“Your life, in this country, right now—I could go up to Tondo, give them a bag of shabu for about thirty dollars,” he continued, using the local shorthand for methamphetamine. “That’s what your life is worth. ‘Go kill him.’ And they’ll do it.”

“Well, don’t do that,” was all I could think to say.

He laughed. “You’re okay, don’t worry about it. But you made a lot of people nervous coming here.”

Alternating between energy drinks and cigarettes, Donovan proceeded to tell me his account of how he’d come to intersect with Paul Le Roux. Some of it I would later confirm, while other portions—like many of the tales people in Le Roux’s world told me—I could only triangulate against whispers and rumors. Dono- van’s antipathy for Le Roux, at least, seemed real. When Le Roux had started killing people in the Philippines, he said, “there was a lot of heat that came down. He caused a lot of problems. So he would have got it one way or another.”

A former British military officer, Donovan had landed in the Philippines in the mid-1990s, a decade before Le Roux. He and an American had been running a business in the United States, finding and forcibly returning kids who had been spirited out of the coun- try by one of their parents. After some bad publicity from a botched job, Donovan and his partner had come to Manila to hunker down until the bad press blew over. “We got to know some people, and we got to realize they did not have a clue what security was here,” Donovan said. So they’d stayed and started their own firm, train- ing security guards to protect dignitaries and conducting “risk as- sessment surveys” for businesses. After a few years, Donovan’s partner got caught up in the hunt for Yamashita’s gold, a long- rumored stash of treasure supposedly hidden somewhere in the Philippines by a Japanese general during World War II. “That seems to destroy people here,” Donovan said. “I said nah, I’m going my own way.” He started his own security company.

Over the years, Donovan said, he fell almost accidentally into the Philippine underworld of graft and corruption, a natural prod-