whom Le Roux paid to act as a "dummy" on company registra- tions; and Robert McGowan, a thirty-year-old Zimbabwean engi- neer assigned to import logging equipment from the United States.

For a time, with Bulawayo as the hub, the spokes of Le Roux's African ventures seemed to be spinning smoothly. In a typical op- eration, Le Roux would first dispatch employees on blind missions to countries as disparate as Ghana, the Congo, Mali, and Zambia to find black-market gold dealers he could buy from directly. The Hahn brothers would then be flown in to assay samples of the product, testing it for purity. If the gold checked out, McConnell and other members of the security team would arrive with bags of cash, complete the transaction, and shepherd the gold out of the country. As Le Roux grew more confident in his Bulawayo charges, Steve Hahn even convinced Le Roux to invest in a gold mining project of his own. Everyone was making money.

Then, in July 2008, the Hahn brothers told Le Roux that they had traveled to Zambia to purchase seventy kilos of gold from a local dealer, at a price of $1.5 million. When they returned to Bu- lawayo and opened their haul, however, they claimed to have dis- covered the gold was fake. Someone must have swapped out the samples they had tested, they told Le Roux. Suspecting that the brothers had instead pocketed some or all of the money, Le Roux deployed McConnell and the American contractor to Bulawayo and Zambia to investigate, and ordered the Hahn brothers to Ma- nila. He also called in the outstanding funds he'd sent Mathew for other missions. When his cousin came up $52,000 short, Le Roux concluded that his own family was stealing from him.

McConnell and the American contractor were supplied with dossiers on Smith and his father and ordered to pin down their locations. For the American contractor, the assignment was a red flag that it was time to get out. If Le Roux was paranoid enough to suspect that his family had betrayed him, he told McConnell, "You have to be very careful."

"Why's that?" McConnell asked.

"It's like the domino principle: When the man at the top starts