he said. “There's a difference between doing a gray business and just being interested in illegal business. I could see that he was more interested in that.” After a year in charge of RX Limited's call centers, he told Le Roux he wanted out, and his boss didn't object. There were always more call center managers he could ship in from Israel. After he left, the manager started hearing rumors around Ma- nila that Le Roux's businesses had expanded to include gold and weapons ventures, and that he'd surrounded himself with armed guards and begun threatening difficult employees with violence. “I got out at a perfect time,” he said.

That shift in Le Roux's business—from successful but shady online entrepreneur to brutal cartel boss—was the aspect of his story I found most difficult to understand. Here was a man making tens of millions of dollars a year on the Internet by the mid-2000s— skirting the law, sure, but without much apparent risk—who then decided to expand into realms manifestly more dangerous. From the perspective of the straight business world, it made no sense. Why diversify into more difficult businesses than the one in which you're minting money? Mostly, my questions were logistical: How does a computer programmer operating in the gray world of call centers even make contact with the world of mercenaries, arms dealers, and contract killers? Did he meet them at the bar? Find them online? “I don't even know how he got his connections later,” the call center manager told me. The answer arrived in the form of Patrick Donovan, a well- known figure in Manila's security contracting community. I'd first come across his name on the staff page of a defunct website for a security company that also listed Dave Smith and Lachlan McCon- nell as employees. It had all seemed too much of a coincidence, so I sent an email to Donovan asking for an interview. “I'm not real game for talking on phone, especially given what you want to dis- cuss,” he wrote back. “Myself and my colleagues have discussed