In 2012, after four years in the war zone, Taj transferred to the DEA’s Special Operations Division. Milione tapped him for his 960 Group. That was the best job in the agency, if you didn’t mind living out of your suitcase. Milione’s team had a license to go anywhere in the world to find and stop transnational drugs, arms, and money-laundering networks that played critical roles in the operations of terrorist groups and rogue regimes.
The agents sometimes found themselves in direct conflict with the CIA. DEA agents wanted to arrest smugglers of drugs and arms, but sometimes the CIA wanted to hire the same people and keep them in play as sources. The CIA could do that because its missions were overseas, covert, and outside the legal system. DEA agents played by American laws, rules, and procedures John Adams and Wyatt Earp would recognize. Everybody got his day in court. No drones, no renditions, no secret prisons, no torture, no illegal intercepts, no clandestine judgments, no summary justice, and no targeted killings.
Wim Brown, Milione’s alter ego, led the 960 Group’s Africa team when it started looking into the LeRoux organization. Midway through the investigation, he transferred to Nairobi. He was gray-haired, engaging, quick-witted, and unfazed by just about everything except Washington, which he despised. Under Milione and Brown were the two case agents for LeRoux—Cindric, energetic, garrulous, charming, and hot-tempered; Stouch, thoughtful, meticulous, coolheaded, and utterly reliable. Cindric went wide-angle. Stouch zoomed in.
Taj played utility. For the Gögel-Vamvakias takedown, he pulled double duty, first, as Sammy the Libyan, and later, as Gögel’s escort and guard. Taj wasn’t as big as Gögel—nobody in the DEA contingent was—but he had been under fire, in places most soldiers never got to see, and he wasn’t about to let this blond slacker ruin his day by trying to escape.
Gögel came from the sleepy German town of Stadthagen, an hour’s drive from Hanover. His mother died of asthma when he was three and his father left him to the care of his grandparents. In 2007, at the age of eighteen, after graduating from trade school, he enlisted in the German army, where he discovered that he had talent as marksman. He became a sniper in the Panzergrenadier division, the equivalent of the U.S. Army Rangers, with two deployments to Kosovo and an honorable discharge in 2010.
Ex-soldiers trained in communications and electronics could find work in corporations, information technology, or civilian law enforcement. Airmen became civilian pilots and flight engineers. In Western Europe, there wasn’t much call for sharpshooters. Gögel drifted into what ex-commandos called “the mercenary Facebook” of footloose American and European vets. It wasn’t literally a Facebook page, but it served the same function for restless, underemployed, hard-core warfighters, whose numbers had swelled during U.S. and NATO engagements in Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Action-loving men of many nations met and mingled while working in combat or intelligence-gathering units and in command-and-control centers. After they left active duty, many of those who craved more high-risk assignments took jobs in security companies that protected diplomats, UN employees, foreign officials, businesspeople, and aid workers in war zones. Smartphones and encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Wickr, ProtonMail, and Signal made it easy for old army buddies to find one another and exchange job tips.
After a short gig as security for a television station in Kabul, Gögel moved on to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean, guarding merchant vessels in pirate-infested waters off Somalia. Those long days and nights on cargo ships gave him a lot of time for his favorite activity, bodybuilding. He used ship lines as training ropes, balanced his toes on buckets to perform dozens of knuckle push-ups, and popped steroids.
In early 2013, he connected with Hunter, a brusque Kentuckian who called himself Rambo. With his gleaming bald head, chiseled cheekbones, and ballooned biceps, Hunter looked the part. As he would eventually write the court in New York in a bid for mercy, Gögel was awed by Hunter’s tough-guy boasts and claims, mostly false, that he had been in special operations, that he lived an ascetic lifestyle devoted to perfecting his body and mind and that he was now leading what Gögel described as a “highly specialized security group to protect and secure high profile clients.” Gögel latched on to Hunter, he later confessed, “not only as mentor but as a father figure, something I never had before. He seemed to offer everything I dreamed of, career development and family. It seemed my life was finally on track.”
Gögel misread Hunter. The sour American didn’t want to be anybody’s daddy. He hired mercenaries to please LeRoux, who had instructed him to find “capable guys who are willing to do black ops jobs.” Black ops meant murder-for-hire. What “capable” meant to LeRoux depended on the task. Filipinos and Israelis who worked in his pharmaceutical e-commerce call centers had to be neat, polite, discreet, and adept at taking credit card authorizations.
For his security team, LeRoux wanted U.S. and NATO-trained veterans in superb physical shape, disciplined and willing to take orders unquestioningly. He was not happy with two of Hunter’s hires as contract killers, Adam Samia and Carl David Stillwell, out-of-shape civilians who lived in Roxboro, North Carolina, collected guns and fantasized about becoming soldiers of fortune. In early 2012, the pair had carried out a hit demanded by LeRoux, the murder of a young woman named Catherine Lee, who had worked as a real estate broker for LeRoux, finding expensive properties for him to buy through straw purchasers. LeRoux suspected her of skimming and ordered her killed. The North Carolinians bungled the job and left a trail of evidence wide and bright as the Vegas strip at midnight. By the time Gögel set out for Monrovia, the only reason nobody had traced the Catherine Lee murder back to LeRoux was that he had paid massive amounts of protection money to a long list of Philippines cops and other officials.
LeRoux made it clear to Hunter that the next bunch of mercenaries had to be truly battle-hardened sharpshooters willing to kill people they didn’t know for $25,000 a head. The list of people he wanted knocked off was growing. He didn’t want any more mistakes that would enable corrupt Asian and African police officials to shake him down for even more cash. On the other hand, he didn’t want gunmen who were too bright. They might talk back or even refuse hit jobs. LeRoux wouldn’t put up with being second-guessed. He didn’t want anybody around who could think for himself. He did the thinking for everyone.
Gögel checked all the boxes. He was a bronze god, beautiful, obedient, fun-loving, not too clever and, so it seemed, thoroughly amoral. He was eager for the perks that came with the job—a condo on Phuket Island, sugar-crystal sand, a pocketful of euros, all the ecstasy he wanted, a gym where he could build abs like knuckles, and a welcome at go-go clubs where the bar girls and ladyboys climbed his body like a pole. LeRoux and Hunter had thoughtfully based the mercenary team near Phuket’s Patong Beach scene, the sex tourism capital of the world, where every day was Mardi Gras on Whore Island—horns, stench, glare, blinking neon lights, boom boxes, tequila shooters, Suzy Wong’s Rock Hard’s Crazy Girls A Go Go, Club XTC, and so much more.
Aside from plenty of recreation to distract the sort of young unattached men LeRoux was after, Phuket was an easy place for LeRoux’s team to come and go unnoticed. It wasn’t a traditional organized-crime hangout. People everywhere, cars all over the place, noisy revelers banging around the streets at all hours. By night, the beach roads were thick with college guys, soldiers and sailors on leave, young professionals escaping from cubicles and mingling with hookers, drag queens, deejays, bar girls, bartenders, women who performed in sex shows with other women, women who performed in sex shows with snakes, masseuses, waitresses, more hookers, women who shot Ping-Pong balls and darts with their vaginas.
On this particular day, though—September 25, 2013—Phuket had extra visitors who weren’t getting their freak on in the clubs.
Cindric, Stouch, and Milione were in Phuket, using the resort as a base to run arrests. They had been tracking Paul LeRoux and his henchmen since December 2011 and had designated September 25 as Takedo
wn Day, when they intended to dismantle the most dangerous components of LeRoux’s operation—his mercenary team and his drugs-and-arms-trafficking team.
The degree of difficulty of their op plan was extreme. Normal law enforcement and military agencies would have called it insane. One problem was that LeRoux’s five-man security team operated globally. Its member were practiced at detecting and evading surveillance.
To incriminate two of the five, Gögel and Vamvakias, and make arrests, Cindric and Stouch created the elaborate Liberian undercover sting.
To build the theatrical scenario, Milione, undercover as DEA agent “Casich” and Taj as “Sammy the Libyan,” infiltrated into Monrovia. Credible-seeming emails and an hour-by-hour surveillance report had to be crafted to simulate how a Colombian cartel would spy on Casich and Sammy, the “targets” of the assassination plan. The undercover agents playacted surreptitious meetings for low-res iPhone photos in popular Monrovia nightspots. Costumes and disguises were acquired. Evidence of flights, hotel rooms, car rentals, and other logistics had to be generated. Liberian authorities had to be briefed to make the arrests and expel the hit men into DEA custody. It all had to happen amid the anxious awareness that one mistake or leak from anyone would blow the entire operation.
The op plan, difficult enough to pull off on its own, was multiplied by five. A second multilayered sting had to be set up and run in Tallinn, Estonia, to arrest two more of LeRoux’s men, Soborski and Filter, lured there on what they were told was a different mission. And, at three separate locations in Phuket, Thailand, six more LeRoux henchmen had to be taken down.
To further increase the difficulty, each of the targets had to be surprised and overpowered and all the arrests had to occur virtually simultaneously so that no one could alarm the others by texting an ABORT signal. Or, if the mercenaries were clever, by not calling or texting at a designated “check-in” time. The cue to vanish might be silence. Each set of arrests had to be prepared and advance like clockwork to Takedown Day. Nothing—from complications with local authorities to the weather, nothing—could cause any of the five operations to delay.
The Estonian operation required theater and logistics similar to Monrovia. The three ops in Phuket—taken down in coordination with a Thai police SWAT team and an elite plainclothes unit—involved intercepting Hunter, as well as rolling up five men identified through messages and undercover meetings as leaders of a branch of LeRoux’s empire that smuggled North Korean meth, South American cocaine and small arms from many countries.
In the larger context, Takedown Day was as ambitious and daring as any ever attempted by American law enforcement. For Cindric, Stouch, and Milione, it was another routine, anxiety-ridden 960 Group operation. They lived with the knowledge that if anyone in any of the three theaters of operation put a foot wrong, or if secrecy was blown by an incompetent or corrupt local government official, a jealous CIA officer or a nervous diplomat, the whole scheme would fall apart and shatter like a disco ball. Such disasters had happened before. Who was to say they would not happen again?
Milione, Cindric, and Stouch didn’t see any other way to proceed. Milione told the two agents to “plan for as many curveballs as possible” as they were setting up the arrests. “Like a dance—every piece has to be choreographed.” Once they gave the “go” signal, there was no turning back.
There was no exaggerating the danger of the arrests, not only to the DEA agents but to their local police partners and innocent bystanders. LeRoux’s five hit men were battle-hardened military snipers. The five other suspects—LeRoux’s smugglers—were professional criminals who had survived for decades on the streets, and they were targets of geostrategic importance, having established a connection to purchase tons of nearly pure meth, industrially produced by a North Korean supplier that appeared to be protected by the regime of dictator Kim Jong Un. The arrangement was worth millions of dollars to a heavily sanctioned, cash-starved rogue nation that was racing to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that could reach the American homeland. Depriving North Korea of hard currency was the immediate goal. Beyond it, the DEA agents had a longer-term plan. They thought that if they could get inside the North Korean meth/money pipeline, they could gather valuable intelligence about the rat lines that enabled North Korea to evade International controls and raise money to finance its weapons programs.
LeRoux’s smugglers had other intrigues in the works. Investigations of these schemes could spin off valuable leads into the small arms underground in unstable countries and regions. They were making deals with Chinese military officers who offered to sell them SAMs, antiaircraft missiles coveted by terrorists everywhere; with white South African arms dealers and mercenaries; and with a gang of Serbian gun runners LeRoux’s men nicknamed “the war criminals.”
Early on in the setup, working with three accomplished DEA undercover sources, Cindric and Stouch maneuvered Hunter into believing that LeRoux wanted “Casich” and “Sammy” assassinated in Monrovia. The undercover sources—about whom we’ll learn more later—were “Colombian cartel representatives” who used the cover names Diego and Geraldo, and Georges, a French bush pilot, who was introduced to the mercenaries as LeRoux’s liaison to their unit, their fixer, weapons supplier and transportation. Hunter assigned the Monrovia hit job to Gögel and Vamvakias. He told them to map out exactly how they intended to do the hit, with maximum stealth and no clues to connect the murders back to LeRoux. He gave them a “Colombian surveillance report” that he thought had come from LeRoux and his cartel partners. In fact, the DEA agents had written it and illustrated it with snapshots of Milione and Taj.
Gögel and Vamvakias responded with an assassination plot that was as callous and blood-drenched as the video games the mercenaries liked to play. They discussed it in conversations captured on DEA’s hidden bugs and video.
Through Jonathan Wall, LeRoux’s U.S.-based purchasing agent, they acquired Hollywood-grade latex masks that would transform their faces into those of black Africans. They intended to pull on the masks and prowl the nightspots until they located their quarries. The fake surveillance report said that Casich and Sammy might be found at a bar and restaurant called the Blue House in Congo Town, half an hour from the city center. Hipster tourists favored the place for its Mexican-African fusion food. The DEA agent and his snitch had been spotted stumbling drunk out of the place, according to the surveillance report. It added that they had also been spotted at the Level 1 Steak House, an upscale place patronized by the political elite, and Bishoftu, an Ethiopian joint that attracted adventurous diners.
Gögel and Vamvakias intended to execute the DEA agent and the informant with shots to the heads from .22-caliber pistols with silencers. Or, if they couldn’t get close, they would use Heckler & Koch MP7 “personal defense weapons,” which were shrunken submachine pistols designed for special operations forces and security details. Just seventeen inches long and weighing four pounds, the MP7 fired up to forty high-velocity rounds that could pierce NATO-standard titanium body armor. YouTube videos of the H&K MP7 were gun porn that racked up millions of eyeballs. Gögel and Vamvakias lusted after those MP7s the way drunken college guys drooled over the bargirls at the Rock Hard Club on Patong Beach.
“Whatever gets in that kill zone is going down,” Vamvakias boasted.
“Even if they wear a Second Chance vest,” Gögel said laughing. He referred to a brand of body armor popular with security contractors.
If innocent people who stumbled into the “kill zone” died—tough luck.
The slight hitch was that the MP7 packed so much firepower into a concealable automatic weapon that it was banned for civilian sales. During planning meetings in Phuket, Georges had assured them, no problem, he’d pick up a couple of MP7s on the black market and smuggle them into Monrovia, along with the handguns, masks, and other gear. He’d have everything they wanted waiting in their hotel. They would be back in the Patong bars in a day or two.
After they killed thei
r two victims, the two shooters expected to step out of the blood-drenched bar and into a car waiting to whisk them to the Monrovia airport, where Georges would be warming up a private getaway plane.
They would carry nothing with them that hinted at a murder plot, except for two hollowed-out euro coins, one per shooter. Each coin contained an encrypted microchip. Even if the local cops found the coin and pried it open, they wouldn’t be able to read the chip. Hunter had encrypted the data on them because he was afraid that his emails were being intercepted by the DEA or other law enforcement or intelligence agencies. The data was “target package” with photographs of the intended victims, names, descriptions, cell phone numbers, and locations of apartments and hangouts.
The plan got rolling at 9 p.m. on September 24. At that hour, Gögel and Vamvakias took a puddle jumper for the flight from Phuket to Bangkok International and then boarded Kenya Airways 887 for Nairobi. Their flight took off shortly after midnight and landed in Nairobi just past dawn. Gögel and Vamvakias had some breakfast and changed to Kenya Airways flight 508. The plane stopped for an hour in Accra and arrived at their destination, Monrovia, at 3:10 p.m. local time.
Hunting LeRoux Page 3
