Hunting LeRoux Read online

  Dedication

  For my husband, Dan Morgan, and our son,

  Andrew Shannon Morgan, my earth and my sky;

  For my brother Edward Hogan Shannon, force of nature;

  For my brother Michael Willard Shannon

  and my nephew Michael Willard Shannon II,

  who are in the stars.

  Epigraph

  I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

  —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

  You must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. . . . You have to kill without feeling . . . without passion . . . without judgment . . . without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

  —John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now

  All non-state actors, whether malign or benevolent, are both finding enormous profit in two related phenomena. The first has been the amazing global growth of the free flow of information, goods, services, and people. The fact that you can be anywhere in the world, buy something, and have it delivered to you within three days is simply amazing, but increasingly commonplace. The second has been the arrival of the so-called “Digital Age,” where it is now possible to have a supercomputer and high-speed access to information about virtually anything wherever one happens to be around the world at one’s fingertips. The power and advantage this is generating has been enormously beneficial for most of mankind, but malign actors can profit just as much.

  One of the results we’re now seeing unfold before us is that non-state actors, whether malign or benevolent, can accrue power, influence, capability, and reach that were once exclusively available only to nation-states.

  —Lieutenant General Michael K. Nagata, director, Directorate of Strategic Operational Planning at the National Counterterrorism Center and veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Michael Mann

  Introduction: Malign Actor

  1: September 25, 2013

  2: Murphy’s Law

  3: The Rhodesian

  4: Black Cloud

  5: Magic!

  6: Invisible City

  7: Pac-Man and Ironman

  8: “We’re Way Beyond Birthdays”

  9: Dazzle Him

  10: “I Just Don’t Want to Get on the Plane”

  11: Queen for a Day

  12: All the Pieces on the Chessboard

  13: Hunting Rambo

  14: Ninja Stuff

  15: Burning It Down

  Note to Readers

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Elaine Shannon

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword by Michael Mann

  WE’RE SITTING IN A GULFSTREAM II, STARING AT A STEROID-POPPED, MUSCLE-bound ex–NATO sniper in handcuffs. He looks out the window. We lift off from Monrovia, Liberia. That look of ennui on his face decays into self-pity, because he knows he’s bound for long-term incarceration in the United States. He hasn’t uttered a word about the irony. He and his partner, Tim Vamvakias, a former U.S. Army military policeman, flew from Phuket, Thailand, to murder a Libyan sea captain and drug transporter turned informant and the DEA agent for whom he worked. The “Libyan informant” has just arrested him. The targets were a setup. So were the coordinators who supplied staged surveillance photos of the targets, a daily log of their movements, the opportune kill spot, and the French mercenary in charge of their West African transportation and the supplier of silenced .22 caliber pistols and Heckler & Koch MP7s.

  On that Gulfstream, the man opposite Dennis Gögel, the hired killer, is “Taj.” Taj is a superstar undercover DEA agent, working with the agency’s elite and secretive 960 Group. Taj and the group’s boss, Lou Milione, staged themselves as targets. Another pair of mercenaries just as dangerous as Gögel and Vamvakias have been arrested simultaneously in Tallinn, Estonia. Yet another team of killers, including their leader, Joseph “Rambo” Hunter—a retired US Army sniper trainer—is being apprehended at this very moment in Phuket. We have been dropped inside a complex operation in which five separate undercover stings, involving three different nations’ police forces in different parts of the world, all needed to be synchronized to conclude with arrests—simultaneously. That was so that none of LeRoux’s teams could alert any of the others.

  Elaine Shannon’s Hunting LeRoux delivers us into close proximity to dangerous people in the most ungoverned places on the planet. The moment-to-moment, heartbeat-to-heartbeat suspense of the five takedowns pervades many sections of Shannon’s book. Fiction would be hard pressed to match the tension and color and the new dimensions of criminality revealed here. There is nothing else quite like it. Its authenticity is based on her knowledge of federal and transnational law enforcement, criminal enterprises, and the trust of her sources, who are exclusive to her.

  It, simply, is better than most crime stories people can make up. Shannon has the magical ability to write from inside the flow of actual events, making them come alive. You know it’s real, and you are there.

  Reading Shannon’s partial manuscript almost two years ago, I felt I had never been taken inside an organized criminal empire within day-to-day proximity of its lethal and brilliant entrepreneur with such specificity. The atmosphere of danger and continual scrutiny is tangible. It’s as if we’re captive in a series called Lifestyles of the Rich and Malevolent.

  Equally, the manuscript parachutes us into the lives of Tom Cindric and Eric Stouch, the two agents in the DEA’s secretive 960 Group, who initiated and are the protagonists driving the mainstream investigation into LeRoux. Across continents and time zones, in dark motel rooms and in dangerous countries, we are with law enforcement’s most major-league big-game hunters.

  The revelation at the center of this true-crime saga is Paul Calder LeRoux and the transformation he innovated. LeRoux is a cybertech genius turned crime lord—committing cold-blooded murders along the way. He created a revolution in how transnational organized crime organized itself. LeRoux deconstructed the conventional ways even sophisticated drug cartels or arms merchants operated. They still had “farm-to-the-arm,” vertically integrated business models often locking them to physical locales. Infrastructure and personnel hierarchies made them vulnerable, visible, and out-of-date to LeRoux. He deconstructed that model and created something completely different. His criminal enterprises—linked by a dark web of his own invention—were like a cutting-edge Silicon Valley start-up, using the gig economy, pivoting quickly off failed ideas, capable of rapid scalability, and climbing a hockey-stick curve of success.

  He—and those who have followed—traffic in advanced weapons systems, tonnages of drugs, and exotic fissile materials, and engage in money laundering. They corrupt struggling small countries into failed nation-states to provide transport hubs and service regional conflicts. This new world’s innovator and its architect is Paul Calder LeRoux.

  Early on, the 960 Group came to the realization that LeRoux was the Elon Musk, the Jeff Bezos of transnational organized crime. They believe LeRoux is the “new now” as well as the near future.

  Many in LeRoux’s presence describe his lethal aura of brilliance, deviance, and sociopathy.

  As a dramatist, it is this additional quality of Hunting LeRoux that appeals to me, perhaps even more compellingly than its revelations. That is, our proximity. We are there. We are brought there because people trust Elaine Shannon. She has a reputa
tion among intelligence agencies and top-echelon law enforcement as a highly respected journalist who courageously goes where the story is, never betrays confidences, and gets it right. Their confidence in her, their openness, and the acuity of her insight—plus her irony and charm—is why the book has its unique ambiance and close-up engagement.

  The agents driving the investigation—Cindric and Stouch; their bosses, Lou Milione and Derek Maltz; the undercover DEA agent Taj—share their first-person perspectives, diaries, memos, documents, personal feelings, intuitions, suspicions, fears, and, sometimes, triumphs with Shannon. Their perspectives are woven into the compelling fabric of this narrative.

  So, too, is the perspective of “Jack,” the man LeRoux calls his “golden boy.” Through the eyes of Jack, we are taken into LeRoux’s strangely empty, twin luxury Manila penthouses and read his body language and experience the brainstorm-a-minute outbursts of this blond three-hundred-fifty-pounder. We’re flattered by his seductive speech and feel the danger of his MRI-like stare. Threat is redolent in the heat and humidity.

  Jack built the compound and the militia for LeRoux in Somalia, helped him move money, and buy sumptuous safe houses. Jack flipped to Agents Cindric and Stouch and became their undercover source, reporting on and surreptitiously recording LeRoux at enormous personal risk. Not only had LeRoux created squads of killers, he’d begun pulling the trigger himself.

  The image of LeRoux on this book’s cover is one frame from a surveillance video Jack recorded through a lens in a small device hidden in his clothing.

  Overseeing Agents Cindric and Stouch is ASAC Lou Milione, one of the founders of the 960 Group under Special Operations Division chief Derek Maltz. Milione and his right-hand man, Wim Brown, have taken down some of the world’s most insulated and sophisticated criminal figures, including the arms merchant Viktor “Merchant of Death” Bout, Monzer al-Kassar, and Haji Juma Khan, an Afghani heroin kingpin. The 960 Group, quietly, is law enforcement’s heavy-hitter.

  In Hunting LeRoux, Shannon creates a work in which we walk in the shoes, live in the skins, and see through the eyes of these people. It is a revelatory true-crime saga.

  Michael Mann is an acclaimed four-time Oscar-nominated director, writer, and producer. His credits include Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, The Insider, Ali, Collateral, Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and Blackhat. He produced Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Hancock, and the television series Miami Vice, Crime Story, Luck, and Witness—as well as the Emmy-winning miniseries Drug Wars: the Camarena Story, based on Elaine Shannon’s bestselling 1988 book, Desperados, about the murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico.

  Introduction: Malign Actor

  TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PAUL CALDER LEROUX, THE CREATOR of the Innovation Age’s first transnational criminal empire, start at the other end of the evolutionary scale.

  When the last cocaine cowboy went down, it wasn’t classy.

  On the run from the Mexican marines, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán emerged stinking from a sewer pipe. His idea of keeping a low profile was to steal a fire-engine-red Ford Focus from a grandmother. Black-clad Mexican federal police intercepted him in a matter of minutes and locked him in a fetid rent-by-the-hour sex motel until a government helicopter took him back to the prison he had tunneled out of six months earlier.

  El Chapo, taken into custody on January 8, 2016, was one of the last relics of the first phase of the cocaine invasion—call it the Miami Vice era—when cocaine cowboys built their brands by festooning themselves in diamond-encrusted guns and belt buckles and by surrounding themselves with cars, corpses, trucks, SUVs, dealerships, whores, horses, hotels, nightclubs, soccer teams, TV stations, zoos, boats, and more corpses. The most famous and fabulous shot and betrayed one another until nearly all of them were dead or in prison.

  Phase Two began in the first years of the twenty-first century. The global black market in illegal drugs had become a vast, mature industry estimated to generate $400 billion a year (and probably much more), exceeding the combined profits of the underground trade in arms, humans, and blood diamonds. Responding to attractive profit opportunities on the dark side as well as in the visible economy, the underworld globalized. As traffickers militarized, militants criminalized, and they met in a borderless swamp. Colombian cartels joined forces with Lebanese syndicates and Hezbollah operatives in South America, Africa, and Europe. Colombia’s Marxist guerrillas, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), went into cocaine production on an industrial scale; by the early 2000s, DEA officials estimated that the FARC supplied more than half the world’s cocaine. Mexican organizations turned up in Nigeria and China. The Serb mafia posted gun runners on every continent. The Russian mafia laundered money, smuggled, bribed, intimidated, and launched cyberattacks for profit. Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgency was founded with money from Afghan heroin kingpins.

  The men and women at the top of transnational organized crime had evolved for the era of globalization. They were discreet and smart enough not to go to war with one another. They were in the game to make money, not news. They embraced the tools of the Digital Age—encrypted mobile devices, satellite phones, cloud storage, the dark web. They were ardent capitalists who worshipped no god but money. They drank alcohol, gambled, whored, raped, and blasphemed. Radical ideology left them cold, except as a means of destabilizing governments that threatened their impunity. They invested strategically, in chaos, because the threat to their existence was not rivals or soldiers or cops but peace. They paid off armed bands who held territory, who controlled roads, ports, rivers, border crossings, and air strips. They were never the face of conflict. But they were the money in the back room, and it was the money that kept things boiling.

  However sophisticated the infrastructure, during Phase Two, most criminal organizations were still working within an industrial model of organized crime. They had to control the supply directly and supervise the steps of production, from farm to arm. That meant lots of people and facilities to grow, harvest, refine, transport, reprocess, produce, guard, smuggle, protect with internal security and counterintelligence, distribute, collect money, and launder money. Lots of people. Lots of organization. Lots of aboveground and belowground infrastructure, all of which was vulnerable to discovery and attack by adversaries and law enforcement.

  Now Phase Three—the model for transnational organized crime of tomorrow—has emerged, and it is changing everything. It is the innovation of Paul Calder LeRoux, who has introduced the principles of twenty-first-century entrepreneurship to the dark side of the global economy.

  Born in the outlaw colony of Rhodesia, LeRoux has a complicated psyche and near-genius intelligence. With his imposing 350-pound physique, anvil-shaped forehead, and blue-black eyes that gleam like lit cigarettes, he strides into a room and takes command, projecting the menacing gravitas of an absolutely powerful medieval monarch, a Gilded Age robber baron, or a Wagnerian antihero. His mannerisms evoke Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, the renegade Green Beret turned warlord in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now. LeRoux conveys the tension roiling his soul just as Brando/Kurtz did, by rubbing his pale shaved head, twisting his neck, and smiling when there is nothing to smile about. These are gifted, seductive souls who have weighed good and evil and chosen evil, justifying it as more honorable than hypocrisy. “There’s nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies,” Brando/Kurtz told his interlocutor, boasting that he had surrounded himself with warriors “who are moral . . . and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instinct to kill without feeling . . . without passion . . . without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.” Of course, for Kurtz, it was really about power. No judgment meant no reason and no remorse. That was madness, but who has more power than a madman?

  LeRoux understood the usefulness of fear very well. In a similar vein, he bragged of buying an island off the Philippines coast
because “every villain needs his own island.” The password that unlocked his laptop was “Hitler.” He sought alliances with malefactors he admired—Colombian cartels, Russian oligarchs, Somali pirates, the Serb mafia, and Chinese Triads. He surrounded himself with enforcers as pitiless as Kurtz’s headhunters.

  For years, the chief operating officer of LeRoux’s empire was a hard-drinking, meth-smoking English sadist named Dave Smith, who, LeRoux said, “got great pleasure in torturing animals and killing people and torturing people. Obviously, he is very violent, and he is the type of person I needed.” LeRoux instructed Smith to hire more men like himself—men who “enjoyed killing and torturing and beating.”

  Brando’s Kurtz adorned his jungle dwelling with human skulls. LeRoux updated the concept, loading his laptop with digital snapshots of the bloodied corpses of people he ordered killed. Inside his sparsely furnished penthouse, he toiled in lonely splendor, obsessed with accumulating dollars, euros, rands, rubles, dirhams, and rupees by dealing in chemicals, drugs, gold, timber, and arms. His customers, he said proudly, were “warlords, criminals, essentially anyone who had money.”

  Greed and cruelty are as old as humankind. What is groundbreaking about LeRoux is his unique combination of dazzling intellect and absence of conscience. These qualities have allowed him to develop a formidable business style. He is transnational organized crime’s supreme innovator. He is Netflix to Blockbuster, Spotify to Tower Records.

  For LeRoux, money is just a way of keeping score. He dresses with the ironic downscale look known as Silicon Valley billionaire—battered khakis and primary-colored polo shirts that can be seen from space. He stuffs himself with Domino’s pizza and Big Macs. His women are expendable and interchangeable. For LeRoux, sex is a snack, like an energy bar or a stress reliever.

  When doing business, he is crisp and focused. He has racked up numbers that Silicon Valley’s forward leaners would envy. Starting in 2004, when he emerged in East Asia as the brash young founder of a new kind of e-commerce business, he built a criminal empire stretching from Manila and Hong Kong, across Jerusalem and Dubai, to Texas to Rio. By 2012, he employed close to two thousand people. His first venture generated at least 3 million orders valued at close to $300 million total. More recently, he has developed numerous unquantified cash streams for various criminal enterprises and legitimate fronts.