McGowan eventually confronted Le Roux, who told him that it was all a misunderstanding. He wanted to keep working together. “That was the last time I saw him,” McGowan said.

McGowan passed me an email address for Mathew Smith. A few weeks after I sent him a note, Mathew wrote me cryptically from a Gmail address in the name of his dog, Lulu—subject line: “PLR.” “He is an interesting character,” he wrote of his cousin. Le Roux, he noted, “had a legitimate Congolese diplomatic passport in his own name and a Bulgarian passport in another name.” From there we struck up a correspondence over email, phone, and online chat. At first he asked me to refer to him in my published reporting only as “Lulu.” But two years into our conversations, he changed his mind and agreed to go on the record.

After growing up close with his cousin, Mathew told me he’d lost touch with Le Roux in the early 2000s, when he moved to the Philippines. But in 2007 Le Roux had suddenly reconnected, say- ing that his business was expanding and that he needed trusted friends to help him grow his operations in Africa. He bought Mathew and his father tickets to Manila to discuss the possibili- ties, and before long Mathew had signed on to help Le Roux from Bulawayo.

Mathew set about recruiting additional family and other locals like the Hahn brothers and McGowan. An in-law of Mathew’s told me he at first thought Le Roux was a rich businessman look- ing to reinvest in Zimbabwe. Le Roux’s first mission for the in-law, in 2007, involved traveling to Montreal to meet an Israeli named Ari Ben-Menashe and sign some documents he didn’t understand related to farmland back in Zimbabwe. Then the jobs multiplied. Le Roux sent the in-law to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shop for timber concessions with an Israeli named Asaf Shoshana. Back in Bulawayo, he helped two guys from Le Roux’s security team, Lachlan McConnell and Joseph Hunter, find stash houses for gold. He and another local then arranged the acquisition of Le