rupted by it, enamored with it, addicted to the feeling of it flowing toward him, more than he could ever spend. There were naturally those who diagnosed something more fundamental to his nature. “He was a complete sociopath,” said the Israeli who had briefly handled the job of procuring women for Le Roux. “You look at the definition of sociopath, inability for empathy and so on. This is him, word for word.” My own reporting had revealed him to be, at the least, a monster who never thought twice about ordering the maiming and killing of people around him. There were times when he came off as a sadist who reveled in it.

Some people speculated that his drive was fueled by some sub- merged pain—his hurt over being adopted, or some other child- hood affront for which he was forever exacting revenge on the world. Maybe so. I always suspected that at least a part of the answer dwelled in his life as a programmer. Le Roux had found his place inside code, a universe in which he could bend reality to his will. It seemed to me that he tried to apply the detached logic of software to real life. That’s why the DEA schemes must have ap- pealed to him. “Nothing involves emotion for him,” the former 960 agent put it to me. “Everything is a calculation.” His approach was algorithmic, not moral: Set the program in motion and watch it run.

One afternoon in Tel Aviv, I met a former employee of Le Roux’s at a bustling café. I’d had a difficult time persuading him to talk to me at all. He was finally free of Le Roux’s organization and had moved on with his life, he said. He hadn’t been indicted in any of the cases, despite working for both the pharmaceutical and merce- nary sides of Le Roux’s business—although he said he planned to wait a few years before traveling to the United States, just in case. After days of deflecting my inquiries, he finally relented and agreed to talk to me anonymously about his time with Le Roux, and to confirm what I had heard from others. We spoke for an hour, and as we stood up to leave, I asked him the question: What did Le Roux want?