employee responded when I contacted her on Facebook. “And how did you get my name? If you see him can you tell him there’s a special place in hell for murderers like him? If you work for him, please know I’m no longer scared.”

For a few who had made it through their time with Le Roux un- scathed and unbothered by law enforcement, it was just an amusing footnote to their lives. “I knew the boss was some kind of Internet guru,” one American contractor told me when I found him in the Philippines. He’d done a brief stint with The Company, buy- ing black-market gold in Ghana. “He had multiple revenue streams, he’s buying some gold, buying some fucking weapons, doing differ- ent shit. It was all compartmentalized. I didn’t mind doing some stuff in the gray area. It was nothing compared to Iraq and Afghan- istan.”

The most maddening part of trying to unravel Le Roux’s or- ganization, it turned out, was not finding these people but making sense of their experiences, many of which overlapped and contra- dicted each other. As I mapped Le Roux’s sprawling network— physically, on my bedroom wall, in a collection of multicolored Post-it notes as if from some demented corporate ideas meeting— lines began to intersect. Israelis associated with call centers in Tel Aviv turned up in Vanuatu running international logging opera- tions. Zimbabweans I found on company registrations in Hong Kong showed up on property records in Australia.

I’d like to claim that this was some kind of linear process, a journalist-turned-detective expertly following a trail of bread- crumbs down the path to the secret lair. But, in truth, people and stories came to me scattershot, and I found myself constantly cir- cling back to reevaluate some fact that I’d been told before. I piled up puzzle pieces and then sifted through them, seeking connec- tions, and then set out to pile up some more. It was discovery by accrual, and as I stumbled my way through, a picture of the empire that Le Roux had built slowly began to come into focus.