At first, it appeared that Joseph Hunter’s case might bring Le Roux into the light. Hunter’s court-appointed attorney, a New York criminal defense lawyer named Marlon Kirton, planned an unconventional defense that would use the government’s own prized witness against them. In January 2015, he filed a motion asking the judge to dismiss the case against Hunter, alleging that the use of Le Roux as an informant amounted to “outrageous conduct” on the part of the government. In the filing, Kirton appeared to be laying the foundation for a rarely used, and even more rarely successful, defense known as duress. A claim of duress argues, essentially, that a defendant committed a crime because he faced an imminent threat of serious bodily harm or death. A person could be found innocent of a crime, in other words, if someone held a loaded gun to his head and told him to commit it. Hunter, the argument went, had gone along with the assassination plan only because he believed Le Roux would kill him if he refused.
Years before either man was arrested, Hunter claimed, Le Roux had threatened him and his family over a gold deal gone bad. And Hunter was in a unique position to know that Le Roux followed through on his threats. “Mr. _________ literally killed and threatened his associates with the full knowledge of his other associates,” Kirton wrote in the motion. (Le Roux’s name was still officially sealed, and Kirton was required to blank it out despite the fact that The New York Times had revealed it a month earlier.) “How then can law enforcement use this man to engage the same person as part of a reverse sting operation? What choice did Mr. Hunter have? The answer is death.”
Hunter’s argument was a thin reed, laced with the freakish irony that a man who had carried out hits for Le Roux claimed to be doing so out of fear of Le Roux’s hit men. But given the evidence against Hunter, it appeared to be the only reed available.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York responded that even if Le Roux had threatened Hunter, it had happened long ago. Hunter had ample time to quit the organization and go to the police. Indeed, he himself admitted to having left the organization for a time, returning after his former boss, Dave Smith, was murdered.
Scott Stammers, in the North Korean methamphetamine case, made motions suggesting he might also pursue a duress defense. His lawyer demanded that the prosecution hand over, among other evidence, “all threats made by _________ to Scott Stammers,” and “all killings carried out at the directive of _________.”
But ultimately both Hunter and Stammers would end up where most federal defendants do. Several weeks after Kirton’s filing, before the judge in the case had even ruled on it, Hunter changed his plea to guilty. Six months later, in August 2015, Stammers followed suit. Eventually, all ten defendants across both cases would do the same, pleading guilty and throwing themselves on the mercy of the court.
By the beginning of 2016, I’d been following these cases for two and half years, and Le Roux’s name had never so much as been mentioned in an open courtroom. In court, lawyers for the defendants in New York were not only required to redact his name in filings, but to use elaborate hypotheticals to discuss anything related to Le Roux. “Imagine that you have the godfather,” one attorney proposed to the judge, in a lengthy back and forth in open court. “A man who is immersed in the most horrific and pronounced crimes you can think of, including murders, and this godfather has his own security team that’s involved in helping him carry out murders in organized crime.”
At first the fanatical secrecy made sense: Through at least mid-2014, Le Roux was essentially an undercover DEA operative in U.S. custody. By virtue of his cooperation, agents were able to build their elaborate sting operations around the fiction that he was still out in the world; it was essential that his subordinates believe Le Roux was still free, calling the shots. But once the underlings had been arrested, the utility of that fiction evaporated. After his name became international news in December 2014, it was rendered ridiculous. Le Roux might have been able to convince Oz that a 2013 Brazilian newspaper story about him was fake news, but the revelation in The New York Times that he was in U.S. custody ended his life as pretend drug boss.
Still, the government guarded facts about Le Roux with the same zealous secrecy, propelled by an internal logic that was itself closed to interrogation. His name might have been public, but Le Roux’s case file remained sealed. So, too, did significant portions of the prosecution’s cases against Hunter and his team of would-be assassins, the group arrested for trafficking North Korean meth, and the RX Limited defendants indicted in Minnesota.
Even the name of Le Roux’s defense attorney was treated like a state secret. In a closed proceeding in August 2013, Le Roux had dispensed with Marvinny, his appointed attorney, and hired a New York criminal lawyer named B. Alan Seidler. (“I was on the case for a while, and now I’m not,” was all Marvinny would tell me when I reached him by phone.) Sometime later Le Roux fired Seidler, too, hiring another attorney whose name was sealed. No one I spoke with, including a former federal prosecutor who had worked on sensitive terrorism cases, could find any precedent for sealing an attorney’s name when the defendant’s name was public. What made the maneuver even more mystifying was that Le Roux’s new attorney wasn’t appointed by the court. He was being paid by Le Roux—out of what funds was anyone’s guess—and could quit the case any time he wished.
Now, as one defendant after another folded and admitted his guilt, any hope I’d had that Le Roux himself might ever be called to testify seemed to be draining away. But there was one defendant whose attorneys thought they had a way to bring Le Roux into the open.
“The government is embarrassed,” Robert Richman, one of Moran Oz’s attorneys, told me when I traveled to Minneapolis to interview Oz in December 2015. “They don’t want to admit that Le Roux is involved.” Richman and the other half of Oz’s defense team, Joe Friedberg, had started to think their client had the basis for a duress defense. Oz, after all, had been thrown off a boat and shot at by Le Roux’s henchman. The only problem was that Linda Marks, the Department of Justice lawyer prosecuting the case, exhibited no intention of calling Le Roux as a witness much less making him available to Oz’s attorneys for a deposition.
At first, their attempts to gain access to Le Roux amounted to legal filings mocking the government’s absurd level of secrecy. When they’d asked to speak to Le Roux’s attorney, the prosecutor told them that “counsel for Le Roux has requested anonymity because he fears for his safety from ‘international associates of Mr. Le Roux,’ ” Richman and Friedman wrote in a brief. “Given that Mr. Le Roux is more dangerous than any of his associates, one wonders whether the masked attorney has identified himself to his own client. Perhaps even Mr. Le Roux does not know the identity of his attorney, with all meetings conducted in a confessional, perhaps, or with a curtain separating the two, voice disguised.” When they’d suggested that they might subpoena Le Roux, Marks had replied that they could do so “only if he is in the United States,” and then refused to indicate whether he was. “We feel reasonably confident that Mr. Le Roux is somewhere on planet Earth, but that is only an inference,” Richman and Friedman wrote. Wherever he was, they argued that it should be Le Roux who was facing a jury, not underlings like Oz. “The government’s use of Mr. Le Roux as an informant is even more egregious here because the government has cut a deal with the principal architect and leader of the alleged criminal enterprise, while prosecuting his employees,” they concluded. “It is as if Microsoft was a criminal enterprise, and the government cuts a deal with Bill Gates to take down the entire shipping department.”
Mockery aside, the filings were part of a serious legal gambit that Richman and Friedman thought might force the government’s hand. The case against Oz was based in part on calls between Le Roux, in U.S. custody, and Oz, in Israel. Digging through the evidence, Richman realized that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had recorded them without a warrant. So he filed a motion to have the material suppressed, arguing that U.S. federal law required at least one party consent to a recorded phone call. Richman knew that Oz certainly hadn’t given his permission. Had Le Roux? The government produced statements from DEA agents saying that he had. But Richman and Friedberg argued that if the government wanted to prove Le Roux did so voluntarily, the man himself would need to say it under oath. “Defendant Moran Oz moves for an order requiring the government to produce its favorite informant, Paul Calder Le Roux, to testify at the motion hearing,” Richman wrote.
After a few weeks of back and forth, in mid-January 2016 the judge finally handed down a decision: “IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that Defendant Moran Oz’s Motion to Produce Government Informant Paul Calder Le Roux for a Motion Hearing is GRANTED.”
After years of chasing Le Roux’s shadow, at first online and then around the world, here finally was my chance to see him face-to-face, at least in a courtroom. I arrived in Minneapolis on a clear, frigid morning in early March. The hearing was across the river in St. Paul, and I ran into Richman and Friedberg at a café beforehand. They showed me a copy of what appeared to be a fake local arrest record for Le Roux, on cocaine charges, concocted by the Department of Justice as a cover story for his transfer to the Minnesota jail. It was evidence that Le Roux was nearby—and of how far federal prosecutors had gone to keep him under wraps.
There was also some bad news. “Le Roux’s lawyer filed an emergency motion to seal the courtroom,” Richman told me. In a letter to the court that was itself sealed, the anonymous lawyer argued that Le Roux’s family would be put in jeopardy by allowing the media to report on the proceedings. Some of Le Roux’s former employees, like Lachlan McConnell, were still at large, and could represent a danger to people close to Le Roux. Later, I got a copy of the letter, which amounted to an unusual prosecution-sanctioned list of accusations against Le Roux’s associates. “For example, Chris De Meyer, a former Special Forces French Foreign Legion Sniper, is an un-indicted coconspirator in the Hunter case,” the attorney wrote. “De Meyer, known to have access to weapons, is at large and resides approximately 40 minutes from Leroux’s ex-wife. De Meyer also participated in murders with and for Hunter. He was a consistent member of Hunter’s murder for hire group.” He was, the letter asserted, responsible for the murder of Noimie Edillor, shooting her in the head.
The judge allowed the press in the courtroom to hear his decision on the sealing order, and I took a seat in the back of the courtroom, alongside some local reporters and Oz’s wife, who had moved from Israel with their two kids. A few minutes later, Oz arrived in jeans and a black jacket, wearing the same dark, trim beard as when I’d met him in 2015. For a man about to share a courtroom with the ex-boss who’d had him shot at and set up, he appeared buoyant. When Richman showed him a printout of Le Roux’s fake local arrest record, he laughed aloud.
Linda Marks, the prosecutor, had dark, swept-back hair and was wearing a black suit, sitting with another prosecutor at a table across the courtroom. They’d both flown in from Washington.
The judge opened the hearing by noting the request from Le Roux’s attorney to close the courtroom. “Let me turn first to Mr. Oz’s counsel,” he said. “Do you continue to assert your constitutional rights to have an open hearing, Mr. Richman?”
“Yes, your honor,” Richman replied. “I find this procedure somewhat baffling.” Le Roux, he pointed out, was a government informant. His name was now public, and court hearings are typically sealed only at the behest of the government, not a witness’s private attorney. “This is a matter that has generated great interest,” Richman continued. “There are members of the press in the back of the courtroom, as well as Mr. Oz’s family.” Richman pointed out that Le Roux’s identity had been revealed over a year before and “no harm has fallen on the family. And that document also suggests that the government has taken steps to protect the family.”
The moment had arrived that could decide whether Le Roux would be forced to publicly answer for his past—from the pharmacy network to the drug-running to the arms shipments to the murders—and for his work on behalf of the U.S. government.
“I am going to deny the request,” the judge finally said. “Nothing has been established that would override the strong interest that the defendant has in a public proceeding.”
And with that, the hearing began. Linda Marks called Special Agent Eric Stouch, from the DEA Special Operations Division, who entered in a suit, holding a pair of eyeglasses. Stouch testified succinctly to the fact that Le Roux had cooperated voluntarily, that he’d been an eager participant in the sting operation. On cross-examination, Richman—hoping to establish that Le Roux had been so desperate for a deal that he had lied about Oz’s role—pressed Stouch on whether Le Roux had ever been promised that he wouldn’t be extradited to another country, or that he would avoid facing the death penalty. Stouch admitted that Le Roux had voiced concern about being extradited, but denied that the government had made him any assurances.
Richman then attempted to drive home another point. After the DEA had arrested Le Roux, he asked, wasn’t he then allowed to keep operating the same pharmacy network that the United States had sought for years to shut down?
“The Internet pharmacy was still operating, but was winding down,” Stouch said.
“And as part of that process of operating the pharmacy, he was continuing to transfer cash to pay salaries and pay doctors and so on, correct?” Richman asked.
“He was transferring cash to pay salaries.”
“And that was obviously with the consent of the U.S. government, correct?”
“Yes.”
“So during that period of time the U.S. government was operating the Internet pharmacy, correct?”
Linda Marks objected, and it wasn’t hard to see why. If the government was going to argue that RX Limited put its customers in danger, they would have to answer for why they had given Le Roux access to his money so he could keep it operating, just to let them catch lower-level employees.
“Overruled,” the judge said.
“No, we were in the process of having him wind it down,” Stouch said. “It was still operating and he was paying salaries. Whether the U.S. government was operating the pharmacy, I—we were in the process of shutting it down.”
After Stouch, Marks called Travis Ocken, a DEA agent from Minneapolis who had helped Brill in the later stages of the RX Limited case, and had been by Le Roux’s side when he communicated with Moran Oz. Ocken also testified to the fact the Le Roux had made the calls voluntarily.
Now it was Richman’s turn. “Your honor,” he said. “We call Paul Calder Le Roux.”
Le Roux entered the courtroom through a side door, escorted by two plainclothes United States marshals. He had a slightly unruly beard that was a darker shade than his silver hair, but otherwise looked surprisingly tropical in a billowy, lemon-yellow T-shirt and orange correctional pants. He was still a fat man—his fake arrest record listed him at six feet, 280 pounds—but he’d lost some weight in his three and a half years in custody.
The marshals unshackled his arms and pointed him to the elevated witness stand. He scanned the courtroom intently as he settled into the chair, as if puzzled by the people who had shown up to see him. For a moment we locked eyes, or at least I thought we did. But his gaze quickly moved on, with an expression of bemused curiosity.
If Le Roux’s anonymous lawyer was in attendance, he didn’t make his presence known. So, in what amounted to a contorted legal setup, Le Roux—a potential defense witness—was functionally represented by Marks, who offered periodic objections that were indistinguishable from those she might have made for her own witness.
Furthering the role-reversal, Richman adopted an approach not unlike that of a prosecutor questioning a defendant about his crimes. He approached the podium and began by asking Le Roux what his profession was.
Le Roux thought for a moment, then responded in what sounded to my ears like a South African accent, flattened by years abroad—and Le Roux’s own efforts to shed it. “Essentially,” he said, “I worked as a programmer for many years.”
The ostensible purpose of the hearing, to establish whether Le Roux had consented to recordings of his phone calls with Moran Oz, was accomplished in minutes. But Richman was after more, and he pushed Le Roux to admit to a list of the same facts that I had been chasing for years. He confirmed that he had created the encryption software E4M, but denied that he had developed TrueCrypt, its famous progeny. He copped to some of his aliases, including Johan Smit, Bernard Bowlins, and John Smith. He admitted having organized the two-hundred-kilo cocaine shipment on the JeReVe, out of Ecuador.
It was when Richman began asking about the murders that the casualness of Le Roux’s admissions became most dissonant.
“You knew that your legal situation was far worse than just a methamphetamine charge, correct?” Richman asked, probing Le Roux’s motives for cooperating.
“In what way?” Le Roux asked. He leaned back in his chair, his arms folded.
“Well, for example, you ordered multiple murders, correct?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“And, for example, you ordered the murder of a Filipino customs agent, correct?”
“That’s not correct,” Le Roux said, leaning into the microphone and furrowing his brow in mild irritation. There, in the skeptical narrowing of his eyes, he displayed the sense of superiority that I heard many of his employees and family members describe.
“What is not correct about it?”
“The individual wasn’t a customs agent,” Le Roux said. It was a trivial objection: The victim in question, Noimie Edillor, was a part-time real estate agent who also worked for Le Roux, helping him move items through customs.
“So it was a real estate agent, correct?” Richman continued.
“Correct.”
“And then there was a second real estate agent, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Who was also murdered on your orders, correct?”
“That’s true.” There was nothing approaching contrition in his manner, nor a hint of any emotion at all. When Le Roux then admitted that he had also ordered the killing of Dave Smith, his tone was as cold and flat as if he had just confirmed what he had been served for breakfast.
Richman walked Le Roux through his decision to cooperate with the U.S. government, fishing for evidence that he’d done so under pressure from the DEA, or in exchange for promises that he would avoid extradition or the death penalty. The greater the benefit that Le Roux expected from the government for his cooperation, the more likely it was that he would lie to help them convict Moran Oz.
“The government has given no assurances in the plea deal,” Le Roux replied, sounding well-practiced. “They simply state that they will make it known to the court if I’m truthful and I provide information that’s of substantial assistance.” He acknowledged that when he’d decided to cooperate on the plane back to the U.S., he’d been formally charged in only the meth deal. The possible sentence was ten years to life, but as Le Roux helpfully pointed out to Richman, the recommended sentence was “only around twelve years.”
As Richman tried to maneuver him into admitting that he had cooperated out of fear, Le Roux nimbly deflected him.
Did Le Roux know, Richman asked, that Adam Samia and David Stillwell were being prosecuted in New York for Catherine Lee’s murder, and that if he himself had been charged, he could have faced the death penalty?
“I’m not aware of how the laws relate to that case, so I couldn’t answer that,” Le Roux said.
“You don’t know whether you could face the death penalty if you were charged with a murder in the United States?”
“I don’t know the law here, so I couldn’t answer that,” Le Roux said. “If you say so.”
When it came to other countries’ laws, though, Le Roux displayed a rather detailed knowledge. He admitted that he was vulnerable to criminal charges in the Philippines and Ecuador—the latter “since the cocaine shipment originated there.” He’d committed no crimes in Brazil, he said, because it “lacks a conspiracy law.” As for his adventures in Somalia, he argued, “Somalia lacks any government, so I am not concerned about whatever actions took place there because they are not crimes.”
By this point, Richman had achieved his goal, and the judge seemed to have reached the limit of the latitude he was willing to grant. Richman tried one more gambit. “Isn’t it true that you had a reputation for killing people who stole from you?” he asked.
“That is an exaggeration,” Le Roux said.
“Nothing further, your honor.”
After a brief cross-examination, in which Linda Marks reestablished that Le Roux had agreed to have his phone calls and email monitored, the hearing was over. Two marshals shackled Le Roux and escorted him back through the side door.
Outside the courtroom, Oz’s other attorney, Friedberg, seemed almost triumphant, even though the defense team would ultimately lose the motion to throw out the phone and email records. They’d flushed Le Roux out into the open, and if they called him as a witness at Oz’s trial, they could easily establish his murderous past through his own admissions. “Certainly, the phone calls will come into evidence, we always knew that,” he said. “Getting a look at this guy is worth a lot to us.”
The hearing had finally breached the wall of secrecy surrounding Le Roux, or at least a section of it. The same day, a federal judge in New York unsealed a portion of his case file in the Southern District. The docket showed that Le Roux had formally pleaded guilty, after a year of cooperation, at the end of 2013. His final plea deal remained sealed, but the “information” he had signed was now available. There, at last, were the criminal counts that Le Roux was on the hook for: the meth importation plan, computer hacking, and bribery of a foreign official. The information also included crimes that he’d admitted but would never be prosecuted for, including that he had solicited or participated in seven murders. The names were redacted, but it wasn’t hard for me to fill them in: Dave Smith, Noimie Edillor, Catherine Lee, Joe Frank Zuñiga, Bruce Jones, Herbert Tan Tiu, and Chito—the man who had tipped off the Philippine police to Tiu’s gun stash. Kent Bailey told me that Le Roux denied ordering the daylight assassination of Michael Lontoc, the Philippine target shooter who ran the organization’s gun shop in Manila, claiming someone else killed him over a gambling debt.
There was another remarkable fact in Le Roux’s unsealed docket, one that held the key to the incredible secrecy surrounding him. Le Roux had confessed to selling technology to the government of Iran, a crime in the United States. Finally I understood why Le Roux had been treated like a national security asset: He was one. Or at least a potential asset. Later, I learned from the former 960 agent that the DEA hadn’t been able to turn Le Roux’s information about Iran into actionable intelligence. “We were trying to work with the FBI, it just didn’t go anywhere,” he said. The Obama administration, he said, refused to allow the DEA to send anyone into Iran to pick up the trail of Le Roux’s contacts. And they’d missed out on Nestor Del Rosario, who had approached the Australians willing to cooperate before he disappeared. “I don’t blame him,” the former agent said. “I wish we would have talked to him because he’s the one who could really spell out the whole Iranian situation.”
Le Roux’s North Korean connections, via a Chinese triad group, similarly fizzled. Ye Tiong Tan Lim, the man convicted in the North Korean meth sting, had declined to cooperate, leaving the DEA with no path into the organization. “Lim plays a role of a poor, little old guy,” the former 960 agent said. “Lim is legit. He’s scared his family would be murdered. And he’s probably right. We just never got far with him. We needed him because we didn’t understand it. And we would have had to go into Hong Kong. They don’t like the Americans.”
Le Roux had leveraged his way into a deal with the U.S. government based on a promise that had largely dissolved into vapor, aside from the former employees he’d helped set up. Kent Bailey, for one, believed that the 960 agents had been starstruck by headline-grabbing possibilities and let themselves believe that Le Roux could deliver something bigger than himself. “These are the countries that are in the news, these are hot frickin’ items,” Bailey said. “His pipe dream was that he was dealing directly with some general in the Iranian army, and Iran was talking about building missiles for nuclear weapons. But people in that world think they are bigger than they are.”