My contacts cautioned me about approaching Le Roux's former collaborators in Manila, warning that some might not take kindly to my inquiries. I encountered this undercurrent of concern often in my reporting, which over the next few years would take me to Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Minneapolis, and Rio de Janeiro. It was hard to know how seriously to take it. I tended to assume the warnings were, in their own way, boasts intended to inflate the stature of the teller. Then again, I'd read enough of the Joseph "Rambo" Hunter file to know that there was real menace at the heart of Le Roux's operation.

Between the people who had worked for Le Roux over the years and the authorities who had pursued him, neither were particu- larly forthcoming. As soon as I said the name Paul Le Roux, doors tended to shut in my face, messages were left unanswered, memo- ries suddenly clouded. Former employees sometimes expressed fears that they would become targets of American law enforce- ment if their name surfaced in connection with him. But more often they feared vengeance from the man himself. "He is a very dangerous man, a mastermind," one Israeli call center manager told me on the phone before hanging up abruptly.

One afternoon in Manila I walked a few blocks from my hotel to the high-rise offices of Blu, an energy drink company owned by Shai Reuven, an Israeli I'd heard had once been one of Le Roux's top lieutenants. A receptionist viewed my business card skeptically and said that Reuven was out of the country. She'd be sure to pass along the message that I wanted to meet him. I got the same re- sponse at the consulting business of another Israeli whose name I'd seen connected with Le Roux's early call centers. Staff members insisted that he was out. But an hour later he emailed, suggesting we meet at a crowded coffee shop. When he arrived, he immedi- ately asked that I keep him anonymous. "I was already detained the last time I entered the U.S. and interrogated about Le Roux," he said.

He'd joined Le Roux's operation in 2006, he told me, recruited from a job at a call center in Israel. "Paul liked to hire Israelis," he