ernment had constructed around Le Roux. To the extent that I had pierced it slightly—building on revelations in The New York Times and elsewhere—I’d filled a vacuum that the government had cre- ated. Defense attorneys who had been denied any information about Le Roux began citing my articles in their court filings, hop- ing to mitigate the crimes to which their clients had pleaded guilty. Scott Stammers’s attorney submitted the articles as evidence that “there was no ‘Organization’ as alleged by the government, in which Mr. Stammers was a manager. Instead, there was one per- son, Le Roux, who orchestrated crimes of a massive scale.” Philip Shackels’s attorney argued that his client lived in fear of Le Roux. “This is corroborated, as we point out in our papers, by reporting by different sources, including the Atavist,” he wrote. Joseph Hunter’s attorney pointed to the articles as evidence that no state- ments from Le Roux should be believed on their face. One day at a hearing in the RX Limited case, I puzzled over the familiarity of a photo presented by a defense attorney, only to realize that I had taken it, and then had sent it to the lawyer hoping to get his client to verify the location.

Throughout my reporting on Le Roux I had the experience of becoming simultaneously a seeker of information and a source of it. Never before had I chased a story in which so many subjects threw up their hands mid-interview and turned my questions back on me. Could I help them find someone across the world, in the Philippines, or supply a document that a government refused to provide? Could I explain where Le Roux was, and whether he would ever be released from prison? I found myself saying over and over, “Well, I’m not a defense investigator,” or, “I’m not a government agent.” But now, after some of my reporting was pub- lic, I was experiencing a journalistic analog of what in quantum physics is called the observer effect: the inability of a researcher to study a phenomenon without themselves altering it.

My reporting had come full circle in sometimes unsettling ways. I received an email from the ex-girlfriend of a defendant, who con- tacted me to say that she had a laptop that he’d had given her years