cocaine leaving South America headed for Asian markets. In Flor- ida he'd arranged the purchase of a forty-four-foot luxury sailboat called the JeReVe—French for “I dream”—for $105,000. Accord- ing to its sales listing, its previous owners had sailed it around the Mediterranean and the Caribbean before giving it up. “JeReVe is ready to sail and to give a lot of pleasure to its next owner,” the ad said. One of Le Roux's captains sailed the JeReVe to Panama, where it waited for another skipper to take it south to Ecuador.

Le Roux's calls with an unknown collaborator in Ecuador were conducted in a relatively simple code. “The car looks brand new,” his contact told him, to convey that the boat was in place. For Kent Bailey, reviewing the tapes back in the United States, it didn't take decades of law enforcement experience to know that he was listening to a transoceanic drug shipment about to take off. Bailey enlisted in-country DEA agents to meet the boat at its berth in Panama. They arranged a distraction for the crew of the JeReVe while they placed a tracking device on the craft, and snapped a photo of the two men Le Roux sent to sail it on its next leg.

In August the boat arrived in Ecuador. Greased by bribe money Le Roux had wired into the country, it cleared Ecuadorian cus- toms on August 20 and sailed out with two crew members: Ivan Vaclavic, who had been detained and then released in both the Philippines and Hong Kong, and another man, unknown to Bailey and the DEA. Now they had a chance to follow a major drug ship- ment in real time, and hopefully catch whoever received it on the other end. After a brief stop off the coast of Peru, where Le Roux had sourced the cocaine to be loaded on board, the boat began its two-month journey across the ocean.

By that time, the wiretap had gone dark. Le Roux had departed for the Philippines, where the DEA lacked a window into his move- ments. As the summer months passed into September, Bailey again pressed Linda Marks to speed up her efforts to convene a grand jury and indict Le Roux in Minnesota. But it was too late.