To work with Le Roux, the agents needed a judge’s approval to pull him out of confinement, after which they would transport him to one of the few locations that now comprised his world: a DEA office near JFK airport, the U.S. Attorney’s offices at the fed- eral courthouse in downtown Manhattan, or the airport Hilton. (In one inexplicable security slip, someone allowed Le Roux’s rec- ord to be publicly available on the Bureau of Prisons website. “Paul Leroux”—without the space—was listed as “Released On: 09/04/2013,” perhaps an artifact of the process of moving him in and out of jail.) Once sequestered, Le Roux would spend the day orchestrating a new set of sting operations. He attacked his role with the single-minded devotion that he’d previously shown toward his criminal endeavors.

There was one immediate problem: Le Roux communicated largely using email that passed through his own server, fast-free -email.com, which he had designed to periodically destroy his mes- sages. The agents needed a way to mirror the contents of that email address in another account, so that they could preserve all of Le Roux’s communications as evidence. Fortunately, there was one person in the room technically proficient enough to execute such a maneuver. And he seemed happy to be back in the game, even if on the other side. From inside the confines of the Manhattan federal courthouse, Le Roux logged in to his old fast-free-email server in the Philippines and got to work.

From the perspective of his employees scattered around the world, Le Roux had briefly gone dark, but not for long enough to raise alarms. They were used to not seeing him for months at a time. “You could always reach him via email or phone, and that was probably the strangest thing of all when he dropped off for a while,” said Tim Vamvakias, who had rejoined the organization when Jo- seph Hunter took over Le Roux’s kill teams. Vamvakias’s new job was to run an operation to import tramadol, the generic version of Ultram, directly from Mexican cartels into Texas—foregoing the