THE MASTERMIND 305

we can put in writing,” he continued. “It will put me in a situation where it will endanger me.”

He arrived at the appointed hour, a white guy with thinning hair, in a polo shirt with folded reading glasses hanging from its open collar. “People are still really scared, because there is a strong belief that there are operations still going on,” he said. “Money talks in this country. For five thousand pesos”—around $100— “you could have someone taken out.” He lit a cigarette, the first of several, and dropped the pack on the table. His own concerns were largely legal: he was facing thirty-five federal criminal counts in the United States, for setting up companies and shipping accounts connected to RX Limited.

For the next hour, McConnell recounted his story, from his hir- ing by Dave Smith to the gold schemes in Hong Kong and the mis- sions in Zimbabwe, to Smith's murder and Le Roux's threats at the Hard Rock Cafe, to his new duties in Florida and his mental breakdown. He'd always tried to stay on the right side of the law in his work for Le Roux, he said. But somewhere along the way his sense of right and wrong had warped. “Morally I knew it was wrong,” he said. “I lost the plot.”

McConnell told me that after leaving the organization, he began moving locations with his family, hoping there was no one on his tail. Eventually his paranoia eased, and he started working security again. He stopped hearing from Le Roux, and in 2013, he'd de- cided to go to the authorities with what he knew. He wrote a letter detailing what he believed to be Le Roux's crimes. Afraid that no agency in the Philippines could be trusted, he arranged for a friend to hand-deliver the letter to the U.S. embassy in Manila, with in- structions not to give it to any non-American staff. He never heard back.

I caught up with him as he was trying again to switch sides, this time with a Philippine intelligence agency. McConnell had main- tained copies of records about Le Roux's wealth, including his purchases of gold bars and of land that he'd bought in Western Australia. He estimated that there was $16 million in gold left in