and arrested. Mathew immediately went to the airport and caught the next flight to Hong Kong.

He checked into a hotel, assuming he was safe. Then the land- line rang. It was Le Roux, asking why he’d run away. “I put the phone down, checked out, and rushed to the airport,” Mathew said. He then hid at a friend’s apartment in Singapore while he tried to figure out Le Roux’s intentions. In an online chat, he ac- cused Le Roux of trying to take him out. “I thought you were hunting me,” he said.

Le Roux responded with a smiley face. “Buddy if I was hunting you,” he wrote, “you would be dead.”

Mathew returned to Bulawayo, and over the ensuing months things seemed to return to normal. Steve Hahn had been allowed to return home—with his brother still in a Philippine prison—to try to raise the money to repay Le Roux. Apparently, he didn’t work fast enough: One day Joseph Hunter turned up, ordered him into a car, and shot him in the hand before making Hahn drive him to the airport.

Chatting online not long after the shooting, Le Roux began to hint to Mathew that a similar fate awaited him, for $52,000 he had taken from the organization and never paid back. The money was of course “chump change,” Le Roux said. He was worth hun- dreds of millions of dollars. “BUT it is a matter of honor. . . . It is the principle here, it is a shame you can’t see that.”

“Dude I very clearly understand,” Mathew said. The gun that had been used on Steve Hahn, he noted, had been bought at Le Roux’s request by Mathew himself.

“Yes but he is alive,” Le Roux said. “Nobody wanted him dead. Dead people don’t repay their debts.”

A few weeks later, in May 2009, Mathew was asleep at home in Bulawayo when he was awoken by an explosion. Someone had thrown a petrol bomb through his bedroom window, lighting the curtains on fire. When he rushed to look out, four shots shattered the glass, one passing through a door, centimeters from his head.