Furthering the role-reversal, Richman adopted an approach not unlike that of a prosecutor questioning a defendant about his crimes. He approached the podium and began by asking Le Roux what his profession was.

Le Roux thought for a moment, then responded in what sounded to my ears like a South African accent, flattened by years abroad— and Le Roux’s own efforts to shed it. "Essentially," he said, "I worked as a programmer for many years."

The ostensible purpose of the hearing, to establish whether Le Roux had consented to recordings of his phone calls with Moran Oz, was accomplished in minutes. But Richman was after more, and he pushed Le Roux to admit to a list of the same facts that I had been chasing for years. He confirmed that he had created the encryption software E4M, but denied that he had developed True- Crypt, its famous progeny. He copped to some of his aliases, in- cluding Johan Smit, Bernard Bowlins, and John Smith. He admitted having organized the two-hundred-kilo cocaine shipment on the JeReVe, out of Ecuador.

It was when Richman began asking about the murders that the casualness of Le Roux’s admissions became most dissonant.

"You knew that your legal situation was far worse than just a methamphetamine charge, correct?" Richman asked, probing Le Roux’s motives for cooperating.

"In what way?" Le Roux asked. He leaned back in his chair, his arms folded.

"Well, for example, you ordered multiple murders, correct?"

"Yes, that’s true."

"And, for example, you ordered the murder of a Filipino cus- toms agent, correct?"

"That’s not correct," Le Roux said, leaning into the micro- phone and furrowing his brow in mild irritation. There, in the skeptical narrowing of his eyes, he displayed the sense of superi- ority that I heard many of his employees and family members describe.

"What is not correct about it?"