Le Roux suspected of tipping off the authorities to the M/V Ufuk. When Le Roux concluded that another employee named Joseph— not Hunter—had conspired with Dave Smith to cheat him, he ar- ranged for a rebel leader to plant a bomb under Joseph’s vehicle. The bomb went off; Joseph survived. Le Roux simply moved to the next name on his list.

There were different theories about what eventually spooked Le Roux enough to force him out of the protective cocoon he’d built for himself in the Philippines. Patrick Donovan believed he pulled up stakes because his growing conglomerate had trod on the terri- tory of Chinese cartels that controlled the local drug trade. “Le Roux fell afoul of them when he started fucking bringing drugs on the streets here,” Donovan said. “I know there were three people that wanted to kill him. But nobody could get to him, he was such a recluse. Fucker hardly ever came out of anywhere. And when he did it was in the fucking middle of the night or early hours of the morning.”

Others said he saw international authorities closing in on him. He had talked for years about how the DEA was on his trail. “The Americans,” he would say, “are watching.” For half a decade he had been watching the watchers, exploiting the Philippines’ ram- pant corruption to ensure his invulnerabilty to local and inter- national investigations. He had Filipino employees at the U.S. embassy on his payroll, tipping him off to American information requests through FinCEN, the financial crimes enforcement net- work that Kent Bailey had used to gather intel. Through his paid Philippine law enforcement contacts, Le Roux had heard about Bailey’s 2009 visit to Manila. (“We were very careful with what we shared with them,” Bailey said of the Philippine authorities. “But it was common knowledge that they would take those requests and try and get money from the people that we were making re- quests about.”) Le Roux had gotten hold of a letter from the FBI’s Manila attaché to the Philippine Securities and Exchange Commis- sion, inquiring about his business dealings. From a contact he called “Dragnet,” he had purchased documents purporting to be