week delivered to him in the lockup. Two sandwiches every weekday.

  He played spider-and-fly with the brighter prisoners. He made a point to size up men arrested for white-collar crimes, because they could play chess with him for real.

  In Mir Islam, a young black-hat hacker, LeRoux found a chess partner and soul mate. Islam was a Bangladeshi American from the Bronx. (Despite his name, he told the court he was Jewish.) The first time he was arrested was in 2012, when he had just turned eighteen, for stealing and trading stolen identities. He was released and rearrested in 2013, for “swatting”—making false reports that dispatched SWAT teams to victims’ houses; “doxing”—posting personal information about celebrities and officials on the Web; and cyber-stalking a young woman who had caught his eye.

  According to LeRoux’s testimony in the Hunter/Samia/Stillwell trial, LeRoux met Islam in 2015, when the younger man was incarcerated in the Brooklyn facility, awaiting sentencing. They struck up a friendship. LeRoux gave Islam money for food, a cell phone, and a laptop. When Islam was sentenced to two years and transferred to a federal facility in Virginia, he and LeRoux kept up their relationship via a covert communications channel, using a telephone that was supposed to be reserved for calls to defense lawyers’ offices. In mid-2016, LeRoux was on the phone with his young buddy, discussing going into business together. “I discussed with Islam, using Islam to assist me in legal research and we also discussed opening a legal call center business with legal E-commerce operation,” LeRoux testified in the Hunter/Samia/Stillwell trial.

  Since Islam would be out of jail first, he would be the active partner in the call center enterprise. LeRoux would be the silent partner, putting up the funding.

  LeRoux inveigled a paralegal worker at a law firm that represented him to visit him and make three-way calls so that he could talk directly to Cayanan, still his girlfriend and business partner.

  The scheme fell apart in the summer of 2016, when FBI agents in Northern Virginia got wind that Islam was having strange conversations with some guy named Paul. The phone conversations were recorded. The FBI agents called the U.S. Marshals Service. Somebody there realized that LeRoux was a criminal defendant and a star witness for the DEA and the Southern District and alerted Cindric and Stouch. The agents investigated and determined that LeRoux had used the arrangement to communicate with a Filipino programmer who had worked for RX Limited. Through the IT man, LeRoux had set up a new server. He intended to use it to regenerate his pharmaceutical business and to serve as a platform for a new online gambling venture and possibly other businesses. He planned new call centers and new financial channels.

  When called to testify in the Hunter/Samia/Stillwell trial, LeRoux insisted that he wasn’t planning to resume his life of crime. “We discussed a variety of legal e-commerce businesses,” he said.

  Maybe. But his plans had all the hallmarks of an incipient criminal enterprise, communicating at the speed of light with nodes throughout the world. LeRoux had the new server programmed to erase itself every twenty-four to forty-eight hours, so that it wouldn’t leave an electronic trail. It wasn’t illegal, yet, but it looked devious.

  LeRoux got a stern lecture and for a while, isolation from the agents. He shed a few real tears over that one. He had gloried in being the center of attention and “leader” of the winning Team America. Power, control, and attention were smack, crack, and crank to a narcissist. LeRoux was always chasing the rush, so the agents had been giving it to him as long as they needed his help tracking down his associates in his criminal network.

  After they wrapped up the man-hunter phase of the investigation, the spotlight shifted to the prosecutions. The agents didn’t need to pull LeRoux out of his cell every day or so. He went sullen and moody. When they saw him, they sensed the beast inside him, clawing and hissing. During one interview session, LeRoux spent most of the time ranting about some minor misstep by one of his women.

  “I’m under attack,” he raged.

  “Fuck, dude, she’s five foot nothing and a hundred-and-nothing pounds.” Cindric laughed.

  LeRoux was in no mood to kid. His “friendship” with the agents was situational. The agents knew he would switch it off the minute he didn’t need them.

  “Did you see his eyes?” Stouch asked Cindric afterward.

  “Oh yeah. We better check our cars.”

  They shared an inside joke that LeRoux was going to figure out a way to build a remote-control detonator so he could blow up the agents’ cars from his cell. They were sure that when they weren’t around, LeRoux was sitting in his cell, pushing his chess pieces around, ruminating on ways to beat them, beat the system, take revenge on a world that gave him nothing.

  Nothing but money, women, children, yachts, cars, airplanes, houses, beaches, an island for a while, and whatever else struck his fancy.

  Many times, LeRoux was calm and smiling when other people would have panicked. The agents wondered, was he one of those people whose feet didn’t touch the same earth everybody else’s feet trod? Sometimes they had a sense that they were looking at a remake of Apocalypse Now, that LeRoux was a twenty-first-century Colonel Kurtz. LeRoux couldn’t match the charisma of Brando as the renegade warrior-king of Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1979 film about the madness of the Vietnam War, but he was far worse than Kurtz in some ways, because he possessed real scientific know-how and lit up when he talked working day and night to make it possible for Iran to destroy a lot of Israel and any other place the radical regime’s leaders didn’t like.

  Was he born this way, or did something twist him around? The agents didn’t probe deeply his childhood and possible motives for his misdeeds. There was too much else to do. Those questions were best left to the psychologists and, frankly, every crook they’d ever met had a sad story about mama or a daddy issue.

  Even then, LeRoux managed to surprise them. During a routine debriefing, one of the agents from Minneapolis questioned LeRoux about the identities of other black-market pill merchants. Asked to examine a photo lineup with mug shots of suspected pill peddlers, LeRoux pointed to a photo of a middle-aged man and said, “Yeah, I know that guy. He’s my biological father.”

  “W
hat?” Stouch said.

  “Yeah, he’s one of my biggest competitors in the pharmaceutical business. He stole from me. He definitely stole $60,000 from me.”

  LeRoux said that soon after he got into the Internet pill game, he connected with the white Rhodesian he had been told fathered him. He didn’t say how he knew. He said they became business partners, and Hornbuckle went to the southern United States to sign up pharmacies to fulfill the bogus prescriptions ginned up by LeRoux’s paid doctors.

  LeRoux suggested he trusted the older man, because he made Hornbuckle a cosigner on one of his business bank accounts. Things went well, he said, until sometime in 2007, when LeRoux realized that $60,000 was missing from the account. LeRoux told the agents that from that moment on, the man was his archenemy.

  In a twisted way, LeRoux’s father, or at least, father figure, might have inspired him to ascend to greater heights in business. That the business was on the dark side was no accident. That’s where he thought his dad had tried to make his mark and where he wanted to crush the older man.

  “His father being that much of an asshole lent itself to risk-taking,” Stouch said. “Obviously, he was trying to prove he was better than his dad.”

  He didn’t have a good word to say about his adoptive parents. He didn’t know where his adoptive father was. Maybe gone, maybe dead. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care about his adoptive mother, either. Some months after his arrest, a message landed in LeRoux’s email box from his younger sister, the biological child of the LeRoux couple. She wrote that Judith LeRoux had died. Since Cindric and Stouch were reading all LeRoux’s email, they brought him the bad news and offered condolences.

  LeRoux shrugged. “Guys, she’s been dying for years,” he said, and changed the subject.

  Being simultaneously indifferent and insatiable is what narcissists do. It’s the reason narcissists make excellent innovators. They don’t stop, and they don’t yield to logic or compassion.

  The agents concluded that Paul LeRoux was intercepted before he realized his full potential as a villain. Still, he left an enduring legacy. He had laid the foundation for something new—a new form of transnational organized crime that transcended categorizations such as “drug trafficker” and “gun runner.” It didn’t have a name yet. It was fluid and seeped into cracks. LeRoux and his disciples, acolytes, and imitators functioned like a swarm of jellyfish. They looked like discarded bits of tissue paper, if you could see them at all. But try swimming in a bay they occupied.