Often, the people I thought would open the doors of Le Roux’s history only led me to more locked ones. One character who had long confounded me, amid the collection of Le Roux employees’ names stuck to my wall, was the Zimbabwean engineer, Robert McGowan. I’d seen his name first on a patchwork of corporate registrations tied to the heart of Le Roux’s business. In the United Kingdom he was listed as the director of Southern Ace, a company used by Le Roux’s mercenary arm. In documents from ICANN, the international organization that accredits website registrars, he was listed as the former head of ABSystems, Le Roux’s regis- trar in the Philippines. There were dozens of RX Limited websites in McGowan’s name, from rxfleetusa.com to pills24-7.com to pharmacybuycheapusa.com. He was attached to Florida-based companies with names like Armada Commerce and Quality Foun- tain, and tied to a Miami address used by RX Limited’s operations in the United States. Adding it all up, McGowan seemed to be as significant as Le Roux himself, but he’d never turned up in any of the court cases in the United States.

In early 2016, I flew to Tel Aviv to trace the Israeli end of the network and discovered McGowan’s name yet again, on docu- ments establishing the first iteration of CSWW, Le Roux’s Israeli call center company. Included was a copy of McGowan’s passport, along with Le Roux’s. It all seemed to point to the conclusion drawn by an Israeli magazine, in a 2011 article about the mysteri- ous call centers selling pharmaceuticals from Tel Aviv and Jerusa- lem: McGowan must be a major figure in RX Limited.

With his passport information in hand, I was able to track him down on Facebook from my Tel Aviv hotel room. We traded mes- sages and he sent me his number. When I finally spoke to him, he freely admitted working for Le Roux, but seemed perplexed by the scope of operations attributed to him. He’d been recruited into the business by Le Roux’s cousin Mathew, in Bulawayo, and told that Le Roux was a wealthy South African who needed help with logging projects. Le Roux flew McGowan to Manila and ex- plained that for his African endeavors he required heavy machin-