After Sid's closed two years later, Peralta came to Le Roux with an offer: an introduction to Lim, whose triad connections could get Le Roux high-quality meth out of North Korea. Peralta, who spoke English better than Lim, had become the go-between with Le Roux, for which he was paid $25,000.

Now, one year later, Le Roux was back, asking him to make the same arrangement, this time for the South Americans. Peralta agreed to do it. In early January 2013, Lim and Peralta traveled to Thailand to meet the South Americans, who claimed to be senior figures in a Colombian cartel. They were planning to sell the meth in New York, they said. First, they'd need a sample sent to Liberia, so they could test the quality. The whole plan was a modified ver- sion of the sting used to ensnare Le Roux himself.

The request was a little unusual, but it didn't faze Lim any more than it had fazed Le Roux. “My boss,” Lim said, “only gets [it] from the original source.” That source was North Korea.

North Korea's contribution to the international meth trade dated to the mid-1990s, when heavy rains wiped out its thriving poppy crop, opening a lane for lab-made drugs. By 2007, North Korea was producing tons of the stuff per year—“the highest qual- ity product for export” according to one U.S. congressional report— which was then smuggled across the border into northeastern China. By 2013 the flow of drugs out of the dictatorship seemed to be lessening; the State Department observed that “state-sponsored drug trafficking may have ceased or been sharply reduced, or . . . the DPRK regime has become more adept at concealing state- sponsored trafficking of illicit drugs.”

Lim now made a similar point to the Colombians. “The North Korean government already burned all the labs,” he told them, “to show the Americans they aren't selling it anymore.” But Lim said he still had access to roughly one ton of ultra-pure North Korean meth. “Only our labs are not closed,” he said.

The Colombians asked to visit the labs to verify its origins—if the DEA was going to use Le Roux to get a foothold inside North