Klaussen called it—with complete command of even the most triv- ial minutiae. He was driven by a single-minded devotion to grow- ing his business. "You rarely saw him or heard that he was going out," said Klaussen. "He wasn't interested in life at all."

Le Roux's attention roved like an all-seeing eye across his dispa- rate projects. No matter the country or time of day, employees knew to answer the phone if one of Le Roux's numbers came up. "It was almost like the guy never slept, and you never knew which personality you'd get on the other end," said Vamvakias. "His in- sane behavior at random times is what really threw me. When he called he never said who he was, but you knew it was him. And right from the moment that you answered his call, he would start. Sometimes calm and other times irate, and most of the time you never even knew why. I remember one time he called me in the middle of the night and just started shouting and didn't make any sense whatsoever. He kept referring to me by another name and when I finally was able to cut in and tell him who he was speaking with, it suddenly got quiet and then he calmly apologized and hung up."

As in any sizable corporation, employees spent an inordinate amount of time creating and filing reports, demanded by Le Roux in order to track the progress of even the smallest missions. If he wanted a rival timber operation burned to the ground in Papua New Guinea, he expected a memo outlining how the mission had played out. Often his expectations were at odds with the contrac- tors' technical competency. "'Make a spreadsheet and a master plan in Excel,'" Klaussen remembered Le Roux demanding of his security teams. "They didn't get it. It was a simple thing—at least for him it was. But for somebody who never had a computer, it was Latin." Le Roux issued trusted employees addresses on The Company's private email server, fast-free-email.com, and laptops preloaded with TrueCrypt. If they were ever approached by law enforcement, they were told to close the computer immediately. The TrueCrypt software would be activated as soon as the laptop lid was shut. (Le Roux himself worked on a well-worn and cum-