“Hi, how are you, this is Tom,” the man said. “I work for the U.S. government.”
It had been a year since Klaussen sent his email to a generic address he’d found on the CIA’s website. In the intervening time, he’d managed to put his life as “Jack Anderson,” who worked for Paul Le Roux and ran a militia-protected operation in Somalia, behind him. He’d even burned his fake passport in front of his fiancée to prove that there was no going back. After a stint managing a hotel, he’d recently been running his own personal fitness training company. But he was considering swapping careers again. His fiancée was growing uncomfortable with his one-on-one training sessions in the homes of wealthy women who, because of Dubai’s strict social codes, found it simpler to exercise in private.
Now, a man claiming to be an agent from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was on the phone, telling Klaussen that his email to the CIA had been passed to the U.S. embassy in South Africa, where the agent had come across it. “I was wondering if you would still be willing to talk,” he said.
For a moment, Klaussen wondered if the call might be a setup by Le Roux himself. Could he have intercepted Klaussen’s original email? Since he’d persuaded his old boss to cancel the Joseph Hunter hit, and even garnered a kind of apology for accusing him of stealing, Klaussen hadn’t felt like he was living under an active threat. “Still, knowing Le Roux, you keep it in your mind,” he said. “It’s automatic. Because too many people died.”
The only contact he’d had with Le Roux in the previous year had been after the U.N. issued its report describing the Somalia operation and its collapse into chaos. Klaussen already knew most of the details, including that one Zimbabwean had been shot dead in a dispute over the equipment, and that his former Somali point man, Liban Mohamed Ahmed, had been briefly jailed as a result. “He was released, but in the meantime the whole business was fucked,” Klaussen said. When the organization stopped paying rent, the compound was confiscated and everything they’d shipped in disappeared. Then the U.N. report hit the news. “I sent it to Le Roux. ‘What the fuck is this?’ ” Klaussen said. “He said, ‘Fuck them. They can’t do anything. It’s just a commission. They have no power.’ ” That was the end of it.
Now the man on the phone, whose full name was Thomas Cindric, was able to convince Klaussen that he did in fact work for the DEA’s Special Operations Division, and was investigating Le Roux. In fact, he wasn’t just looking for information. He was looking for someone who could help take down the organization from inside.
“Okay,” Klaussen said, “how do you see this going?”
“First we’d like to meet and see what you have,” Cindric said. The meeting would have to take place somewhere other than Dubai, so no one could trace Klaussen back to his home. Cindric proposed Cyprus, in a few weeks’ time. Klaussen agreed.
On the appointed day, Cindric and another DEA agent named Eric Stouch flew through Dubai and greeted Klaussen at the gate of a Cyprus-bound flight. Once on board, Klaussen took a seat in business class, while the agents who would become his employers trundled back to economy. The DEA had bought his ticket, but Klaussen had arranged for his own upgrade.
Cindric and Stouch booked a hotel conference room in Cyprus, where they all sat down to discuss what Klaussen could offer. “First it was me who had to convince them that I have what it takes,” Klaussen said. But this was a moment Klaussen had imagined when he first abandoned the Somalia operation back in 2010. He pulled out an encrypted drive on which he had stored reams of material from his time working with Le Roux. There were emails about arms purchases, copies of Le Roux’s IDs—real and fake—financial reports, weapons orders, contact lists. As he walked the agents through the files, he recalled, “They didn’t really show excitement. They didn’t really show emotion. But it’s there. I can feel it. It’s in the room.” When he finished his presentation, the agents finally let on that they were ecstatic.
But the information Klaussen had wasn’t enough. The agents explained that while the case against Le Roux would certainly be bolstered by it, what they really needed was help setting him up. Wherever Le Roux was arrested—be it the Philippines, Brazil, or any of a dozen other countries where he regularly did business—there was the potential that he could buy his way out of jail. Cindric and Stouch needed to somehow get him somewhere that they could control the environment. Le Roux wasn’t dumb enough to travel to the United States, so it would have to be somewhere else. They would need not only to entice him into his own capture, but also to create an airtight case against him back in the States. To do that, they’d need Klaussen to go back to work for Le Roux.
When Klaussen said yes, he, Cindric, and Stouch became a kind of subunit within the DEA, a team whose work was largely walled off—even from the likes of Bailey and Brill, who were still doggedly working the case from Minnesota. Together, the three of them outlined a plan to lure Le Roux into the kind of global sting that the Special Operations Division reserved for the world’s most dangerous kingpins. Step one involved Klaussen contacting Le Roux to ask for his job back. To do that, he couldn’t call empty-handed. He would need to bring his old boss the kind of deal Le Roux couldn’t resist.
Every detail had to be perfect. When it was time for Klaussen to make contact with Le Roux in April 2012, the agents flew him to New York to do it, to help establish a U.S. “nexus” for the crime. Sitting on the front steps of the elegant federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, Klaussen dialed Le Roux’s number. He picked up.
“How are you?” Klaussen asked. “You still have that job for me in the U.S.?”
Le Roux was friendly, but told him he had given the job to someone else, months before.
Klaussen said that job or no job, he had something to offer. He had made some interesting contacts in the world of narcotics trafficking, he told him, but lacked his own funds and organization to make anything of them. “They are big people, big deals,” he told Le Roux. “Colombians. Hundreds and hundreds of kilos.”
Later, Klaussen would marvel that Le Roux never questioned why he had had such a dramatic change of heart, from quitting the organization over its illegal activities and threatening to turn in Le Roux to suddenly approaching him with a Colombian drug deal. “He didn’t even ask about it,” Klaussen said. “Didn’t even bother. He knows what people are capable of when they are really in need of money. Most of his employees are willing to cross the line every time. I was one of the first that stood up and said, ‘No, I’m not doing it anymore.’ It was a bit of a shock for him, but I’m not sure. I don’t think you can shock a guy like that.” When he came crawling back, he thought, it merely reaffirmed for Le Roux his outlook on humanity. “See?” he imagined his boss saying to himself. “He is no different than the others.”
Le Roux agreed to hire Klaussen back. He would be working at a lower salary, $3,000 a month plus bonuses. “That’s how our system works now,” Le Roux said.
After the call, Klaussen and his handlers began laying the groundwork for the deal, sending Le Roux a list of contacts that Klaussen would need to meet with, and where. The first stop would be a rendezvous with the Colombians in person. From New York, Klaussen and the agents flew to Panama to meet a paid DEA confidential informant who would be playing the role of “Colombian cartel boss.” Unlike Klaussen, he had some experience with undercover stings. He’d been busted by the DEA years before, and began cooperating as part of a plea agreement to keep him out of prison. Now he was doing it for money.
From their meeting in Panama, Klaussen called Le Roux and pressured him to get on the phone with the Colombian.
“I’m here with the guy, he wants to talk to you,” Klaussen said.
“Nah, nah, I don’t talk to these people,” Le Roux said.
“Come on, they came all the way here,” Klaussen implored. “Just talk to the freaking guy. He wants to meet you, wants to set up a meeting, set up a deal. These people don’t deal with lower-level people like me, they want to talk boss to boss.”
Then he handed the phone to the C.I. The imaginary drug boss and the real one conversed for two or three minutes. “Not too much, because of course he doesn’t want to give the impression he just talks loosely on the phone. He’s supposed to be a professional drug dealer,” Klaussen said. “Le Roux didn’t like it, but he did it anyway. So I knew he was eating out of my hand.”
From there, Klaussen and the agents began working their scheme around the clock. Their motives may have been divergent—Klaussen was out for revenge, the agents for a scalp—but in the intensity of the operation they quickly forged a bond. “Everybody was on full standby 24/7, for six or seven months,” Klaussen said. Both Stouch and Cindric had honed their skills as cops on the streets of Baltimore. Stouch, who’d also worked as a detective in Pennsylvania before joining the DEA in 1999, was a triathlete, wiry and fit, with a closely shaved head. “Eric is the quiet but very observant one,” Klaussen said. Cindric, who’d started as a DC cop and had a cynical streak, wore his opinions more on his sleeve. “Tom will say what he thinks,” Klaussen said. “If it offends you, it offends you.” There were endless debates about when and how to push Le Roux, what he would believe, what might make him suspicious. Stouch and Cindric had the benefit of experience with criminal mindsets, while Klaussen knew Le Roux, his methods and his madness. Klaussen admired how thoroughly the agents prepared him, creating a story with enough details to make it believable, but enough flexibility to adjust on the fly. “They always asked me if I was comfortable with it,” Klaussen said. “Always. If I said no, it was no. They never pushed me. At any moment if I felt uncomfortable I just had to say the word and it was done.”
As the months went on, they methodically laid the trap. If Klaussen told Le Roux he was meeting a contact somewhere—whether Panama or Paris—he and the agents convened there, so that Klaussen could always prove his backstory. “The guy is not stupid,” Klaussen said. “You can’t just tell him a story. He’s going to check it. It has to add up. Everything has to be very, very real.” They had photos of the Colombian cocaine, newspapers bought locally as casual proof that he’d been there, emails sent from IP addresses in the right location, airline tickets that matched the trip dates he’d given Le Roux. “For a guy like him, why would he not be capable of hacking into flight manifests?” Klaussen said. “Especially for somebody who is that paranoid.”
Klaussen tried to keep Le Roux primed with a flow of information about the deal, anticipating his boss’s need to weigh in on the smallest details. “You have to constantly feed his brain with positive information that you are on the right track, that everything is going smoothly,” Klaussen said. “With evidence of course, because otherwise he wouldn’t believe it. That was the hard part: To keep him out of control. Because he’s a control freak, and he’s got the brain to do it.” The Colombians, Klaussen told Le Roux, were setting up operations in West Africa, centered in Liberia. The cartel, their story went, was interested in making their own meth there. They hoped that Le Roux could provide the precursor chemicals and clean rooms to make the stuff, and maybe even meth cooks to train the Colombians on how to make it themselves. In the meantime, they were also interested in buying some finished product from Le Roux, for distribution in New York. The destination was crucial: to fall under provision 959, the sting needed to make it absolutely clear that the drugs were destined for the United States.
Each detail was perfectly primed to cohere with Le Roux’s psychology and worldview. The Colombians were the kind of South American partner Le Roux coveted—he’d once been rumored to have sent Shai Reuven into the country to make contact with one of its biggest cartels, without success. The idea that the Colombians now respected his knowledge appealed perfectly to his ego. “You have to get in his head,” Klaussen said. But still, he worried that Le Roux could somehow be several moves beyond them. “With a guy like Le Roux, it’s almost impossible. He thinks of a million things in one day. You need a whole team to get around what he’s thinking about, what his next move is. He’s so unpredictable, it’s crazy.”
Therein lay the problem: It was difficult to tell whether Le Roux was truly taking the bait or just playing along. For the first month, Klaussen was able to conduct all his business with Le Roux via encrypted email and occasional phone calls. But he and the agents knew that at some point, Klaussen would need to meet the boss in person. Then, in early May, Le Roux sent him a message: “Book a flight to Rio.”
The request was typical Le Roux, abrupt enough to feel impulsive, arbitrary enough to feel threatening. Whichever was the case, the urgency of it caught Stouch and Cindric off-guard. There was no time to get the diplomatic visas they would need to travel to Brazil.
The agents offered Klaussen the option of turning down the request. If Le Roux somehow already suspected him, he could be walking into a trap. But they knew as well as Klaussen that nobody ignored the boss’s orders and expected to stay employed. If Klaussen failed to show, Le Roux would be instantly suspicious—if he wasn’t already.
Klaussen bought the ticket to Rio and booked a cheap hotel, careful to stay within Le Roux’s $80-a-night budget. He wouldn’t be using the room anyway. The DEA was paying for a nicer one.