tion washing millions of dollars in cash and gold across Africa came with an undertow of violence. Le Roux had interests to pro- tect, after all, and they didn’t always involve keeping boat captains company or arranging gold transfers in Hong Kong.

On one occasion, Le Roux dispatched McConnell and an Amer- ican contractor into the jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their assignment: to locate some logging equipment Le Roux believed had been stolen, and the manager of the company he believed was behind the theft. They spent several days sleeping in a mud hut, snooping around logging camps, taking photographs of Le Roux’s gear being used by a Malaysian company. “We made the trip back, turned the report in, and that was that,” the Ameri- can contractor said. Whatever happened after that wasn’t their business. “Common sense will tell you why they want somone sur- veilled,” he said. Another time, McConnell was ordered to Canada, where he was given photographs and asked to verify the location of an ex-business partner of Le Roux’s. He did, dutifully writing up and submitting his report. Perhaps, he told himself, the intelli- gence was for a lawsuit.

When Le Roux asked McConnell to surveil Le Roux’s own fam- ily, however, the brutal realities of his boss’s venture became harder to ignore.

Much of Le Roux’s business in Africa, from gold buying to timber extraction, passed through a Zimbabwean cousin, Mathew Smith, who lived in Le Roux’s hometown of Bulawayo. The city had been devastated, along with the Zimbabwean economy, by a decade of hyperinflation that peaked in early 2009, so bad the government briefly printed $100 trillion notes. It was a place that had always maintained a kind of frontier mentality, a town where gray-market moneymaking schemes were often a part of life, especially in hard times. Mathew had spread Le Roux’s work to friends and associ- ates in town, including Andrew and Steve Hahn, a pair of experi- enced gold dealers; an out-of-work local named Robson Tandanayi,