changed for what should now be obvious reasons: He was a high- level confidential informant against a murderous criminal cartel, and is involved in ongoing operations in that capacity. He argued persuasively that revealing his full identity could bring risk to his life. Other than the change of his name, he placed no conditions on my use of our interviews, but I have withheld (not changed) some biographical facts. Patrick Donovan was willing to explain first- hand how corruption in the Philippines operates and to describe his experiences with Paul Le Roux on the condition of anonymity. Because I quoted him often, it became unwieldy not to refer to him by some name rather than a generic honorific. He, too, placed no other conditions on my use of our interviews. And while “Mar- cus” is the name Le Roux used for his South African hit man, it is not the name that he is known by in his daily life. I used it due to an attribution agreement I made with him before discovering that he was Le Roux’s assassin.

No other facts in this book have been changed to protect sources, or for any reason.

In some online correspondence that I quote directly I have cor- rected minor punctuation, spelling, and syntax issues and cut un- related asides—all for readability’s sake—without altering the meaning or context of the quoted statements. (Some of the inter- views I conducted, and conversations I received copies of, involved very casual digital chats that can be confusing if left unadjusted in this fashion.) The chats are otherwise unchanged, and I have elected to avoid correcting other spelling mistakes or including re- petitive instances of “[sic]” as long as the language is understand- able.

Throughout this book I’ve tried to be as transparent as possible about my process—indeed, it’s the primary reason I appear as a character at all—and to reveal how my reporting came about. But I feel the need to reemphasize here that subjects often provided conflicting accounts of the same events. Memories fade and di- verge, driven by time and motive. Given the nature of the events, most subjects did little to document their participation. Indeed,