8

The Reporter

2015–2017 . . . On the ground in Manila . . . Finding Le Roux's people . . . Patrick Donovan's stories . . . Dave Smith lands the job

At times I had trouble explaining—to others and myself—why I invested so much time in understanding Paul Le Roux and what he'd done. In part, it was simply a reporter's curiosity: How did he become what he became? But something felt oddly personal about the search, too. I kept coming across small but eerie paral- lels between our histories. We were roughly the same age, born three years apart. When he'd lived in Sydney creating E4M, I'd been just a few miles away, studying at an Australian university. In the late 1990s, I'd worked as a software consultant in Amsterdam, vastly less talented than Le Roux but engaged in work not dis- similar to the kind he was doing down the road in Rotterdam. I, too, was enthralled with the early message-board culture that drew in Le Roux, and fascinated by the legal gray areas birthed on the Internet.

There our paths diverged, to put it mildly. My curiosity led me to cover this new universe as a reporter for Wired, while Le Roux leveraged his into E4M. But I imagine that we both watched the dot-com gold rush at the turn of the century with some bafflement,