Hunting LeRoux

by Elaine Shannon

  “You can find programmers out there like sand at the beach, but only few—less than one percent—with the skills for developing full disk encryption,” Hafner said. LeRoux was in that golden one percent, not only because of his knowledge of low-level programming but also because of his adroitness in solving many other types of problems. Any programmer could copy what somebody else had done. Innovation required someone who could imagine how to do things that had never been done, and then do them.

  “Paul proved to be a brilliant programmer,” Hafner said. “He is one of the smartest and most consequential technical person I know. Many people may have cool ideas, but Paul also knows or finds a way to transform those ideas into reality. He also follows through where many give up.”

  But to become a full partner, he would have to give up his vagabond ways, park his butt in a chair, glue his fingers to a keyboard, and spend two or three years tapping out magical little cybersymphonies that only machines could hear. To press the point home, Hafner picked up LeRoux in his Mercedes 500 SL, swept him away to his villa in Cap d’Antibes, the Cote d’Azur’s most exclusive enclave, and started showing him the opulence that could be his if the company caught fire.

  Hafner found LeRoux a hard man to inspire. He was indifferent to the iconic sights—the cerulean sky and sea that had transfixed, among others, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Rudolf Valentino, Alfred Hitchcock, Bono, and Mick Jagger; the spot where Fitzgerald finished The Great Gatsby and started Tender Is the Night; the musky cafes of St. Tropez, where Brigitte Bardot danced barefoot in And God Created Woman; the cliff where Jean Seberg played at goading Deborah Kerr to her death in Bonjour Tristesse. He didn’t want to go to the Picasso museum. He declined Hafner’s offer of a lavish lobster dinner at the rococo Hotel Carlton in Cannes, the film festival watering hole where Alfred Hitchcock had filmed Grace Kelly and Cary Grant flirting in To Catch a Thief. LeRoux, clinging to his T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, complained that all those movie stars hanging about the Carlton’s marbled terrace made him uncomfortable. A beachside fish-and-chips joint was fine, thank you.

  The vision of extreme wealth struck him like a coup de foudre when they went to at the International Yacht Club and the Quai des Milliardaires, Billionaires’ Cay, in Antibes. French locals called it the Cove of False Money. Bobbing in the sparkling blue water was a fleet of superyachts owned by Russian oligarchs, Greek shipping tycoons, and Persian Gulf sheiks. The sleek leviathans had perks that would make a James Bond villain gasp with envy—one, sometimes two, helicopters and helipads, pools and sport courts with jet-skis and other toys. Armed guards, big pale Russians and Ukrainians toting M4s or Uzis, stood at the ready. The deck chairs were decorated with stunning young women, or girls, adjusting Chanel sunglasses to hide black eyes dealt out by their cranky lovers/keepers/masters. LeRoux’s eyes lit up like a slot machine that just landed on three cherries. Inside his head, a switch had just flipped. In retrospect, it seemed as if this was the moment when an unknown young programmer became LEROUX.

  “He said, I want to get to this,” Hafner recalled. “It’s not that he needed to have a yacht, but he wanted to have the money to be able to buy a yacht. He started calculating. If somebody has the money to buy a yacht, which is $100 million or more, first what he’s doing is buying a house, then a second house, buying his car, buying his helicopter, and at the last, buying his yacht. He said, if his yacht cost $100 million, this guy must have much, much more. And just the cost of the people that are cleaning it all day all year, and so on. He was thinking, how much money these people must have, and that is where he wants to be.”

  He wanted the full Russian oligarch package, not only the superyacht, but also the party girls with cat-eye makeup, thongs, and thigh-high black boots, the cliffside villa on shore, the townhouse in London and apartments in Hong Kong and Paris, the Ferrari, the strapping, heavily muscled bodyguards, and much, much more.

  His lust for opulence swelled when they strolled into the gilded Casino de Monte Carlo. For the occasion, he waived his no-tie rule and allowed Hafner to drape him in a shirt and suit borrowed from a portly oil executive, with Hafner’s own silk cravat wrapped around his thick neck. Hafner bought him a stack of chips to wager at the high-stakes roulette table. LeRoux was dazzled. The Russians were there, consuming liters of vodka and pawing gorgeous women dressed in stilettos, a few spangles, and not much else. They were laughing and clinking glasses as they lost great stacks of chips and bills. Hafner could see that LeRoux was interested in gamblers. They were addicts, and addicts of any kind were very reliable customers. To think of the money the casino was raking in! The house couldn’t lose. This was an insight LeRoux filed away for future reference.

  LeRoux agreed to join Hafner, and for two years things went well. LeRoux lived in Rotterdam and teleworked, collaborating with Hafner and others in the company via the Internet. Hafner noticed that LeRoux had a perverse streak. He couldn’t resist messing with people. He lied when he didn’t need to. He liked to brag to Hafner how he had played somebody. He would lie to a colleague, then tell Hafner what he had done and laugh about it.

  “He’s a good actor, in telling a story that was completely made up, to achieve something else,” Hafner said.

  He was a user. “He often found the solution by getting someone to do something for him,” Hafner said. “He would go on the Internet and find someone who did.” He got a lot of free help from other computer geeks, picking their brains for knowledge that they would ordinarily charge for.

  His demeanor was usually calm, but occasionally he exhibited flashes of rage and contempt for others. Once while talking to Hafner on the phone, LeRoux belittled some favor Hafner had done him. Hafner hung up. LeRoux called him back, weeping and groveling. Hafner said LeRoux had offended and insulted him by not appreciating what Hafner was doing for him.

  Hafner’s voice went stony. “I. Did. Not. Have. To. Do. This.” LeRoux wept anew and apologized again. They called a truce.

  Hafner formally launched the new company, SecurStar, in 2001 and put the product, a security software package called DriveCrypt, on the market in November of that year. They were on their way!

  Until they weren’t, because LeRoux’s mood turned inexplicably dark. In 2002, a few months after the launch, LeRoux told Hafner he was unhappy with the pace the company was setting and with his pay. “I’m ambitious,” he complained. “I’m in need of money.” LeRoux said he wanted to live in luxury. Plus, he had recently remarried, to a Taiwanese expatriate named Lillian. They had a baby son, the first of the four children they would have together.

  “Encryption software is a niche market,” Hafner told him. “You’re in the wrong business.” The company would pay off eventually, but not as spectacularly nor as quickly as LeRoux wanted. He offered to introduce LeRoux to people in the online casino business in Costa Rica. They probably needed a good programmer.

  LeRoux perked up. He hadn’t forgotten that night at the Monte Carlo casino—those gambling junkies flinging bills around like confetti at a political convention, the gold, the cars, the women. The drawback, Hafner said, was that LeRoux would have to move to Costa Rica to pursue the casino opportunity. What about his little son? Hafner could hear the baby, about five months old, crying in the background. What about Lillian?

  “I’ll dump my wife and the kid, no problem,” LeRoux said with a laugh. “I’ve heard South American women are prettier.”

  Hafner was appalled. How could a man joke about abandoning his family? He was growing increasingly uneasy about his collaborator’s character. A few months earlier, LeRoux had mentioned that he was adopted and said of his biological father, “I don’t give a shit about him.” Hafner was shocked. How could he speak ill of his own father? Where Hafner came from, people didn’t disrespect their parents, not even in jest.

  Then Hafner discovered that LeRoux had stolen from the company. He had gotte
n his hands on a valuable string of code proprietary to SecurStar and had sold it out the back door to a British company. Another team of engineers within the company had written the code, which drove a security device called a crypto-key. Because it was extremely difficult to write, that string of code was worth $100,000, and maybe more on the black market.

  When Hafner confronted him, LeRoux didn’t deny pilfering the code. He made some lame excuses. Hafner fired him, but he was baffled. For the chief technical officer to cheat his own colleagues was beyond his belief. And for what? LeRoux did not need to steal. He had just blown the opportunity to be made a full partner in SecurStar. As the company grew, so would his share of the profits. He would have made far more than $100,000 if he had had a little patience. He lost something beyond price—his relationship with Hafner, his mentor. It was as close to a real friendship with a person his age as he had ever had or ever would have.

  Except for a brief unresolved dispute in 2004 over the ownership of some software, LeRoux disappeared from Hafner’s life. Then one day in 2008, a message popped up in Hafner’s old Yahoo email account. “Hi, how are you doing?” It was LeRoux. Hafner’s temper had cooled, and anyway, in business, he made it a practice to hold his cards close and not to make lasting enemies. They talked. LeRoux seemed excited to reconnect, friendly and polite as always, but more grown-up. As an aside, Hafner mentioned to LeRoux that to satisfy demand from military and other government clients, he was developing software to prevent telephone calls from being intercepted. He was going to call it PhoneCrypt. The venture would be off and running as soon as he raised the last $3 million.

  “I made over $20 Million U.S., and I want to invest the money,” LeRoux said. “I would be happy to invest in SecurStar.”

  Hafner didn’t want to let LeRoux back into his life, and the next line cinched it. “I feel that we can make the company the next Microsoft,” LeRoux said airily. “Send me over your business plan.”

  LeRoux came on way too strong, all alpha, and his high-handed remark—“send me your business plan”—was downright rude. Hafner listened politely and incredulously. LeRoux should have known that Hafner’s investors were his personal friends of long standing. They didn’t demand elaborate business plans. Hafner told them about a project, and they liked it and invested, or they didn’t. Hafner thought that LeRoux was trying to rewrite the narrative, casting his old boss as the supplicant and himself as the rich angel investor who needed to be pitched.

  Hafner concluded that LeRoux was running some kind of con job, or maybe fishing for intelligence about Hafner’s next business moves. Hafner did not believe that LeRoux had made anything like $20 million. When he told the story to a colleague at the company, they both concluded that LeRoux was just a strange needy guy who self-destructed.

  “I still don’t understand what happened to Paul,” the colleague said. “He was the most brilliant guy I ever worked with. Could have gone to the very top. It’s really insane.”

  They did not know—they could not know—that LeRoux was on top. He had a lot more than $20 million. He had created the biggest black-market e-commerce pharmaceutical company on the planet. He had boxes full of hundred-dollar bills and 500 euro notes, but since narcissists never get enough, he had to have more.

  At that point, he was fully committed to what filmmaker John Huston called, in his film noir masterpiece The Asphalt Jungle, the “left-handed form of human endeavor.” He had felt a vocation to entrepreneurship, in the mold of his contemporaries—Musk, a South African a year and a half older than LeRoux, and already disrupting the mainstream economy in various ways, large and small, and Bezos, six years older than LeRoux, also from modest means, who had founded Amazon in 1994 and was on his way to building an online retailing juggernaut that by 2018 would make him the world’s richest man. Both Musk and Bezos were launching space exploration ventures, a radical departure direction from their original businesses, digital maps and books, respectively.

  LeRoux’s innovations were always on the dark side. He was sampling many different kinds of crime, bland and shocking, cerebral and violent.

  Through them all, he fell back on a mind-set he must have absorbed in Rhodesia—dig in hard, don’t spare the bullets, and be ready to move.

  “He knew if somebody was going to catch him, it was going to be the Americans,” Jack said. “He didn’t know what place would be safe. He needed a lot of bolt holes in a lot of places.” Eventually, LeRoux would try and fail to bribe the king of Swaziland to give him diplomatic status that would protect him from extradition. Sanctuary in Iran would become another option to consider. LeRoux believed that because of his work with the Iranian Defense Industries Organization, Tehran would grant him political asylum, should he need it. The drawback was that, in Iran, an enormous white guy would be highly visible. Also, a society tightly controlled by religious fanatics and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps wasn’t an appealing destination for a freewheeling, irreligious war profiteer and lover of women.

  The Rhodesian in LeRoux kept tugging at him to return to the place he was born. In 2007 and 2008, LeRoux paid $12 million to Israeli arms dealer Ari Ben-Menashe, who was reputed to be close to Robert Mugabe, then the president of Zimbabwe. LeRoux wanted to lease a large parcel of land confiscated from white farmers during land reforms Mugabe ordered in the year 2000. LeRoux didn’t get what he wanted. He got no plantation, and he got no money back.

  LeRoux tried another tack. Several times in 2009, he sent Jack to travel around the Zimbabwean countryside to scout out possible safe houses. He gave Jack very specific instructions: search out a colonial-era villa with white, plantation-style columns, some acreage, and a “big, curvy driveway.” The description suggested a nostalgic fantasy harking back to a bygone era when white gentlemen planters enjoyed a life of ease in the green hills of southern Africa. The more languorous characters were called “verandah farmers,” a term meant to evoke idle days and debauched nights, sipping cool drinks on the broad front porches, observing from a distance the toils of the black farmhands, then toddling off at dusk for dinner and an orgy with other planters’ bored wives.

  That was not the way Paul and Judith and their children lived, but LeRoux might have seen colonial mansions and harbored romantic notions about the glory days when a white man could stroll into the mahogany-paneled Bulawayo Club bar and order the “boy” to fetch him a gin and tonic.

  As a child in a whites-only school, he would have been told the so-called Pioneers Myth, about intrepid English settlers taming the verdant, empty plain and carving out a civilization. It is highly doubtful he would have been told that white Rhodesia was founded on and sustained by blood and lies. As British journalist Richard West wrote in 1965 in his classic book The White Tribes of Africa, “Rhodesia began with a swindle.” West chronicled how diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company claimed the territory for Britain in 1890, lured by reports of vast deposits of diamonds, gemstones, gold, silver, copper, chrome, iron, and other valuable minerals. They went to Bulawayo and tricked the king into signing away the tribe’s metal and mineral rights for £100 a month, plus the promise of guns and a boat that they did not deliver.

  When the indigenous people rebelled in 1896, British troops and Rhodes’s militiamen exterminated them. Historian Brendon described scenes of horrific cruelty: British soldiers and settlers putting villages, grain stores crops to the torch; slaughtering men, women and children; collecting trophy ears; and making their victims’ skin into tobacco pouches. In the famine that resulted, people were reduced to eating roots, monkeys, and plague-ridden cattle corpses. The streets of Bulawayo filled with emaciated refugees trying to escape to South Africa.

  LeRoux wasn’t interested in his homeland’s shameful imperial history. He just wanted what he wanted—the plantation, the Landcruiser, the Range Rover, obsequious servants, women.

  Zimbabwe “was home for him,” Jack said. “But maybe also his narcissistic mind wanted to get the land back fr
om Mugabe. He definitely had a thing with Zimbabwe. It was about getting what he wanted, and if he had to do business with an evil person like Mugabe, then so be it, as long as he got his part off the deal. He didn’t care about the people. They were all monkeys to him. But getting a part of his country back somehow seemed important to him.”

  Chapter Four

  Black Cloud

  LEROUX LAUNCHED RX LIMITED IN 2004.

  He moved to Manila and set up his base of operations there because it offered cheap labor for his call centers, which took orders and pushed sales. As important, the Philippines’ legal system was rife with corruption. He could buy silence.

  He registered a long list of Internet domains—acmemeds.com, all-the-best-rx.com, cheaprxmeds.com, allpharmmeds.com, BuyMeds Cheap.com, my-online-drugstore.com, preapprovedrx.com, matrixmeds .com, your-pills.com, speedyrxdrugs.com, 123onlinepharmacy.com, epropecia.com, and fioricetdosage.com. He set up a hand-crafted black cloud of his own websites and multiple servers. A few sessions at his keyboard and he was a founder! In the New Economy, founders were rock stars. No factory, no staff, no board, no business plan—no problem. In the tech age, all anyone needed to start a company was a good idea, and LeRoux had one.