“You see,” Le Roux told Berkman afterward. “I can get to you wherever you are.”

A month after McConnell checked out of the hospital, Le Roux summoned him to a meeting at a coffee shop near one of his homes outside Manila. McConnell noticed that Le Roux seemed to have increased his security, with a follow car and a pair of Filipino bodyguards who entered in front of him.

Le Roux had ample reasons for caution: Even as RX Limited struggled, his larger organization had expanded into more and bigger criminal ventures. He was now active in the meth trade, putting him in business—and potentially in conflict—with power- ful forces in the Southeast Asian underworld. One Le Roux em- ployee in the Philippines, an Irishman named Philip Shackels, tried to build Le Roux a meth lab in an apartment. Another, Scott Stam- mers, attempted to arrange meth production in Cambodia with the help of a Cambodian general. Those plans failed, but Le Roux finally hit the meth supply jackpot when a former bartender at Sid’s named Kelly Peralta introduced him to a member of a triad organized-crime syndicate in Hong Kong. The contact, a man named Ye Tiong Tan Lim, had access to the highest-quality North Korean-made meth. Le Roux obtained forty-eight kilos, with a promise of much more, and split the load between safe houses in Thailand and the Philippines.

For transportation, he attempted to buy a submarine from the North Koreans to move the drugs. When that fell through, he had his engineers design a small one-man sub for the job. (Le Roux’s only legitimate business was a boat-repair shop in Manila.) He attempted to reverse-engineer a Predator drone to create his own for shipping drugs, and built a working prototype in a Philippine warehouse.

Le Roux was also now deep into the international cocaine busi- ness. Shackels, after the failed meth lab, redeemed himself by de- livering contacts for cocaine suppliers in Peru and Brazil. By 2011,