Some combination of financial necessity and geographical proxim- ity explained why most people drifted into Le Roux's organiza- tion, often with little conception of the devil's bargain they were making by signing up. So it was with Felix Klaussen. At the mo- ment he crossed paths with Le Roux in 2007, Klaussen was trying to keep alive a dream life in the Philippines. A former navy diver from Europe, he was living in a condo on Baloy Beach, a glorious stretch of sand in Barrio Barretto, on the west coast of the coun- try's main island. The town had for decades served as an off-duty playground for the sailors at Subic Bay, a U.S. naval base a few miles south. The Americans decommissioned the base in 1992, but the area still maintained a kind of burned-out Fleet Week atmo- sphere, attracting a clientele of sun- and sin-seeking expats, many of them retired military. The main thoroughfare included the up- scale Subic Bay Yacht Club, along with seedier stops like the Wet Spot and Coco Lips, offering cold beer and "bar girls," the Philip- pine euphemism for government-tolerated prostitution.

Klaussen resided largely on the sun-seeking end of the spectrum. He'd first fallen in love with the Philippines in the late 1990s, when he worked as a wreck diver in Subic, escorting tourists out to see the scuttled USS New York just offshore. In his youth he'd been a champion swimmer, talented enough to have a shot at the Olympic team. But his motivation had come more from a hard-driving fa- ther than from any inner desire, and at eighteen Klaussen gave up swimming and joined the Navy, training as a diver whose duties included disabling sea mines. After leaving the military he'd drifted to Baloy, where a friend from his hometown owned a resort.

Klaussen returned home from the Philippines a few years later and took a desk job at a pharmaceutical company, thinking he would settle into a staid, predictable life. Then, in what he later came to view as a bit of twisted fortune, a motorcycle wreck in 2003 left him hospitalized with titanium rods in one arm. Fortu-