chronicler of his own story. "Ari has put five or six dozen journal- ists from all over the world through roughly the same paces," the investigative reporter Craig Unger once wrote. "Listen to him, trust him, print his story verbatim-then sit round and watch your career go up in flames."

By the 2000s, Ben-Menashe had settled in Montreal and nomi- nally ran an international consultancy called Dickens & Madson, profiting off the international connections he'd forged around the world. In Zimbabwe, he was widely known to have developed a close relationship with President Mugabe, related to a bizarre 2002 incident in which Ben-Menashe claimed that an opposition party leader had sought his help "eliminating" Mugabe. (A judge later concluded that the party leader had meant only that he would win an election.) And it was Zimbabwe that Steve LeBaron had arrived to discuss. "He came to Montreal initially, not knowing whether he was going to find me or not," Ben-Menashe said. "Funny enough he found out that my home number was listed. All this international intrigue, and my phone number is in the white pages."

LeBaron told Ben-Menashe that his boss, a white Zimbabwean named Paul Le Roux, was interested in talking to high-level offi- cials in Zimbabwe's government. Ben-Menashe agreed to meet with Le Roux, who traveled to Montreal not long after, flying from the Philippines with a stopover in the United States. "He was an interesting guy," Ben-Menashe said. "Not that well educated, you can't call him an intellectual. I would define him as street smart. He didn't look like the criminal type." As Ben-Menashe came to understand, Le Roux "was a bit of a computer-type wiz" who had gotten rich selling prescription drugs online. Now, Le Roux told Ben-Menashe, he was willing to pay months to persuade Mugabe's government to lease him a large amount of farmland. Le Roux, in turn, would sublease it to white farmers who'd been driven off their land.

Le Roux also told Ben-Menashe he hoped to obtain a diplo-