Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  They unkinked their knees, grabbed their daypacks, and descended into the blazing sunlight. At the bottom of the steps was Georges, their lifeline. Vamvakias lunged clumsily toward him, as if to embrace him.

  “Don’t fucking touch me!” Georges snarled. “Just follow me!” He was scowling. As a onetime commander in the French navy, he had professional standards. He thought Vamvakias had been drinking. He whirled on Gögel, who was grinning like an overgrown kid on a visit to Toyland. The German’s beach-rat attire offended Georges, whose khaki civvies were trim and just so, as usual.

  “Hey, man, you’re not supposed to look like that,” Georges snapped.

  As they crossed the tarmac, Georges explained to Gögel and Vamvakias that he had spread around plenty of LeRoux’s money so they didn’t have to present themselves to Liberian border control or have their passports stamped. They nodded and grinned, looking forward, after a cramped, swamp-crotch-inducing twenty-five-hour sky-slog, to a decent meal, VIP treatment, a shower, and pressed hotel sheets. They had been around the Frenchman long enough to know that he was sharp-tongued and judgmental, but he was good at what he did, and they needed him. They tagged behind him through the terminal, a dilapidated cargo building that had been pressed into service as Monrovia’s airport after the original terminal burned in 1990 during the Liberian civil war.

  Georges handed the men’s passports to a kindly-looking middle-aged Liberian with dark skin, short salt-and-pepper hair, and a sweet smile. Georges introduced him as Sam, a Liberian immigration officer paid to usher them past border control. Sam beckoned the three men out of the terminal and along a narrow walkway that led to a squat two-room cinder-block hut behind the terminal.

  At the door, Georges gestured toward Sam. “He’s my buddy. He’ll take care of you. I have to talk to immigration for a few minutes. I’ll be back, and we’ll go into town.”

  Gögel and Vamvakias stepped inside and found themselves in a dingy room, empty but for a wooden desk and hard, straight-backed chair on one side and a second hard chair on the other. Just as they settled in, the interior door burst open and four figures exploded into the room.

  “Police, police, get on the ground, GET ON THE GROUND!” shouted an angular white American man in a T-shirt and jeans. The three Liberians alongside him took up the clamor.

  “Police!”

  “Get down! Now!”

  The startled mercenaries threw up their hands and started to crouch. The cops shoved them the rest of the way until they were prone and face down on the concrete floor.

  The American yanked Gögel’s arms backward and cuffed them, while one of the Liberians cuffed Vamvakias.

  “I’m Special Agent Jim Scott of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration,” the American said, bending over the pair to show them his credentials. “You guys are under arrest.”

  Scott stood up, enormously relieved that the mantra he had learned in basic agent training—surprise, speed, and violence of action—had worked. He had dreaded wrestling the mercenaries to the floor, especially that blond beast. He asked the Liberian cops to make a ferocious racket, hoping like hell the mercenaries obeyed before they noticed a key detail, that Scott and the three Liberian airport cops weren’t armed. American lawmen couldn’t carry firearms in most foreign nations. The Liberian airport cops routinely went unarmed.

  Scott pulled out a card and read Gögel and Vamvakias their Miranda rights. They had been indicted in the Southern District of New York for conspiring to murder an American official and an American informant, which were federal felonies. The DEA had already presented the Liberian government with a warrant for their arrest. Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had declared them “undesirable aliens” and ordered them expelled to the custody of the DEA.

  Scott could see that Gögel didn’t get it yet. He looked nonchalant, as if this were just another third-world airport hassle. Scott peered into his bag. It was full of anabolic steroids. Gögel said it was time for his dose. Would Scott give him a shot?

  “I’ve got to stay on my regime or I’ll get manboobies,” he whined.

  “You’re not going to get any more steroids,” the agent said.

  With Scott and the cops watching them, the prisoners spent the night on the floor of the airport’s presidential lounge, which had been commandeered as a holding cell. The next morning, more DEA agents showed up to escort Gögel and Vamvakias to lower Manhattan for their day in court. Wim Brown pulled off Gögel’s T-shirt to photograph his body, to prove he hadn’t been tortured. Taj helped him. The German’s entire back, shoulder to shoulder, neck to waist, was one big tattoo with splotches of black and enormous Gothic letters that spelled INFIDEL.

  “What’s that?” Taj asked, though he knew. Gögel looked down at his bare tanned toes and shrugged. Did he think INFIDEL was a defiant message for Al-Qaeda and the Taliban? If so, the tattoo was just dumb. If an Islamist militant ever got close enough to see the German’s naked back, it would be to saw off his head.

  Or maybe that enormous INFIDEL was meant to impress other soldiers in the showers and hooches. If so, he had insulted the people he was sent to Kosovo and Afghanistan to protect. Good Muslims, and Taj considered himself one, knew that INFIDEL didn’t mean Christian or Jew. It meant atheist, somebody who believed in nothing.

  During these procedures, it started to hit home for Gögel that since he embarked on this job, practically nobody he met was who he said he was.

  Brown, the senior DEA agent on the ground in Monrovia, had been sitting knee to knee with Gögel and Vamvakias on the airport tram in Nairobi, then a few rows behind them on the Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi to Accra. Gögel hadn’t really noticed him. Brown had looked like any other globetrotting businessman absorbed in his smartphone. Actually, he was DEA’s man in East Africa. He had been tailing the mercenaries since they changed planes in Nairobi and texting their movements to Scott and the DEA crew on the ground in Monrovia.

  Georges was a bona fide bush pilot and mercenary, but he was also Brown’s friend and was working with the DEA, not against it. After his service as a French navy pilot, flying a Crusader interceptor-reconnaissance aircraft, he became a private pilot in Africa, flying for a number of African leaders and strongmen. On the side, he worked gigs for various Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies. In his fifties, he was tanned, fit, and impeccable, even in Monrovia’s soggy heat.

  Sam, the “corrupt Liberian immigration officer,” was Sam Gaye, a retired DEA agent turned security consultant who had been the agency’s man in West Africa for many years. Like Georges, he was a pair of eyes and ears for Cindric and Stouch. Born in Monrovia, he moved with his family to the United States when he was fifteen, joined the DEA after college, and volunteered to return to the war-torn region of his birth. Gaye knew just about every West African who mattered, most importantly, his childhood friend Fombah Sirleaf, the stepson of Liberian President Johnson Sirleaf. She had appointed Fombah to the helm of the Liberian National Security Agency. The president and Fombah Sirleaf were in on the sting from the beginning. Sirleaf had posted his own armed, plainclothes agents throughout the airport to make sure the unarmed airport cops managed the arrests of Gögel and Vamvakias without a hitch.

  On the DEA-chartered Gulfstream II executive jet that would take the prisoners to New York to face the charges, Taj sat across from Gögel, close enough to hear him breathe. Whenever Gögel needed to go to the head, Taj took him there and stood by. Not the most pleasant part of the job, but the agents couldn’t have a prisoner try to rip out wiring that would affect the plane’s instruments. Whenever Gögel wanted a drink or food, Taj fetched it. No cutlery, metal, or plastic. Any implement could gouge out an eye in a split second.

  Federal agents were required to treat every prisoner with respect, and Taj did. He kept it professional and civil. He served his would-be killer Pepsis and banana pudding and answered his questions patiently. Yes, he could write the Russian girl. No, American prisons didn’t allow conjuga
l visits. Steroids again? No, he couldn’t get steroids in lockup. Yes, he’d probably get manboobs. No, the warden wouldn’t help him out on the steroid front.

  But Taj was entitled to his own thoughts, and what he was thinking was, Fuck you, Gögel. You are the trash of humanity. You want to kill an American citizen for money? Why should you hang out on the beaches of Phuket, enjoying life on my blood, or Lou’s blood, or another human being’s?

  Taj had seen this show before. He expected that Gögel would throw himself on the mercy of the court and plead that he was practically an orphan. He didn’t know any better. He was poor, lost, and confused. Taj had been there—a refugee, penniless, cold, hungry, and hunted, with nothing but what he could carry. But he never felt alone, was never confused and never lost.

  Knee to knee with Gögel, he leaned in and asked again, “You recognize me now?”

  The German looked down at the floor.

  “You have my picture on your wall. You and your pal wrote an op plan about how you were going to kill me.”

  The German refused to meet Taj’s gaze.

  “I actually feel sorry for what you’re going to go through, as a human being; I really do,” Taj said softly, “because you have a long road ahead. It’s going to be bad. But imagine if you actually did kill me. I don’t think you would’ve had second thoughts. Where would you be right now? Probably in Phuket, getting drunk and celebrating your actions. Crazy how the world works?”

  Gögel still didn’t say anything. He put his face up to the window, mashed his cheek against the cold glass, and sobbed.

  Chapter Two

  Murphy’s Law

  TEN ARRESTS, THREE CONTINENTS, NINE HOURS. THAT WAS THE PLAN.

  What could possibly go wrong? Anything. Everything.

  On the morning of September 25, 2013, when Cindric and Stouch gave the signal to start rolling up the LeRoux criminal network, Murphy’s law was starting to kick in.

  Early in the day, Milione joined the pair of agents in the Phuket Marriott’s “honeymoon villa,” a secluded cottage on the beach inside the walled hotel complex. It was secure and set apart, with gauzy white draperies that disguised the inhabitants’ activities. The agents had rigged up a makeshift command center cluttered with computer cables, socks, and empty water bottles. The love nest had become a man cave, smelling like stress sweat, not runner sweat or sex sweat.

  The wall was covered with a map of the world on which the agents had plotted out the locations of their ten targets and a whiteboard with a detailed timeline showing who was supposed to be arrested where and when. The logistics were like a Rubik’s Cube with the possibility of live fire.

  What Milione was hearing for most of the morning was one of the English language’s most versatile words.

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck fuck.”

  “What the fuck!”

  Cindric and Stouch communicated by expletive and grunt. They’d been together for so long, they didn’t need much of a vocabulary.

  The agents had arranged for Hunter, the mercenary team leader, to be alone in Phuket. He was first on the list to be arrested, because if the rest of the mercenaries were captured, he would simply replace them and reconstitute the team. He had done it before.

  But Hunter solo was not to be underestimated. He was accustomed to killing, was good at it and justified it to himself in a variety of ways. Through his long career in the U.S. Army, he had served as a sniper, sniper instructor, marksmanship and tactics trainer, drill sergeant, leader of air-assault and airborne-infantry squads, and first sergeant. After he retired from active duty, he tried civilian life in Owensboro, Kentucky, the Ohio River town where he grew up, but he couldn’t tolerate the peace and quiet. As he told Diego and Geraldo, the Colombian American undercover informants deployed by Cindric and Stouch, “I had twenty-one years of doing the action stuff at high levels. And then I am from a small town in the States. I go back home. I love where I live but once you’re there for a while you’re like, I got to get back into the [action].”

  Hoping to feel young and vigorous again, he took a job with Triple Canopy, an American security contractor (now called Constellis) that placed military veterans in security jobs at American government installations and private companies in locations where robbery, kidnapping, and murder were common. It was a good gig but it was over in early 2008.

  Desperate to avoid going home to Kentucky, Hunter canvassed his contacts. The mercenary Facebook came through. Tim Vamvakias, who had served under Hunter, wrote to say that he had recently gone to work as a mercenary for a Manila security company called Echelon Associates. Echelon was a front set up in 2008 by Dave Smith, LeRoux’s chief of security. To launder the money he was making in his illegal e-commerce pharmaceutical business, LeRoux hired experts to buy and sell gold, diamonds, timber, and real estate for him. LeRoux moved these valuable assets around, churning the ownership records until his money trail was thoroughly obscured.

  LeRoux didn’t trust his own experts not to cheat him. To keep them honest, he hired mercenaries to mind them. “The Echelon mercenaries were there principally to ensure that if any of [the experts] stepped out of line, there would be beatings, shootings, intimidation, and, if necessary, killing,” LeRoux later explained.

  Vamvakias told Hunter that Echelon was assembling a detail of mercenaries and gold experts in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the neighboring Republic of the Congo. This team would be buying gold in central Africa and moving it to LeRoux in the Philippines or Hong Kong. Vamvakias said the pay was good—$7,000 to $7,500 a month. He said he was already living the dream, the dream being a teenage boy’s fantasy of a treasure hunt, complete with pirates, jungle hunts, and girls in sarongs.

  Their adventures could have used the kind of military professionalism Hunter would be expected to bring to the table. For instance, as Vamvakias later recounted at Hunter’s trial, while in Papua New Guinea, Smith and Vamvakias screwed up what looked like a simple mission, to set fire to some trucks at a timber mill whose owner, a Chinese businessman, owed LeRoux several million dollars. Their plan looked as if it had been put together by middle schoolers. They went to sporting goods stores and bought a big pile of gear, including hydration packs and machetes, so they could whack through the deep jungle to the mill. It didn’t occur to them that they could simply walk down the road to the mill. No, they had to do things the hard way. They made themselves ghillie suits, weaving greenery onto their fatigues to camouflage themselves as foliage, and slithered through the bush for several days, checking out the mill, spotting back doors, and figuring out where they could hide a getaway car. The big night came. They slipped into the mill, but as they were about to torch it, the alarm went off. Security guards rushed in. Smith and Vamvakias dived back into the bush and made their way back to their guest house, bug-bitten, mission not accomplished.

  Hunter applied for a job with Echelon and was hired in June 2008. His qualifications as an army sniper and drill sergeant were just what LeRoux and Dave Smith were after. They might have sensed Hunter wasn’t terribly creative, but he was capable, a virtue that would delight LeRoux. Hunter liked following orders, he liked giving orders and he loved adventure.

  Hunter took to the job of enforcer enthusiastically. “It’s just like a military mission,” he boasted to his men in a conversation bugged by the DEA agents. “Right? This is real shit. You know, you see everything. You see James Bond in the movie, and you say, ‘Oh, I can do that.’”

  He had no qualms about murdering people for LeRoux. “I don’t kill anyone unless I get paid,” Hunter said in a bugged conversation. “. . . It’s easy to kill because they can’t talk. But when they can talk, you worry.”

  If that remark sounded strangely specific, it was. One of Hunter’s first chores for LeRoux was to kidnap and shoot to wound a LeRoux business associate. He was Steve Hahn, a South African gold expert who, LeRoux thought, had stolen at least $800,000 from him, and maybe more, by faking some losses in
a convoluted gold deal. Hunter shot Hahn in the hand, to punish him, and now regretted it because Hahn could testify against him or come after him. Hunter probably wished he had finished Hahn off. Worrying meant anticipating and gaming out a target’s next moves. It was exhausting.

  After that, Hunter stuck to simple hits. He took part in at least five murders for LeRoux, by the agents’ count. They were convinced that he would shed much more blood if he weren’t stopped. LeRoux had given him several more “target packages,” military jargon for contract hits. He might still try to carry them out. Or he might take another job as a hit man for some other criminal organization. If he were inclined, he could break out into on a one-man killing spree. The nickname Rambo suggested that he nurtured a darkly romantic fantasy of channeling Sylvester Stallone’s fictional Vietnam vet who became a patriotic action hero and icon. By Rambo IV, released in 2008, his body count topped five hundred people. Could Hunter match that? Would he try?

  For all these reasons, the agents wanted to lock Hunter down early in the day. They had made sure he was alone and isolated. Gögel and Vamvakias were in the air on their way to Monrovia, lured by the agents’ fake murder-for-hire gambit. Two other LeRoux mercenaries—Michael Filter, an ex-army sniper from Germany, and Slawomir Soborski, a former Polish special operations operator—were in Tallinn, Estonia, dispatched there to stand guard over a weapons deal between LeRoux’s Colombian associates and a Serbian mafia boss. This mission was actually a second undercover theater piece dreamed up by Cindric and Stouch.

  The problem was, the agents didn’t know exactly where Hunter would be at any moment. The satellite cell phone tracker on Cindric’s laptop was supposed to tell them. The agents set it to locate Hunter’s two mobile phones—a basic Nokia flip phone that Hunter liked because the battery lasted for weeks, and a tricked-out smartphone that Georges had given Hunter and the other mercenaries, for getting in touch with LeRoux and himself. Cindric and Stouch acquired the smartphones through a shady South African company known as a go-to supplier for organized crime. They made the devices look like bona fide bad-guy phones by adding double coding and encryption, just the way LeRoux liked to communicate. Since the DEA agents had the key to the codes, they could read all the mercenaries’ texts and emails.