employed solely to “intimidate, shoot, threaten, and/or kill” their targets.

Le Roux offered basic details on almost every one of his ven- tures. “I set up a front company in Somalia, which pretended to be about a fishing operation, but was actually a front for criminal activity,” he said. “My objective in Somalia was to obtain a small territory and set myself up as a warlord using whatever violence was necessary.” He’d canceled the project, he said, when he came to believe that the manager was stealing from him.

Le Roux provided his own version of one of the most outland- ish stories I’d heard: the planned invasion and coup in the Sey- chelles. I’d long suspected the story was one of those rumors that spread among mercenaries, embellished each time it was passed along. Le Roux, instead, confirmed its veracity: Dave Smith, Le Roux said, had introduced Le Roux to someone who purported to be related to the current ruler of the country, but wanted him de- posed. If Le Roux could provide the force to do it, he’d receive both a safe haven in the Seychelles and a diplomatic passport in return. He had entertained the coup plan seriously enough to send Joseph Hunter to the island nation to investigate it.

“What did he report?” Bove asked Le Roux.

“Hunter reported that approximately thirty mercenaries would be required, thirty Echelon mercenaries,” Le Roux said.

“Required for what?”

“To take over the government, basically to defeat any resistance in the Seychelles and take over the government.”

In the end, Le Roux said, he’d told Smith the mission wasn’t vi- able in the long term. Sure, Smith’s mercenaries could overrun the country. But the current government’s allies across the water in Tanzania would inevitably mobilize their much more serious mili- tary to come take it back.

Le Roux was dispassionate about the violence he’d ordered. Yes, he had ordered drugs planted on Andrew Hahn, one of the brothers from Zimbabwe who he believed had stolen over a mil-