The hearing had finally breached the wall of secrecy surrounding Le Roux, or at least a section of it. The same day, a federal judge in New York unsealed a portion of his case file in the Southern District. The docket showed that Le Roux had formally pleaded guilty, after a year of cooperation, at the end of 2013. His final plea deal remained sealed, but the “information” he had signed was now available. There, at last, were the criminal counts that Le Roux was on the hook for: the meth importation plan, computer hacking, and bribery of a foreign official. The information also in- cluded crimes that he’d admitted but would never be prosecuted for, including that he had solicited or participated in seven murders. The names were redacted, but it wasn’t hard for me to fill them in: Dave Smith, Noimie Edillor, Catherine Lee, Joe Frank Zuñiga, Bruce Jones, Herbert Tan Tiu, and Chito—the man who had tipped off the Philippine police to Tiu’s gun stash. Kent Bailey told me that Le Roux denied ordering the daylight assassination of Michael Lontoc, the Philippine target shooter who ran the organization’s gun shop in Manila, claiming someone else killed him over a gam- bling debt.

There was another remarkable fact in Le Roux’s unsealed docket, one that held the key to the incredible secrecy surrounding him. Le Roux had confessed to selling technology to the government of Iran, a crime in the United States. Finally I understood why Le Roux had been treated like a national security asset: He was one. Or at least a potential asset. Later, I learned from the former 960 agent that the DEA hadn’t been able to turn Le Roux’s information about Iran into actionable intelligence. “We were trying to work with the FBI, it just didn’t go anywhere,” he said. The Obama ad- ministration, he said, refused to allow the DEA to send anyone into Iran to pick up the trail of Le Roux’s contacts. And they’d missed out on Nestor Del Rosario, who had approached the Australians willing to cooperate before he disappeared. “I don’t blame him,” the former agent said. “I wish we would have talked to him because he’s the one who could really spell out the whole Iranian situation.”