it together as they pursued the underlings whom he had drawn into it.

In legal circles this was known as “cooperating down,” and Le Roux would prove an enthusiastic participant. The speed of his transformation from target to informant was breathtaking. “It was obvious that my situation was a bad situation” was all he would say, with a shrug, when asked later why he’d flipped so eas- ily. Within a day of his arrival in New York, he signed what’s known as a proffer agreement. Under the terms of a proffer, Le Roux was free to talk to prosecutors without fear; nothing he told them could be used against him. Whatever he truthfully fessed up to couldn’t result in new charges against him. Any lies or omis- sions, on the other hand, could.

Suddenly the man whom Kimberly Brill and Kent Bailey had worked for years to understand was spilling parts of his story to investigators as fast as they could record them. He was cagey at first about some of the killings he’d ordered—“I’m already at risk of being sentenced to death in the Philippines,” he said later in court (perhaps fearing a kind of extrajudicial justice, since the Philippines banned the death penalty in 2006). But eventually he came clean on seven murders. He admitted to bribing officials in the Philippines, China, Laos, Brazil, and all over Africa, to laun- dering hundreds of millions of dollars, to dealing in massive quan- tities of methamphetamines and cocaine, to selling explosives to and acquiring weapons from Iran.

The SOD agents who had cornered Le Roux, Eric Stouch and Thomas Cindric, needed more than just names and admissions. To run him as an asset, they’d need to quickly convince his remaining crew that Le Roux was still at large, running his business. “We were trying to maintain the image that he was still free and moving about, specifically in Brazil,” Stouch later said. The 960 group also had indicted Shai Reuven in the methamphetamine sting—he’d been scheduled to travel to Liberia with Le Roux but failed to show up—and now the agents left him on the street to help main- tain the myth that Le Roux was still free.