pines, Le Roux ordered an airstrip constructed on a piece of prop- erty in Batangas, facing the South China Sea. On the east coast, he bought an island to facilitate shipments from the Pacific.

Soon, Shai Reuven was telling his fellow employees that he had been sent to Colombia make contacts with cocaine producers, and another Israeli was rumored to have been ordered to Mexico to try to find a cartel connection for Le Roux. (He was instead taken captive and beaten, the story went, lucky to escape with his life.) The details sometimes changed in the telling, but the whispers cap- tured the weird truth of Le Roux's philosophy for expanding his empire: throw money or employees at the wall and see what sticks. Any particular assignment could seem inane, even naïve, but in the aggregate the approach got results. "He just sent his people," said Felix Klaussen. "Sometimes they come back with nothing. Some- times they come back with information. And then when some guys finally get in contact with a serious source or with a serious sup- plier, if necessary he gives them a call and wires them a couple million dollars. Then, okay, this guy is serious. Everything was a tryout for him. He could send ten people to the same city until he got the result he wanted."

The same philosophy held for arms deals. Nestor Del Rosario had risen from call center administrator to the manager of Red White & Blue Arms to the overseer of Le Roux's efforts to buy and sell weapons in Iran. For this latter mission, Del Rosario was or- dered to fly to Tehran and find contacts in the Iranian government to transact with. Le Roux was hoping to sell them an explosives formula he had perfected—his own variation on erythritol tetrani- trate, or ETN, a cousin of plastic explosives that was powerful and simple to produce. Somewhat miraculously, Le Roux's faith in Del Rosario paid off, and he made contact with a government official who eventually agreed to buy the formula for $5 million. But Le Roux had a more lucrative project for the Iranians: missile- guidance-system software, similar to that used in U.S. Tomahawk missiles, that could potentially help the country extend the reach of the nuclear capabilities it had been trying to develop for de-