Still, the government guarded facts about Le Roux with the same zealous secrecy, propelled by an internal logic that was itself closed to interrogation. His name might have been public, but Le Roux’s case file remained sealed. So, too, did significant portions of the prosecution’s cases against Hunter and his team of would-be assassins, the group arrested for trafficking North Korean meth, and the RX Limited defendants indicted in Minnesota.

Even the name of Le Roux’s defense attorney was treated like a state secret. In a closed proceeding in August 2013, Le Roux had dispensed with Marvinny, his appointed attorney, and hired a New York criminal lawyer named B. Alan Seidler. (“I was on the case for a while, and now I’m not,” was all Marvinny would tell me when I reached him by phone.) Sometime later Le Roux fired Seidler, too, hiring another attorney whose name was sealed. No one I spoke with, including a former federal prosecutor who had worked on sensitive terrorism cases, could find any precedent for sealing an attorney’s name when the defendant’s name was public. What made the maneuver even more mystifying was that Le Roux’s new attorney wasn’t appointed by the court. He was being paid by Le Roux—out of what funds was anyone’s guess—and could quit the case any time he wished.

Now, as one defendant after another folded and admitted his guilt, any hope I’d had that Le Roux himself might ever be called to testify seemed to be draining away. But there was one defendant whose attorneys thought they had a way to bring Le Roux into the open.

“The government is embarrassed,” Robert Richman, one of Moran Oz’s attorneys, told me when I traveled to Minneapolis to inter- view Oz in December 2015. “They don’t want to admit that Le Roux is involved.” Richman and the other half of Oz’s defense team, Joe Friedberg, had started to think their client had the basis for a duress defense. Oz, after all, had been thrown off a boat and shot at by Le Roux’s henchman. The only problem was that Linda