Israel who would transfer to Manila. That, it seemed, was the ex- tent of what Le Roux had needed to discuss with the pair in per- son. Oz and Berkman flew home with recruitment added to their duties.

Finding Israelis willing to move to the Philippines proved easy enough. Many of Beit Oridan’s employees were young and single, and keen for an adventure in a country where their salary would go twice as far. The first few transplants didn’t take, however. “We sent three managers,” Oz said. “One was just to establish the cus- tomer service center—renting the location, creating all the infra- structure. After a month he came back. The second one was the same, it didn’t work out, I didn’t know why.” Finally, Oz and Berkman sent Levi Kugel, a blond Israeli American whose first love was playing guitar and who had been hired by Berkman in Jerusalem. Soon after Kugel arrived in Manila, word came back to Oz that they’d found the kind of manager that Le Roux had been seeking. “It was love at first sight,” Oz said. “Levi was calling the shots in the Philippines after a short time.”

From there, the Israel-to-Philippines pipeline rapidly expanded, fueling Le Roux’s exploding call center business. “My understand- ing was that this was all legal,” said Yehuda Ben-Dor, an Israeli American whose experience typified many of the Israelis. “There was nothing fishy about it.” Ben-Dor had been living in Tel Aviv when he answered an ad for work in the call center run by Oz and Berkman. He took the job, moved up to manager, and then was asked if he wanted to run a call center in the Philippines. “The thing with Paul’s company was that the attrition rate was pretty high, people come and go, and he was always looking for new people. I was the next guy, so to speak. I didn’t know anything about the Philippines at that time.”

Within a few days of arriving in Manila, Ben-Dor found himself overseeing ten call centers with more than a thousand employees. The epicenter of Le Roux’s business was located on the fourteenth floor of the BDO building, a shimmering glass tower in Makati. The open office was an expanse of connected desks, with fifty to