22

The Mercenaries

2012 . . . Hunter’s “ninja work” . . . Noimie Edillor creates the template . . . A new pair of killers . . . The death of Catherine Lee

By early 2011, Dave Smith was dead, and Le Roux promoted Joseph Hunter to reorganize his security teams, at a salary of $12,000 a month. He ordered Hunter to hire a new kill team to tackle the growing list of associates and employees he believed might be stealing from him. They would work with a surveillance group run by a Filipino named Noyt, who would locate and track the targets. Hunter planned to revamp the whole operation, keep- ing what he liked to call “ninja work”—intimidation and murder— separate from “business,” the everyday job of securing Le Roux’s operations. Dave Smith, he told Le Roux, had spent more time drinking and womanizing than he had planning missions. Now things would be different. Hunter rehired his old friend Tim Vamvakias, the former Amer- ican soldier who had brought him into Le Roux’s organization in 2008. He paired up Chris De Meyer, his former finger-breaking partner, with an American of Samoan descent whom everyone in the organization knew only as “Daddy Mac.” They’d each earn a $25,000 “sales bonus” for every hit they carried out.