betrayal and skimming, added her to his hit list. “Paul was looking in the wrong direction,” she said. “He should have looked closer.”

After Marcus’s first three hits, Le Roux ordered him to kill one of the organization’s attorneys, a Filipina who had tried and failed to get the cargo ship M/V Ufuk returned to him. But he deemed the plan Marcus came up with too elaborate and called off the hit. Marcus left for South Africa, he told me, and never returned.

I asked him if he ever thought about the killings later. “In the beginning I had pretty bad nightmares,” he said. “But also for me, coming from my background as a policeman, you shoot people. My mindset was: Don’t think of it any other way, it’s just a job.” Le Roux told him that these people had committed crimes against him. He wasn’t the judge, he said, just the man rendering the ver- dict. “Call it a police mentality if you want. These people, they stole, they robbed, they killed. Only difference is we executed them. I tried to block that shit out of my mind. But yeah, it’s some- thing that I don’t like to talk about.”

One afternoon in January 2011, Lachlan McConnell was sum- moned to meet Le Roux at one of his favorite Manila spots, the Hard Rock Cafe, in a Makati mall. McConnell knew that Le Roux had recently ordered an audit of his gold stashes, and Dave Smith had been missing for weeks, presumed dead. Le Roux had re- placed Smith with Joseph Hunter, who was taking over the secu- rity team. If there had been a time to get out, McConnell had already missed it.

He showed up early and ordered a rum and Coke to steel his nerves. When Le Roux arrived, he was carrying a stack of file fold- ers, and motioned McConnell to an empty section of the restau- rant. When they sat down, he slid a folder across the table.

“I think you know what this is about,” McConnell remembered him saying.

“I kind of do,” McConnell said. Le Roux told him he knew about Smith’s stealing, and McConnell’s part in it.