dom targets in the streets. International human rights groups were shocked by the extrajudicial slaughter, but Duterte was unapolo- getic. He claimed to hold a list of other names, containing as many as a million people, who were involved in the drug trade in the Philippines. “The human rights people will commit suicide if I fin- ish these all,” he said. In fact, he’d taken to bragging that as mayor he’d personally killed a few suspected criminals himself.

Duterte’s twisted bravado put me in mind of Le Roux, and how he’d fired a few extra bullets into Dave Smith, almost as if he wanted to claim he had done some of the killing himself. I won- dered how much he and his operation contributed to the climate that brought Duterte to power. Not that Le Roux himself ever made a significant public impression in the Philippines, having never been prosecuted for his crimes. But that was precisely the point: The scope of corruption and lawlessness that Le Roux gen- erated and exploited was certainly enough to leave ordinary citi- zens cynical about their government. I wondered, too, how Le Roux would have fared had he stuck around for the state-sponsored violence of the Duterte regime. One source connected to the Ma- nila underworld told me he’d talked to people in the higher levels of the cartels now active in the country, who said that the killing campaign was targeted only at addicts and low-level dealers, leav- ing the higher-ups, who knew how to pay for protection, un- touched. The drug business, he said, was booming. “They said, ‘We’re sending in more.’ They’re stockpiling it,” the source told me. “So you killed how many thousands of people? There’s no dent in it.”

The former 960 agent agreed. “He and Paul would do business together, guarantee you,” he said of Duterte. “Paul would have to pay bribes, it would be fine.”

When I went back to see Rizaldy Rivera at the National Bureau of Investigation, on one of my last days in Manila, I asked him if there was any chance Le Roux could be extradited, to face the consequences of his crimes here. “Well, if ever there is a move to