Investigative agencies and legal systems weren’t built to grapple with this protean menace. LeRoux’s world only seemed unorganized because it didn’t fit the traditional template of a solid, squared-off structure with an identifiable hierarchy and command-and-control apparatus.
LeRoux didn’t get caught up in a massive structure of camaraderie, like the Mafia. He created a virtual reality that allowed him to dispense with the need to meet people face-to-face most of the time. He insulated himself in original ways.
“When you marry that brilliance with someone who has no qualms, that’s what’s so scary,” Milione said. “He will not stop, and people will not see it coming with him.”
Milione and his agents built the plane while they were flying it. They found a way to peer into LeRoux’s world, then retooled their tradecraft and improvised to get inside, first with Jack, then with other informants, all the while playing LeRoux, the master manipulator. Their street-cop guts served them well. They didn’t always guess right, but they managed it often enough to gain a narrow edge over their adversaries.
“We knew that Paul is a very complex business guy with a truly multifaceted criminal empire,” Cindric said. “He’s a much more sophisticated model than the cases we had worked before. It’s like making the jump from Triple-A ball to the major leagues: you’re taking everything you learned, and you gotta be able to hit the curveball this time.”
The chilling thing was, the 960 Group had gotten Viktor Bout as he was on the downslope of his career. LeRoux was on the rise. “If we hadn’t gotten Paul when we did, God knows what he would have been able to do,” Cindric said. “There’d be a lot more people dead.”
Milione saw LeRoux as a logical extension of the concept of the entrepreneurship movement, the way of thinking personified by Elon Musk. “You see how Musk has grown and how Tesla has grown and how it’s completely changed how everybody else is doing business,” Milione said. “LeRoux is applying almost that kind of disruption on the dark side. He’s so brilliantly psychotic that he can apply that disruptive frame of mind to business. Guys like him are the engine behind all the bad things that are going on in the world, whether it’s drug trafficking, money laundering, arms trafficking, fake documents, terrorism. He crosses over all kinds of things, into terrorism, weapons, drug trafficking. If he hadn’t gotten into the power he felt from killing people and burning it all down, he might still be out there. Those who know how to operate in the virtual world and have a ruthless brilliance about them will be very hard to catch.”
Milione and his agents knew that a smart international kingpin employing Paul LeRoux’s methodology could win at this game. With rare exceptions, government bureaucracies are too hidebound and rife with internal rivalries to encourage risky, expensive, boundary-breaking investigations like the one that caught LeRoux.
“Does LeRoux have a plan for the future?” said Jack, who probably knew LeRoux as well as anyone living. “Damn right he has, and he’s planning it while he is in prison. Does he have the money and contacts to succeed? Of course he has, because he would never give up all his assets and information. He knew he will walk out again one day. Only this time he has learned a lot more about the system, and he will be even more careful than ever. We have not heard the last word about him for sure. When he walks out he could collect and retire on a nice beach and enjoy the rest of his days in great luxury, but that’s not LeRoux. Nope, he will need something that feeds his brain constantly, and it wouldn’t surprise me that he will go to Asia or South Africa.”
Jack believed that when LeRoux got out, he was going to be preoccupied with his own safety. He had made enemies of his own, by naming names of important Asian and African figures he had bribed. Some of them ran death squads. And then there were the gunslingers he had hired for gigs. He’d gotten five of his mercenary snipers locked up, but there were others still out there.
Cindric and Stouch agreed with Jack that LeRoux was treating his prison time as an interlude, something like a forced postgraduate course in the system and how to beat it. They suspected that he had every intention of emerging from prison, then immediately disappearing into a black cloud of money. He hinted malevolently to them that he had no interest in going straight.
“Paul, when you get out, what do you think you’ll do?” Stouch asked one day.
“Girls.”
“What?” Cindric said.
“Girls. Yeah, you know the Arabs. They want the girls.”
“So he thinks his next business,” Stouch said with disgust, “is going to be trafficking women.”
“When he gets out of jail, he’s going to be the worst enemy for the next group of guys who’ve gotta chase him,” Cindric said, “because he knows some of the game.”
Yet Cindric and Stouch stubbornly persisted in the belief that LeRoux, and people like him, were not beyond the reach of the law.
“The same thing that took Paul down before will bring him down in the future,” Cindric said. Hubris. Excess. That thing inside him was still scratching and clawing to get out and hurt somebody. Whenever it did, Cindric and Stouch believed LeRoux wouldn’t be able to resist showing himself, one way or another.
“He’ll think, there can’t be two more Erics and Tommys,” Stouch said. “But there are.”
Note to Readers
MOST INDIVIDUALS WHO WORKED ON THE INVESTIGATION OF PAUL CALDER LeRoux and his associates are identified by name and title. Interviews for this book were conducted on the record, with very few exceptions. I have enjoyed rare access to firsthand witnesses. This book is drawn from thousands of hours of interviews over six years with people who had direct participation in and knowledge of the events described in the book and from thousands of documents, including government documents, personal notes, diaries, emails, texts, timelines, photos, transcripts, undercover audio and videotapes, and documents seized from people investigated and prosecuted for crimes.
When I have used exact quotations, dialogue, thoughts, or conclusions, I have derived that information from firsthand witnesses to the events or from documents, including transcripts, emails, and texts among the participants.
To protect innocent lives, I have used cover names to conceal the identities of a few people who were and are working undercover or are living and working in dangerous situations. These include:
Taj, a DEA agent who frequently works undercover;
Jack, a former LeRoux employee who penetrated LeRoux’s organization as an undercover DEA informant in order to stop LeRoux’s murders and bring him to justice;
Anya, Jack’s fiancée;
Leo, a European mercenary associated with Jack;
Diego, a DEA informant who posed as a Colombian cartel representative in order to bring LeRoux to justice;
Geraldo, a DEA informant who posed as Diego’s Colombian partner;
Georges, a professional pilot who served as a DEA source in Africa and Asia and who helped bring LeRoux to justice;
Bee is a code name for a Thai employee of the DEA office in Bangkok. His whole name has been withheld for security reasons.
Paul Calder LeRoux has not been interviewed for this book. He is incarcerated in a secure federal facility, has pleaded guilty to certain crimes, and has served as a government witness against those he hired to commit murders, to traffic in drugs and arms, and for other crimes. I have submitted requests to interview him but have not been permitted to do so.
To date, all the individuals charged in the U.S. for agreeing to carry out contract murders for LeRoux or for trafficking in North Korean methamphetamine for LeRoux have pleaded guilty or have been convicted in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Elaine Shannon, Washington, D.C., October 18, 2018
Acknowledgments
WHEN YOU TAKE A TRIP TO A STRANGE COUNTRY, YOU NEED A GOOD GUIDE. For this journey into a place off the map, I’ve been privileged to find the best.
Bill Mockler, who created the DEA’s Special Operations Divi
sion in 1992, foreseeing a global underground where technology, innovation and organized crime would converge; his successors Joe Keefe, Mary Cooper, and Derek Maltz; Lou Milione, who founded SOD’s 960 Group; his deputy Wim Brown; and LeRoux case agents Tom Cindric and Eric Stouch. Others who helped me include Pat Picciano, Steve Casey, Jim Scott, Joe Kellums, Matt Keller, Jim Sparks, Sam Gaye, Carol Dillon and the undercover agent I call Taj, all of DEA; Liberian National Security Agency leader Fombah Sirleaf; Sergeant Mark Massey of Person County, North Carolina; Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph Atallah, USAF (Ret.); and the courageous undercover operatives known as Jack and Georges.
Lissa August and Mary Wormley copyedited and checked facts; Katie Ellsworth tracked down images. Susan McElhinney photographed me.
The unrivaled Shane Salerno of the Story Factory literary agency in Los Angeles placed the manuscript in the able hands of Liate Stehlik, senior vice president and publisher of HarperCollins and her team: associate publisher Ben Steinberg; David Highfill, executive editor at William Morrow/HarperCollins; Chloe Moffett, Molly Waxman, Andy LeCount, Danielle Bartlett, Sharyn Rosenblum, Kelly Rudolph, Andrea Molitor, Nyamekye Waliyaya, Leah Carlson-Stanisic, Bonni Leon-Berman, Jeanne Reina, Yeon Kim, and Chris Sergio.
Special thanks to Michael Mann for many years of honest, encouraging advice, unerring perception, integrity, and fidelity to the truth.
I am grateful to my husband, Dan Morgan, and my son, Andrew Shannon Morgan, for putting up with my long days, longer nights, and working weekends and holidays. We share a passion for getting to the heart of the matter.
—Elaine Shannon
Notes
INTRODUCTION: MALIGN ACTOR
His first venture generated: The estimate of LeRoux’s RX Limited sales comes from a plea agreement signed by John Wall, a former RX Limited employee. It disclosed that DEA agents calculated that from June 2007 through August 2011, RX Limited shipped over 2,973,374 orders valued at $297,337,400. Source: U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota, Criminal No. 13-273 (4), USA v. Jonathan Wall (4), Dec. 7, 2015.
CHAPTER 1: SEPTEMBER 25, 2013
His mother died: Dennis Gögel’s personal history comes from his letter to federal Judge Laura Taylor Swain, filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, on Aug. 27, 2015.
He hired mercenaries: The quotes from LeRoux come from an email from Paul LeRoux to Joseph Hunter, dated January 4, 2013, and obtained by the author.
CHAPTER 2: MURPHY’S LAW
Hunter took to the job: The quotes from Hunter come from a transcript of a conversation that took place March 8, 2013, in Phuket, Thailand, and was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on March 16, 2018, in Case 1:13-cr-00521-RA.
They and other conservatives and libertarians: The history of the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, later, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is described in Lee Edwards, Educating for Liberty: The First Half-Century of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003).
By the time the Reagan Revolution: The quote from President Reagan comes from the ISI website at https://home.isi.org/about/about-isi.
As Milione hoped and expected, Kassar’s arrogance: Monzer al-Kassar’s crimes are described in USA vs Kassar, filed on June 21, 2007 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Kassar was sentenced: Benjamin Weiser, “An Arms Dealer Is Sentenced to 30 Years in a Scheme to Sell Weapons to Terrorists," New York Times, February 25, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/us/25arms.html.
It was a surprising development: According to interviews of DEA agents by the author, Estonian law required an extradition proceeding. The two accused men were extradited to the United States in April 2014. Once the Estonian court ruled, Casey, Cindric, Stouch, and Taj flew to Tallinn in a rented executive jet to pick up Soborski and deliver him to court in Manhattan. “How did you take the cuffs off?” Casey asked him. “Training,” he said. He turned his back to them and stared out the window. When Casey, Cindric, Stouch, and Taj photographed Soborski shirtless, they noted a big scar on his abdomen, clearly, from a major operation. They said he complained at length about the miserable food and frigid cell in the Estonian prison, but he didn’t mention being beaten. However, once in the United States, Soborski accused the Estonian SWAT team of beating him during the arrest. In the end, the U.S. court did not determine how the Pole became ill or injured. Soborski and Filter pleaded guilty to one count of cocaine trafficking.
CHAPTER 3: THE RHODESIAN
Today, only 17,000 people: Information about Zimbabwe’s population can be found in the “Zimbabwe Inter-Censal Demographic Survey, 2017,” www.zimstat.co.zw/sites/default/files/img/publications/Census/ICDS_2017 _Report.pdf, and Ian Phimister, “The Collapse of Rhodesia, Population Demographics and the Politics of Race,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, August 15, 2011.
Liberation brought no peace: Authoritative information on post-independence atrocities can be found in the “Report on the 1980s Disturbances in Matabeleland and Then Midlands,” compiled by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, March 1997, http://www.rhodesia.nl/Matabeleland%20Report.pdf.
The LeRoux family would have avoided: Paul LeRoux’s father’s employment as an asbestos mine supervisor was reported by Evan Ratliff in an online article, “He Always Had a Dark Side,” https://magazine.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side/.
Available accounts of the period: The Shabanie and Mashaba asbestos mining complex was owned by Turner and Newall of Manchester, England, Britain’s largest asbestos company. In the 1970s, Shabanie was considered the world’s largest underground asbestos mine, employing 12,000 people. According to a seminal academic research study published in 2003 and titled, “Asbestos Mining and Occupational Disease in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, 1915–98,” these workers were exposed to far more potentially lethal asbestos dust than allowed in comparable operations in the industrialized world. “To be profitable Zimbabwe’s mines had to run at full capacity, but the limitations of the plant meant that the more ore that was put through the mills, the higher the levels of dust and the higher the incidence of disease,” Professor Jock McCulloch, the study’s author, wrote. “The mines were so profitable because they were so dangerous.” McCulloch, a historian at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia, himself died of mesothelioma in January 2018, probably from exposure to asbestos in the same Zimbabwe mines where Paul LeRoux the elder may have worked as a manager.
Rhodesians labored under a stigma: Life for whites in Rhodesia is described by Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (New York: Knopf, 2008); Robert Blake, A History of Rhodesia (New York: Knopf, 1978); and Frank Clements, Rhodesia: The Course to Collision (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969).
LeRoux’s father reportedly parlayed: Paul LeRoux’s employment in South Africa is reported by Evan Ratliff in an online article “He Always Had a Dark Side,” https://magazine.atavist.com/he-always-had-a-dark-side.
The teenage years: The demography of South Africa during LeRoux’s teenage years is detailed in Padraig O’Malley paper “Demographic Characteristics of South Africa in the late 1980s,” https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv02424/04lv03370/05lv03389.htm.
Hafner wanted to launch: The significance of the project undertaken by LeRoux is explained by Kim des Zetter, in “Hacker Lexicon: What Is Full Disk Encryption?” Wired, July 2, 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/07/hacker-lexicon-full-disk-encryption/.
And then do them: In December 1998, LeRoux had published a freeware disk encryption program he called E4M—Encryption for the Masses. He released not only the E4M application itself but the underlying source code that made it and invited other programmers to improve on it. When Hafner and his programmers looked at LeRoux’s source code closely, they spotted a string of code they had written for an early stage of Hafner’s project and shared with LeRoux in 1997. LeRoux dismissed hi
s appropriation of Hafner’s code as an oversight. Hafner accepted his explanation because LeRoux had valuable skills.
Except for a brief unresolved dispute: In February 2004, a collective of anonymous programmers calling themselves the TrueCrypt Team published a full disk encryption system as freeware. The TrueCrypt website announced that the program was based on LeRoux’s E4M program. Since TrueCrypt competed head-to-head with SecurStar’s DriveCrypt, Hafner immediately suspected that LeRoux was behind TrueCrypt and was seeking revenge for his firing and humiliation. Hafner discovered that E4M contained a string of code that had been created by other Hafner programmers and accused LeRoux of “intellectual property theft.” The TrueCrypt Team refused to withdraw its product. The dispute, which blew up in geek chat rooms, enhanced the TrueCrypt image as the rebel’s choice. Among its famous users was Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who used TrueCrypt in 2013 to transmit sensitive information he took while consulting for the U.S. National Security Agency. DriveCrypt became the choice of mainstream corporate and government customers, including Citicorp, Exxon, Shell, Volkswagen Financial, Prudential, Scotland Yard, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Motorola, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, and Texas Instruments. “If James Bond had encryption software he would have the DriveCrypt Plus Pack,” Justin Peltier of SC magazine raved.
As a child in a whites-only school: White Rhodesian culture is explained by Richard West in The White Tribes of Africa (Cape, 1965) and Brendon in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997.
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