or paid others to do—including, the indictment noted, “arranging for the murder of two female real estate agents.”

The sting operation seemed to have taken a heinous character off the street. But I kept wondering: What had put the DEA on to Hunter in the first place? Was the agency randomly tossing out fishing lines around the world, advertising assassinations hoping that someone would bite? Or had they come across Hunter and targeted him specifically?

Then the story grew even stranger. Two months after the press conference, in November 2013, the Southern District announced another dramatic bust. This time it was of a group of suspects planning to import huge quantities of North Korean-made meth amphetamine into the United States. Again the arrests stemmed from a sting operation set up by the DEA, using fake members of a Colombian cartel. Again some of the arrests were made in Phuket. Again much of the case was sealed, shielding it from the public eye, and yet the U.S. Department of Justice again seemed eager to make a big splash. “Methamphetamine is a dangerous, potentially deadly drug, whatever its origin,” Bharara said in a press release. “If it ends up in our neighborhoods, the threat it poses to public health is grave whether it is produced in New York, elsewhere in the U.S., or in North Korea.”

I was struck by the bizarre set of circumstances shared by the two cases and kept poring over the sketchy information contained in the indictments. Neither made mention of the other, but each referred to an unnamed person involved in the sting, labeled vari ously as a “narcotics trafficking partner” and “Individual-1”— who appeared to be a cooperating witness. Whether this was the same mysterious figure in the two cases was impossible to tell, but both groups had been arrested on the same day in Thailand, and were being prosecuted by exactly the same U.S. Attorneys. A few days later, The Washington Post quoted an unnamed DEA source claiming a link between Hunter and North Korea, but nobody seemed to follow up.

As I dug into the case myself, I started to understand why. I