McConnell was soon trusted enough to take orders directly from Le Roux, whom he found to be overbearing but otherwise tolerable. "He was impatient in emails, strict," McConnell said. "He would say, 'This is a fuckup, do what you can do to straighten people out.' Two or three times he sent me an email to say you can't do it this way or that way. Or 'Hurry up.' He wanted things bang bang bang. He micromanaged everything." Occasionally they would meet face-to-face in Manila, and at first McConnell saw little in Le Roux's demeanor to raise alarms. "I found him to be a really nice guy," he said. Le Roux was clearly a wealthy man, but rarely seemed to flaunt it. "He lived in expensive houses in exclusive areas, but he didn't live extravagantly. He would travel in flip-flops and shorts, like a bum."

McConnell's Hong Kong duties eventually expanded to include obtaining and transporting gold around the city, and out of it. Le Roux was bringing in $6 million a week from his U.S. pharmacy operation, Smith told McConnell, and needed to convert it to hard assets. "Initially Paul's thought was to hire a company like Brink's to pick up the gold and move it around," McConnell said. "I said, 'Let's go low profile and move it ourselves.'"

McConnell wasn't oblivious to the fact that he was, at the least, working for someone operating on the edge of the law. The tenta- cles of Le Roux's empire spread so far that he couldn't see their endpoints, but he knew that they included gold mining and log- ging projects in Africa, and that his boss owned properties in Asia and Australia. There was talk of darker businesses—that some of the money flowing through Hong Kong was being laundered on behalf of Colombian or Brazilian cartels, or that Le Roux was in- volved in hardcore drug trafficking himself. "I did know what I was getting into when I started, in terms of the secrecy involved and the precious cargo being moved," McConnell said. "I'm not a stupid person. In some ways there were things that were probably illegal, but I didn't really pay attention. He kept everything so compartmentalized. I heard rumors, but I didn't consider them to be valid without one hundred percent proof."