7

The Mastermind

1972–2005 . . . A young Paul Le Roux . . . Escape to London and Australia . . . Hanging out his shingle . . . Consumed by encryption . . . Divorced and broke . . . A life-changing discovery . . . A new venture

Everyone says that Paul Le Roux was a sweet kid. “Paulie was an utter delight as a baby and child and young man,” a rela- tive from his extended family recalled. “He was easygoing, a pure delight, happy, uncomplaining, undemanding, loving, and affec- tionate. He really was. I never knew what evil lay in him.”

He was born on Christmas Eve, 1972, at Lady Rodwell Mater- nity Home in Bulawayo, in the country then called Rhodesia. His mother, Jill, was seventeen and had already decided to give him up for adoption. “You’ve disgraced your family, this cannot happen,” her mother told her, according to one of Le Roux’s half-siblings, born to Jill years later. The family was religious, and had little money. According to Le Roux family lore, the father was a soldier from South Africa who’d traveled to Rhodesia to fight in the Bush War, a fifteen-year conflict between forces of the country’s white ruling minority and the black majority seeking liberation from it. Other family members recalled instead that Le Roux’s father was Zimbabwean—and married—and had left for South Africa later.