got up on a wiretap on his phone in six days,” Bailey said. “That's so rare it's not even funny.”

Brill stayed up all night monitoring the line, waiting for McCon- nell to make a call. All they needed was for him to admit to some wrongdoing—or to talk to Le Roux directly—and they could swoop in and grab him, hit play, and watch him flip.

And then suddenly, the next morning, he was gone again, abruptly flying back to Manila. “We intercepted him for less than a day and he got on a flight,” Bailey said. “All we needed was a couple of days. God almighty. Just a couple days.”

Even as Bailey and Brill desperately searched for a direct line to Le Roux, there were some members of Le Roux's organization ready to turn him in. Some, in fact, had spent years trying to find a gov- ernment that would listen. Somehow the connections never quite crossed. First among them was Le Roux's cousin, Mathew Smith. After the firebombing of his house in Bulawayo, Mathew blamed Le Roux, who initially denied any involvement in it. “Had nothing to do with me bud,” Le Roux told him in an online chat. “Are you sure it was not someone else u guys owe money to?”

“No buddy,” Mathew said. “We owe one person. And that's you. You are my cousin for fucksakes. I worshipped the ground you walked on. Fuck mate, this is bullshit.”

But it wasn't until the M/V Ufuk incident that Mathew under- stood how thoroughly Le Roux had played him. When the news broke, Mathew discovered that his father had been listed as an “officer” of La Plata Trading, the company accused of orchestrat- ing the arms shipment. It didn't make sense at first; his father had no recollection of ever signing any paperwork. Then Mathew re- membered that when Le Roux had first reconnected with him, back in 2007, he'd offered to pay for Mathew and his father's airline tickets if they sent along their passports. That was all Le Roux needed. In the years Mathew had spent helping to arrange