everything that followed had he just let Klaussen go quietly, in- stead of ordering him dead. "I'm still angry about it. I will never forgive him that. That he just impulsively ordered a hit on me for no reason. That was his mistake," he said, before harking back to the phone call when he told Le Roux he wouldn't hesitate to turn him in. "I promised him I would take him down, and I did."

As much as Klaussen despised Le Roux, he maintained a respect that drifted into something just short of awe for his boss's pure intellectual brilliance. Le Roux had managed a dozen different op- erations, alone, in his head. "No matter how bad the guy is, no matter all the people he had killed, all the crimes he committed, no matter how people hate him," Klaussen said, "he's the most versa- tile criminal in history."

What will the U.S. government do with Paul Le Roux now? In my conversations with everyone from Le Roux's former security team to Philippine federal agents the talk inevitably came back to this question. Nearly everyone marveled at how easily Le Roux had transformed himself into a government asset. Now he seemed poised to literally get away with murder.

"When he didn't see a way out, he just went in backup mode," Klaussen said. "He played it so smart. Outsmarted everybody in the end."

His value as an informant felt, in a way, manufactured: Most of the people that Le Roux had helped the DEA catch had become criminals entirely at his behest. He'd given the U.S. government three people—including former U.S. soldiers gone rogue—who were willing to kill a DEA agent for money, and eight more happy to import drugs into the United States. But balanced against what the DEA knew about Le Roux, it was hard not to think that he had manipulated them into overlooking the gravity of his own crimes. Even the agents involved in flipping him suspected that he hadn't come entirely clean. "I think his definition of what a murder is,