Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  Yet, typical of Silicon Valley style, in his operations there is little or no infrastructure. He wants no permanent administration, locale, or means of production; no retinue, no partying, no posse. He uses the gig economy to procure contract mercenaries and temp workers. He issues orders to them by email or text in his own unbreakable encryption, sending them to distant corners of the earth to sequester assets, bribe officials, and negotiate business agreements. At any given moment, his hired hands never know where he is or even what he looks like. Loyalty, the adhesive of mafias, Chinese Triads, and cartels, isn’t in his playbook. Once he is done with people, he abandons them or, if they annoy him, has them executed. He calls his Filipino, African, and Israeli subordinates “marginals,” meaning less than human and expendable.

  Phase One and Phase Two criminal organizations tended to be linear, logical, and tied to physical geography. LeRoux is the first crime lord to operate in the realm of pure cyberspace. He browses among clients, suppliers, fixers, and networkers, meeting them wherever fiber optic cables and satellite links take him. His strange big brain empowers him to juggle multiple projects at once and remember everything. His ambitions are unrestrained by conscience and second thoughts.

  His entrepreneurial style might be compared to his fellow South African Elon Musk and to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, ranked among the world’s richest men. Like Musk, who zigzagged wildly from business directories to PayPal to outer space to electric cars to self-driving cars to tunnels, LeRoux’s brain vaults effortlessly from online casinos to e-commerce in pharmaceuticals to small arms to missile technology to North Korean crystal meth.

  And like Bezos, who created the Everything Store, the online superstore that aspired to sell anything anybody might want, LeRoux set out to build the Amazon for arms, with an ultraefficient fulfillment and transshipping facility in a sparkling new, entirely self-sufficient, heavily armed planned community in the Somali badlands.

  Most of the buzzwords of twenty-first-century entrepreneurship apply to LeRoux—contempt for tradition, disruption, lean management, global reach, and rapid scalability. He knows how to find and exploit unfilled niches, upend markets, travel light, move fast, and stay nimble.

  He has kept his dealings clandestine by creating his own, virtually uncrackable dark web. He is not a hacker. He never bothered to break into government or business systems, though he could have easily learned the knack. To him, computers are tools, like ballpoint pens and can openers. He used an old Dell that he configured himself. He was confident it couldn’t be breached, and he wasn’t so sure about newer models. Hackers as a rule don’t kill people. LeRoux did, personally and by proxy.

  For years, LeRoux was a ghost, flickering on and off the screens of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the CIA, and United Nations, yet evading becoming a target of counterterrorism and global crimefighting units. He went almost unnoticed even when he started dealing with Iran and North Korea. The monitoring systems of the U.S. government and its allies were alert to signs of conventional criminal groups, with their predictable, visible hierarchies. The DEA agents who started hunting LeRoux in early 2012 saw only a spectral outline, far more mysterious and challenging than any crime lord they had faced before. “He was creating a whole new industry that transcended the concept of drug trafficker and gun runner and was becoming something original,” said Lou Milione, head of the unit that tracked him. “With the economies of scale of which he was capable, he was going to reach a point where, if nobody took him out, he would have continued to get stronger and more powerful, and God knows what he would have been involved in. And He. Would. Not. Have. Cared.”

  The hunt began with a tip to two of Milione’s best agents, Tom Cindric and Eric Stouch, who had been partners for years and at that point were assigned to track international drug trafficking across Africa.

  Cindric, Stouch, and their fellow agents in the 960 Group, a secretive element inside the agency’s Special Operations Division, are some of the boldest and most creative criminal investigators in the U.S. government. Milione was, in his youth, an actor with serious off-Broadway and film credits. Within the DEA, he was famed for taking down Monzer al-Kassar, the so-called Prince of Marbella, his story splashed across the pages of The New Yorker. The ultimate arms merchant, Kassar, a Syrian, supplied every generation of terrorists and rogue leaders, from Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front and leader of the 1985 Achille Lauro Mediterranean cruise ship hijacking, to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Milione and his agents also arrested Haji Juma Khan, a kingpin of the Afghan heroin cartel. Most spectacularly, in 2008 Milione and his agents staged a sting that captured the Russian arms merchant Viktor Bout, the vaunted “Merchant of Death” who inspired the film The Lord of War.

  Milione handpicked agents who were smart, curious, capable of deception, in constant motion, enterprising, irreverent, and not what they seemed. They revered the law but didn’t mind breaking rules. These qualities were personified by Cindric and Stouch. Their hunt for LeRoux, detailed for the first time in this book, is revealing and unsettling. With bold imagination, highly specialized partners, some luck, and faith in their own gut instincts—qualities that can’t be learned and can’t be taught—they recruited one of LeRoux’s confidants and penetrated his hidden world.

  The ability to sense what’s over the horizon is not necessarily a blessing. The deeper they went down the rabbit hole, the more ominous their discoveries, the more acute their foreboding.

  “Paul is who’s coming,” Cindric said. “He is steps ahead of everyone. And we are not ready for that.”

  Chapter One

  September 25, 2013

  THE BLOND GIANT WEPT RACKING SOBS, FAT TEARS SOAKING THE FLOWERED turquoise board shorts and flip-flops that were his idea of keeping a low profile.

  Dennis Gögel, a former German army sniper and crack shot, had just arrived in Monrovia, capital of Liberia, on an errand for his employer, Paul Calder LeRoux, an eccentric entrepreneur who had made his first fortune with a scheme to sell pharmaceuticals on the Internet.

  LeRoux was branching out into ventures of geopolitical significance—Colombian cocaine, North Korean meth, advanced weapons systems, war profiteering, and Iran sanctions busting. For settling scores, he recruited a team of mercenaries from the swelling ranks of American and European military warfighters who had seen combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and NATO peacekeeping missions. Most vets settled into civilian life without incident, but a few, like Gögel, remained adventure-addicted Lost Boys in search of Neverland. LeRoux, happy to play Captain Hook, put them up in a safe house in the rowdy Thai beach resort of Phuket and financed their adrenaline-charged revels. All they had to do in exchange was occasionally get rid of people who threatened him or impeded him.

  As the best shot on the team, Gögel was to be assigned the trickier contract hits, called “bonus jobs” because they paid extra. The job in Monrovia, his first for LeRoux, was to kill a DEA agent named Joey Casich, who was posted to the U.S. embassy there, and his informant, a Libyan ship captain and professional smuggler named Zaman—Sammy to his pals in Colombia. LeRoux complained that Casich and Sammy were interfering with him and his new business partners, a Colombian organization that was setting up a cocaine route from South America to West Africa and then to Europe.

  LeRoux’s head enforcer, Joseph Hunter, a retired U.S. Army sniper trainer and drill sergeant, had received covert photos of Casich and Sammy and a detailed surveillance report of their routine movements. The photos showed Casich and Sammy meeting in various places in Monrovia. Hunter, who took pride in his cold-blooded efficiency as LeRoux’s head hit man, posted the photos on a wall in the mercenaries’ safe house and told Gögel and his wingman, Tim Vamvakias, a former U.S. Army military policeman, to memorize the faces and come up with an attack plan.

  The mercenaries figured that Sammy wouldn’t be hard to spot. He was a cocky young dude with walnut skin, black eyes, and a devilish grin. He dressed flashy, West Coast gangster
style, in a black T-shirt, black cargo pants, and Oakley shades.

  Recognizing the American agent would be tougher. Pale and middle-aged, average height, average weight, dressed in a zippered windbreaker, polo shirt, and khakis, he looked like every traveling business pro striding through any airport concourse and hotel lobby anywhere in the world. His colorless appearance was not an accident. As players on both sides knew, the first rule of traveling anonymously was to blend in. For a DEA agent, that meant dull tan slacks or utilities, cut loose for striding purposefully, kicking doors, climbing walls, and jumping out of windows; shoes for sprinting, plain, not neon; tan shirts and jackets with pockets for a sidearm, badge, cuffs, and two or three mobile phones. An agent had to have at least one phone per identity. No shorts—they were for the weight room. Suits were for kids’ graduations, weddings, divorce court, and funerals.

  During the four flights from Phuket to Monrovia, Gögel ignored Hunter’s blend-in rule and also his grandmother’s folk saying—“Man soll das Fell des Bären nicht verteilen, bevor er erlegt ist.” Don’t sell the bear’s fur before you’ve killed him. His festive beachwear getup was his way of celebrating the $80,000 he and Vamvakias were about to make for the bonus job—the first of many, he expected. LeRoux and the Colombians had plenty of enemies. Knocking off a few of them was going to make him rich.

  “Actually, for me, that’s fun,” Gögel told Hunter as they were planning the hits. “I love this work. . . . I am very happy with my job right now.”

  Only, things hadn’t gone the way the young German planned. Now his steroid-swollen forearms torqued uselessly inside handcuffs that tethered him to the seat in an executive jet, idling on the tarmac while the pilot and copilot set a course for a small private airfield in White Plains, New York. From there he would be taken to federal court in lower Manhattan.

  The shackles gave him just enough slack to move his hand to his lips. Every so often he kissed a scrap of paper that bore the scrawled cell phone number of the Russian girl he had met in Phuket. She must have been something, because that high-pitched wail didn’t sound like a noise that would come out of such a big guy. You’d think that years of looking at the human race through crosshairs would crush all romantic impulses. Love is strange.

  Vamvakias was tied down in the rear of the jet, sagging and close to inert. A skinny forty-one-year-old from San Bernardino, California, he’d been around the track longer than Gögel. As he would eventually tell the court, he had spent thirteen years in the service, eight of them on active duty as an explosives-detection dog handler and on a military police SWAT team. He had never deployed to a war zone as a soldier, but after his retirement from the U.S. army in 2004, he had worked as a contractor, running bomb dog operations in Doha, Qatar, and Kandahar, Afghanistan. He was fired from the last job for lying about his diabetes. His health was failing, and he sensed that this time, he wasn’t going to catch a break.

  The younger man couldn’t sit still. He fidgeted and grimaced. It didn’t help that Taj, an intense thirty-four-year-old DEA agent, had settled into the seat directly across from him and explained, not unkindly, that he would take care of all Gögel’s needs during the trip. Buckling himself in across from Gögel, Taj smiled at the flight attendant and told her to give Surfer Dude another Pepsi, and no, she couldn’t comfort the guy, pitiful as he looked. The good-looking German was just twenty-seven, and life as he knew it was over. He was looking at maybe twenty years in an eight-by-ten cell. He’d be a pasty, flaccid fifty-something by the time he got out. (In fact, both Gögel and Vamakias would plead guilty to conspiracy to murder a law enforcement agent and a person assisting him and other serious crimes. Each would be sentenced to 240 months in prison.)

  Taj didn’t feel sorry for Gögel. He thought that a couple of decades in the slammer was better than the macho piece of shit deserved. Taj had recently returned from Afghanistan, where he had spent four years in disguise, recruiting a network of informants inside the Taliban and the Afghan heroin cartel that supported it. He had often deployed to the front lines with American and allied special operations troops. He had seen good men die, men younger than Gögel or himself, bleeding out from the kinds of bombs Gögel’s boss, LeRoux, sold to Iran for terrorists. The agent looked at the prisoner with a mix of cold fury and detached irony. They had been in Afghanistan at the same time, supposedly on the same side. Taj wondered how many civilians the German had shot just to see if his gun worked.

  Shortly before takeoff, Taj, wearing a navy raid jacket with huge yellow letters that shouted DEA, leaned into Gögel, glared at him with eyes that burned like hot needles, and snapped, “You recognize me?”

  Gögel stared and shook his head.

  Then, Gögel’s eyes widened. WTF? Sammy the Libyan? He’s got a badge? That’s when the German started sobbing. He realized that this was a sting, street theater, a snare, and he had taken the bait. Taj was the man Gögel had come to Monrovia to kill. They stared at each other across an unbridgeable gulf.

  Taj had enjoyed certain advantages that had eluded his target. Gögel’s youth had been sad but conventional. Taj’s was extreme, inside, warmed by the unconditional love of family but, beyond the walls, besieged by a society going up in flames. He was born in Kabul in 1979, a few months before Soviet tanks rolled in. He spent the first ten years of his life in the crossfire between mujahideen fighters and Soviet troops occupying Kabul. Many evenings, he huddled with his family in a dank subterranean bomb shelter they had dug underneath their dining room table. Bombs went off daily outside the house and his elementary school. His uncle, a doctor, was killed by a rocket attack on the hospital where he was treating the injured. His grandparents and another uncle were bayoneted and shot by Soviet soldiers rampaging through their farm.

  In February 1989, during the last days of the Soviet occupation, the communist regime’s secret police set out to kill his father, an engineer who worked in the political section of the U.S. embassy. The father had already been accused of spying and had been tortured. He and his wife got a warning from a friend in intelligence—get out of the country now! They were forced to make a terrible choice. They sent Taj, who was ten at that point, and his two teenage sisters with a smuggler who promised to take them across the Khyber Pass to Pakistan. The parents bundled up the baby and climbed into a truck driven by a second smuggler. They split up the family, hoping that if they were intercepted and shot, their older children would survive.

  Taj left his childhood on the frozen slopes of the Hindu Kush mountains above Tora Bora. His father had lectured him that he was the man of the family now and had to get his older sisters through the treacherous mountain passes to safety. Taj knew that virgins brought a high price in the bazaars. He knew what he had to do—watch, hide, never sleep, and keep the three of them moving. Miraculously, the family reunited in Peshawar. A couple of years of wandering led them to a melting-pot California town of taquerias, pho shops, and tattoo parlors. His father found work as an engineer for an American oil company, but money was tight. Taj worked two and three jobs to pay for books, shoes, tuition, and anything else he wanted. He grew to adulthood revering the God of Muhammad, Abraham, and Jesus, the U.S. Constitution, the American educational system, the American work ethic, Willie Nelson, and Harley-Davidson, not necessarily in that order.

  After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he set out to join the U.S. Marines but acceded to his mother’s tearful pleas—“No more war!” He earned a master’s degree in criminal justice and signed on with the DEA because the agency promised to put him on the street instead of sticking him at a desk and making him translate and write reports. He was allergic to desks. He went undercover the first week on the job, playing meth and heroin dealers of vaguely Mediterranean ethnicity. He became adept as passing as a Mexican cartel operative, though he didn’t speak a word of Spanish, only the Spanglish he picked up from high school friends.

  To play Sammy the Libyan, he didn’t even have to fake an Arabic accent, just pose for a few p
hotos, looking flush and seedy. What mattered, he discovered, was not facility with language but the way he carried himself. As long as he swaggered, coldly menaced, and bragged about the money he and his targets were about to make, nobody dared question him about his family background.

  In 2009, he returned to the land of his birth with a mission to infiltrate the Taliban and the heroin cartel that supported it. The countryside’s flourishing poppy fields had transformed what should have been a limited conflict into a permanent, self-funding quagmire. He could recruit informants in Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, so he decided to use his languages and street smarts to do something about the pain of ordinary Afghans—those kids flung out into bitter cold, begging for food and coins amid minefields, graveyards, and open sewers. Call it altruism or survivor’s guilt, he knew that but for an incredible string of good fortune, he would have been out there with them.

  Like all plans in all wars, the DEA strategy to break up the cartel, shorten the conflict, and clear the way for stability and reconstruction didn’t survive the first skirmish. Few in the U.S. government but DEA agents gave priority to stopping the heroin trade. Heroin supported both sides of the war. Prominent figures in Afghanistan’s nominally pro-Western power elite were getting a fat slice of the heroin action. American and NATO military commanders feared that attacking the drug trade would cost hearts and minds. Taliban insurgents relied on drug profits as their main source of financing for weapons and logistical support. Osama bin Laden and his followers weren’t directly selling heroin, as far as the DEA agents knew, but Bin Laden was protected by the Taliban and Pakistan’s leadership, both of which benefited from the burgeoning South Asian heroin trade. In addition to figuring out how the drug trade worked, Taj and his partners focused their informants and wiretaps on helping American and NATO forces locate IEDs and arms caches, on heading off ambushes and bombings, and on pinpointing locations of high-value targets. At the request of U.S. special operations commanders, Taj sent informants across the border into Pakistan’s North Waziristan to locate several hostages, including U.S. army private Bowe Bergdahl and American tourist Caitlan Coleman, her Canadian husband, and their children, born in captivity. The Afghan sources returned with GPS coordinates of the compounds where the hostages were being guarded by Afghan insurgents affiliated with the Taliban.