said. “I don’t think he particularly liked Jews, but he thought we were the most honest, cheapest, hardworking labor could find.” Arriving in Manila, the manager discovered that Le Roux’s call center was already employing around twelve hundred people. The business, as he understood it, conducted telephone and email sales for pharmaceuticals in the United States on behalf of RX Limited, an independent company. “I later learned that it was just working for him, a captured client,” he said. The business was a mess. “Very poor organizational structure and management,” he said. “I laid off two-thirds of the staff.”

Le Roux was “not a pleasant person,” he said. “He was a really big racist, an asshole. For Paul, everyone was a ‘nigger.’ I was a ‘white nigger.’ Or a ‘floppy,’ which is a South African term for ‘nigger.’” He was especially offensive, the manager said, in dealing with his local employees, “calling Filipinos monkeys, to their faces.”

Le Roux, he knew, owned dozens of properties around Manila, although the manager had little idea what he did with them. Only once did he recall even interacting with Le Roux outside of work, when the boss invited him down to his beach house in Batangas, a coastal region south of Manila. He met Le Roux’s wife, Lilian, who seemed friendly and largely minded their two children. He and his boss rode jet skis—one of the only episodes of intentional fun I ever heard of Le Roux engaging in. “Even that was more of an activity than a social venture,” the manager said. “Driving down and back, he was working at a laptop. I don’t believe that he had a social life. He was a workaholic, from what I understood, eighteen, nineteen hours a day. At no point did I ever meet any- body that was introduced as his friend, nor did he mention or talk about one.”

The work was challenging, though, and the pay was good— particularly for Manila. As far as the manager understood it, it was also perfectly legal. But over time, he began to feel uneasy, sensing that there was more to Le Roux’s world than he could see. “I had heard which direction he was going with his life choices,”