the Mossad. “I can give you protection,” he told Le Roux, accord- ing to the former 960 agent. The agents decided to ignore the offer.) Marcus went so far as to send Le Roux the résumés of pos- sible recruits, but then the correspondence abruptly ended. Only years later, Marcus said, “did I realize that this fucking cunt was in jail, trying to set me up to come there.”

The phenomenon replicated itself across Le Roux’s operations. Scott Stammers, the security contractor who worked for Le Roux in Thailand, heard from him again in late 2012. Stammers was a thirty-four-year-old British citizen born in Hong Kong who some- how retained his English pallor despite years of living in a tropical climate. He had helped coordinate gun- and drug-related operations for Le Roux in the past, and was skilled at sourcing everything from heavy weaponry to methamphetamine precursor chemicals and the cooks to prepare them.

Le Roux wanted Stammers, together with Philip Shackels— a tattooed Irishman who had become central to Le Roux’s drug business, forging relationships with South American cartels—to coordinate the logistics for a meth deal. This time it would be for some new associates in Colombia, where he’d previously failed to find the right connection. “He said, ‘I won’t be in the Philippines for a while, it’s gotten too hot there,’ ” Stammers recalled. “ ‘My partners want to meet you in Thailand.’ ”

The deal, as Le Roux described it, would be a replay of one he’d done before, with Ye Tiong Tan Lim, who’d previously arranged The Company’s acquisition of nearly fifty kilos of meth in 2012. Lim, a balding Chinese man in his fifties with wire-rim glasses, purportedly operated an import-export business but maintained ties to a triad group in Hong Kong. To get to Lim as part of his new DEA duties, Le Roux reached out to Kelly Peralta, a thirty- nine-year-old Filipino who had once worked for him as a manager of his bar in Manila. Peralta’s role in The Company had been neg- ligible, at best. Dave Smith had hired him to work at Sid’s, Le Roux’s bar, after meeting him at the Blue Rock Resort in Subic.