ing for the CIA, they are never going to admit it. But they would do a better job shielding him, I'm confident."

By late 2017, there was one Le Roux-related case left, one oppor- tunity for me to hear him tell his own story. That October, prose- cutors in the Southern District of New York added Joseph Hunter to the indictment for the murder of Catherine Lee, alongside Adam Samia and David Stillwell. Le Roux himself was named as a poten- tial witness in the case, which made sense, given that he'd admitted to ordering the killing. I heard from several sources that Le Roux was still cooperating with SOD, providing new targets for them to chase from his old Rolodex. All of which meant he was still poten- tially months, if not years, away from sentencing. He remained unlisted in the Bureau of Prisons database that tracks federal de- tainees.

Unsurprisingly, the former Le Roux employees who had been convicted and sent to prison were mystified that the boss they once feared was now on the other side. One afternoon, I drove out to eastern Pennsylvania to see Scott Stammers, one of the men con- victed in the North Korean meth case, at the minimum-security federal prison where he was to be housed for the next fifteen years. The warden had approved the interview on a non-visitation day, and Stammers was waiting for me in a sunny corner of the empty visitation room in his khaki prison jumpsuit. He said that most of what he knew couldn't afford to tell me. "There's stuff that I can't talk about because of the safety of my family and the possi- bility of new charges," he said. "I'm not a saint, but I'm not a bloodthirsty monster, shipping drugs around the world."

The most important thing he wanted me to know was that, un- like Le Roux, he had turned down offers to reduce his time in ex- change for informing on others. "I can't believe the deal they gave him," he said. "He's a very intelligent man, very calculated. Merci- less. He doesn't care. He once told us that we were all monkeys. But I always thought that he wanted to be one of us. He wanted to