But gradually he seemed to realize that he was talking to the only person who knew as much about his pharmacy operation as he did. Brill had analyzed it from every angle, traced every branch to its endpoint. And she had read his emails, too. For Brill, it soon felt like they were talking as peers. “I don’t know that I would call it fun,” she said. “But it was somebody I could actually talk to who knew what I was talking about the whole time. Where I didn’t have to explain.” Every question she’d had about RX Limited could now be answered by the man who had created it. They dove deep into the technical aspects of Le Roux’s networks: the email servers, the affiliate website back ends, the thousands of Web domains. After a couple hours, Brill had filled the notepad and was writing on its cardboard backing.
Over the course of late 2012 and early 2013, Brill returned to interview Le Roux several more times. She and Bailey had hoped to utilize him as an asset, to help lure Moran Oz, Alon Berkman, and others out of Israel. But the 960 agents who controlled Le Roux had specific targets in their sights, Hunter and the North Korean meth groups, and declined to make him available to help Brill round up her own. Le Roux was permitted to send only occasional communications to the likes of Oz and Berkman, just enough to keep up the charade that he was at large.
After Hunter was busted in the fall of 2013, Bailey and Brill finally got a chance to put Le Roux to work. Brill found him to be an enthusiastic partner in setting up a new ruse. “He had made up his mind that he was going to do as much as he could now that he was in the situation he was in,” Brill said. “And information was his currency.”
This time Le Roux wouldn’t have Colombian partners to dangle in front of the targets. He would have to use cleverness and cajoling to lure Oz and Berkman into a trap. With RX Limited barely functional, first he would have to convince them that he was bringing it back to life.
On orders from Le Roux when he was still a free man, Oz and Berkman had shuttered the Tel Aviv office in 2012. They spent months selling off furniture and equipment. From Brazil, Le Roux had ordered Berkman to transfer as many of his assets as possible out of Hong Kong, where the government was trying to seize them. Oz and Berkman retrenched to Jerusalem—a temporary setback, Le Roux assured them. He was planning a future iteration of the business with new call centers, new pharmacies, new doctors. But his communication became increasingly sporadic. Periodically, Oz wrote to Le Roux to ask about severance payments for former employees in Israel. As the company wound down, Le Roux had wired part of the money, which was owed under Israeli law, and promised that the rest would come later.
And then, in September 2012, Le Roux seemed to disappear entirely. Rumors swirled that he had gone underground because authorities had intercepted one of his boats, carrying arms or drugs. Shai Reuven, who was still running Le Roux’s business in Manila, would say only that the boss had gone quiet. The transfers from Hong Kong and the other accounts became increasingly sporadic. “We knew something had happened,” Oz said.
In March 2013, Le Roux reappeared with orders for Oz and Berkman to further cut the staff in Israel, and to stop filling orders and paying doctors and pharmacists by the end of the year. The company would relaunch again soon, he now said, with a new office in Eastern Europe and a different model. “Please advice what is the status with the severance payments,” Oz wrote back. “You asked me to split it to three, but the people didn’t get their second payment and the keep calling me, please let me know what to tell them.”
Oz still felt responsible to the Israeli employees who were owed money, some of whom were friends, and none of whom had heard of Paul Le Roux. To them, Oz was the boss. “He was getting phone calls from employees saying, ‘You shut down the company, you disappeared, you have to pay us, by law,’ ” a friend of Oz’s said.
In late December, Oz and Berkman stumbled onto an article in the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reporting that Le Roux had been arrested. The story, by a reporter who had been tipped off to the Brazilian end of the investigation, was published in Portuguese, but a quick pass through an online translator provided the basic, alarming facts: The DEA had been investigating RX Limited for years and had tracked Le Roux to Brazil, where he was involved in large-scale cocaine trafficking across the Pacific. Worse, the article claimed that the DEA had arrested Le Roux in Liberia and he’d cut a deal, which “led to the arrest of employees in Australia, Hong Kong, Philippines and the United States.” The headline was, simply, “The Lord of Crime.”
In a panic, Oz left word with Reuven to call him. The next day, the return call came from Le Roux himself. “I heard you guys are getting very excited over this article that appeared in the Brazilian press,” he said, laughing.
“Yes, tell me about it,” Oz said.
“At the end of the day, the Israelis are the guys that they arrested in Hong Kong,” Le Roux said. “Basically, they were grabbed and accused of money laundering.”
“Yeah.”
“Bottom line, most of that article is actually true, but it’s been grossly exaggerated and distorted, okay? There’s always surveillance on our operations. That is a matter of fact.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And also, that’s a big part of the reason why I shut down the old operation, like, when I did, because there’s a lot of heat on it.”
“Yeah, but everything is okay with you?”
“Everything is okay with me,” Le Roux said. “Right now I’m traveling under a different passport. I took some steps—you following what I’m saying?”
“Of course.”
“For some reason, the press likes to write about me. I am the lord of crime in this Brazilian newspaper. I run huge militias. You know, they love to write all types of bullshit. Some of it is true, but most of it is grossly exaggerated,” he said. “You know, everyone needs to calm the fuck down.”
Le Roux told Oz he finally had the rest of the money for the Israeli employees, coming within weeks. And he still planned to start up the company again. “I know you’re hurting,” he said. “Keep in mind, everyone is fucking hurting right now, you see what I’m saying? But there is light at the end of the tunnel. I have arranged your cash.” He just needed to see Oz in person to finalize the transfer. He first proposed they meet in Panama, but Oz declined. When Le Roux suggested Romania, he agreed.
With the benefit of hindsight, it seemed absurd that Oz had fallen for it. Berkman didn’t, electing to ignore Le Roux’s entreaties and stay in Israel. Was it greed that blinded Oz, or gullibility? His emails made him appear enthusiastic to restart the business with Le Roux, but later he would assert that the only reason he’d gone along with the meeting was in the hopes of getting the employees’ severance back. “I didn’t go to Romania to get my own salary,” he said. In another sense, though, it was a testament to the alternate reality, mythology even, that Le Roux had created around himself. He could have an employee thrown off a boat and shot at, show up in a U.N. report funding a militia in Somalia, get written up in a major newspaper as having been busted for drug running, and an employee would still believe him enough to get on a plane and meet him in a foreign country.
A few weeks later, Oz landed in Bucharest along with a friend he’d invited on the trip. They had an Israeli expat friend in Romania, and the three of them spent two days hanging out and gambling in the local casinos. Oz won a few thousand Euros at his preferred game, roulette.
The meeting with Le Roux was scheduled for the third day, but as the time approached Oz grew nervous. His chief concern was not that Le Roux might be setting him up, but that he might be planning to kill him. He asked the friend from Bucharest to arrange some hired security, “just to make sure that there are no surprises.” The friend found a couple of bodyguards he could pay by the hour.
Le Roux had set the meeting for March 13 at the Pullman Hotel, not far from the airport. Oz and his two friends arrived in the morning and met up with the bodyguards, who accompanied Oz to a distant part of the lobby while his friends waited at the entrance. After a half hour, Oz texted them to say that his boss hadn’t shown up yet. When the friends checked in a while later, Oz didn’t respond.
Worried, they decided to look for him. They found him at another entrance, surrounded by several men and one woman. Oz explained that they were plainclothes police officers, that they’d shown up looking for him and wanted to take him to the station to ask questions. The bodyguards seemed to have slipped away.
The officers asked the friends to accompany them to the station, and the three men climbed into the back of an old unmarked car. Oz seemed terrified that it was another of Le Roux’s ruses. “Look, they don’t wear police uniforms,” Oz said to his friends in Hebrew. “I hope it’s not one of his tricks.”
He was relieved when they arrived at the Bucharest police station—at least it appeared not to be a Le Roux hit in disguise. His local friend found him a Romanian lawyer, while the other one went to their hotel to retrieve their passports, hoping the whole thing could be cleared up by the evening. After the friend returned, the lawyer told him that Oz had been arrested on behalf of an American agency.
“Go back to Israel, meet Moran’s parents, and tell them to get a good lawyer,” the attorney told him. “Because they are going to move him to the U.S. for a trial.”
Oz spent the next several months in an overcrowded Romanian jail, housed with seven other inmates in a stifling seven-by-ten-foot cell. One of his cellmates had a heart attack and died. Oz’s family hired a local lawyer to fight his extradition, but the hearings were all conducted in Romanian, and Oz often had little idea what was happening. His only contact with the American government had been through Kimberly Brill, from the DEA, who briefly showed up to question him after his arrest.
More than anything, he was baffled that the United States had used Le Roux to get to him and not the other way around. He told them about how Le Roux had ordered him thrown off the boat and shot at. He would have helped them, he said, if they’d asked.
Finally, on the last day he could be legally held in Romania, a judge overruled Oz’s opposition to extradition, and he was put on a plane to the United States. He landed in Minneapolis and was transported to the Sherburne County Jail, outside the city.
In early 2014, Prabhakara Tumpati was hustling again to keep his head above water. He’d opened three sleep clinics, and two of them were losing money. To help make ends meet, he was picking up call shifts at a hospital near his home in suburban Philadelphia. It had been two years since he had given up prescribing for RX Limited. More recently, his referral fees had stopped coming as well, and his physician contacts still prescribing for it told him it had essentially disappeared.
So Tumpati was doubly surprised to receive a letter from Linda Marks’s office at the Consumer Protection Branch of the U.S. Department of Justice, suggesting that his work for the network had been illegal. He engaged a lawyer to respond, but wasn’t overly concerned. “I was under the impression that it was more like, ‘Help us, we are investigating this guy that has these other things going on,’ ” he said. After all, he had been the one trying to convince RX Limited that they needed to add video technology so that doctors could see patients virtually. Tumpati’s lawyer responded that the doctor didn’t believe he had done anything illegal, and that he was willing to come to Washington and sit down with the attorneys.
For a while, that seemed like the end of it. Then, on the morning of March 27, Tumpati had just completed a 7-P.M.-to-6-A.M. shift at the hospital, and was planning to head home and grab a few hours of sleep before heading off to one of his clinics. As he pulled his car into the driveway, he failed to notice a pair of sedans parked near the end of it. He went upstairs to change clothes, and was standing in his thermal underwear when he heard a voice say, “Don’t move.”
A team of ten officers had arrived, guns drawn, to make the arrest. The agents told Tumpati that they had a warrant and went room to room, grabbing files and computers. Tumpati’s wife stood by, calmly praying, and then turned to their four-year-old daughter to comfort her. “She didn’t know what was going on or who these people were,” Tumpati said.
Once they’d put their guns away, the agents were polite and professional. They agreed to let Tumpati walk to the car without handcuffs, suggesting that he tell his neighbors it had been a case of mistaken identity. They then took him to the local police station, where he was strip-searched and fingerprinted, and transported to a federal processing center in downtown Philadelphia. Only later would he learn that he was to be tried not in Pennsylvania but in Minnesota.
Adam Samia, the trigger man Hunter had brought in to kill Catherine Lee, was—like many of Le Roux’s former employees—oblivious to Le Roux’s fate. He’d only ever communicated with the boss through Hunter, and after Hunter had accused him of botching the last job in the Philippines, he didn’t expect to hear from either of them again. Since 2012 Samia had been back in Roxboro, North Carolina, working on his custom gun holster business with David Stillwell as if the Manila trip had never happened.
Then on November 20, 2013, a former colleague from The Company named John O’Donoghue started a chat with Samia on Facebook.
Almost a year later, in September 2014, when Samia and O’Donoghue chatted again, O’Donoghue had figured out that it was Le Roux who had flipped and was taking people down with him.
Three months later, on December 20, 2014, The New York Times revealed to the world what O’Donoghue and others on the inside had figured out: Paul Le Roux was in the custody of the DEA, and for the previous year he’d been working to bring down his own organization.
Samia and Stillwell’s turn to “get brought into this shit” wouldn’t arrive until seven months later, on the morning of July 22, 2015. Stillwell was out picking up some supplies for new holsters at the hardware store. On the way to his office, he was pulled over by a local sheriff and arrested. When the sheriff brought him to the county lockup, he was placed in an interrogation room. Samia was already at the station, having been lured with a question about his gun permits.
Two federal agents stepped into the room with Stillwell and introduced themselves as special agents Eric Stouch and Thomas Cindric from the DEA. “We work for the Special Operations Division out of Virginia,” Stouch said, “and we’re assigned to work investigations primarily overseas. For several years now we’ve been conducting an investigation that led us to you.” They read Stillwell his rights, and after he declined to ask for a lawyer, began asking questions about his 2012 trip to the Philippines. At first, Stillwell claimed to be shocked by their insinuations, saying he’d only traveled to Manila, his first trip out of the country, to unwind with Samia.
But gradually the agents began to tell him drips of what they knew, and what they claimed Samia had already told them. “David, David,” Stouch said. “I understand you’re kind of blown away by the circumstances right now. Take a deep breath here, all right? You’re a professional. You make holsters, you do it well. We’re professionals, we do our jobs well. It’s not a coincidence that Adam’s in here today, and you’re in here. We’ve come to you for a particular reason, but I think there’s some saving grace here with your situation. I don’t know, Tom, what do you think?”
“I think there is because…I don’t think you pulled the trigger,” Cindric said.
They told Stillwell they’d been examining his emails, his bank records, his travel receipts. They knew he was there when Lee was killed, Stouch said, “but we don’t think you really liked it.”
As the minutes passed, Stillwell repeatedly told the agents that he couldn’t recall the events in Manila. “No, I get that!” Cindric said. “I get that. My problem is I don’t really believe you. And I’ll tell you why.”
“Okay.”
“Because there are significant events of people’s lives, and one is watching another man pull out a gun and shoot somebody in the face, twice.”
After an hour and a half of back and forth, Stillwell’s resistance slowly began to fade, as Cindric patiently ground him down. “Did Adam Samia pull the trigger on that woman?” he finally asked.
“Yes.”
“Were you present?”
“Yes.”
“Did it happen in the van?”
“It was in a vehicle.”
“Who was driving the vehicle?”
“I was driving.”
“Were you shocked that he pulled the trigger?”
“Yeah,” said Stillwell.
Samia, for his part, would admit only that he had known Hunter. “I’ve worked with him in the past, yes,” he said, “doing security work.” The jobs consisted of buying and securing gold in Africa, to be shipped to Hong Kong and Dubai. His 2012 trip to the Philippines had just been for some “advance work,” he said. He was “flabbergasted” by the charges. “I’ve met these people, yes, I’ve worked with them in the past, but I did nothing, ever, illegal,” he went on. “My brother’s in law enforcement, all my family is in law enforcement, I’ve never done nothing wrong.”
The agents quickly piled up circumstantial evidence alongside Stillwell’s admissions. At Samia’s house, they found a camera that contained surveillance photos of Catherine Lee’s workplace, along with itineraries from the Philippines trip, and a keychain holding what appeared to be a key to a Toyota Innova van. On a camera of Stillwell’s, they found photographs dated February 12, 2012—the day that Catherine Lee was murdered. According to court filings, the photos “appeared to depict, among other things, a white van similar to the one in which (according to witness accounts) Lee was murdered, and a wounded human head.” And on a small notebook found in Samia’s bedroom, they noticed that he’d written down “Mr. Le Roux, Paul Calder.”
“The Fat Man, that’s what we called him,” Lachlan McConnell said. He was sitting across from me in December 2015 at a Starbucks outside of a mall in Makati City, Manila. A few days earlier, when I’d finally gotten ahold of him, he’d selected this spot for our meeting.
I’d been surprised that I ever heard back from McConnell, having tried without luck to contact him several times before arriving in the country. His name turned up on the website for a security contractor in Manila that listed him on its staff. I had started to assume that the listing was dated—it seemed farfetched that McConnell would be operating out in the open in the Philippines while a fugitive from an indictment in the United States. But one afternoon I decided to drop by the company’s office anyway. I left my business card with the receptionist. Later that day, my phone rang. “I’m reluctant to talk on the phone,” McConnell said. “There’s certain things going on right now, which directly relate to my welfare.” He was doing contract work on another Philippine island, but we could meet when he returned. “Literally, there is nothing we can put in writing,” he continued. “It will put me in a situation where it will endanger me.”
He arrived at the appointed hour, a white guy with thinning hair, in a polo shirt with folded reading glasses hanging from its open collar. “People are still really scared, because there is a strong belief that there are operations still going on,” he said. “Money talks in this country. For five thousand pesos”—around $100—“you could have someone taken out.” He lit a cigarette, the first of several, and dropped the pack on the table. His own concerns were largely legal: he was facing thirty-five federal criminal counts in the United States, for setting up companies and shipping accounts connected to RX Limited.
For the next hour, McConnell recounted his story, from his hiring by Dave Smith to the gold schemes in Hong Kong and the missions in Zimbabwe, to Smith’s murder and Le Roux’s threats at the Hard Rock Cafe, to his new duties in Florida and his mental breakdown. He’d always tried to stay on the right side of the law in his work for Le Roux, he said. But somewhere along the way his sense of right and wrong had warped. “Morally I knew it was wrong,” he said. “I lost the plot.”
McConnell told me that after leaving the organization, he began moving locations with his family, hoping there was no one on his tail. Eventually his paranoia eased, and he started working security again. He stopped hearing from Le Roux, and in 2013, he’d decided to go to the authorities with what he knew. He wrote a letter detailing what he believed to be Le Roux’s crimes. Afraid that no agency in the Philippines could be trusted, he arranged for a friend to hand-deliver the letter to the U.S. embassy in Manila, with instructions not to give it to any non-American staff. He never heard back.
I caught up with him as he was trying again to switch sides, this time with a Philippine intelligence agency. McConnell had maintained copies of records about Le Roux’s wealth, including his purchases of gold bars and of land that he’d bought in Western Australia. He estimated that there was $16 million in gold left in the Philippines alone, and his plan was to help the agency and other countries confiscate Le Roux’s assets. In turn, he believed he would earn their protection against extradition to the United States. “I’m meeting with my handler today,” he said. “I’m not asking for money. I think I’m doing the right thing. I want to help, with what little I know, to destroy what Paul Le Roux has left.”
He wasn’t the only one trying to find Le Roux’s stashes. He’d heard talk of South African contractors showing up to ransack Le Roux’s houses and dig up backyards. Corrupt Philippine law enforcement agencies, McConnell said, were desperately searching the country for their own share. He likened it to Yamashita’s gold, a supposed stash of war loot left behind by General Tomoyuki Yamashita when the Japanese fled the Philippines during World War II. Countless prospectors had lost themselves to an obsession with finding it, wrecking their lives in a vain search for a treasure that was long gone, if it had ever been there at all.