“Everybody was scared of Le Roux, they all knew what he was capable of,” Klaussen said. “And he wasn’t shy to turn on you.” Klaussen, Hunter, and De Meyer made a pact: If any of them found out one of the others was on Le Roux’s target list, they would let him know. Then they’d set up an imaginary hit, fake the pictures, whatever it took to assuage Le Roux and give the would-be victim a chance to escape.

Klaussen soon got a firsthand look at what happened when Le Roux thought he’d been betrayed. In late 2008 he was handed a new job in Manila: keeping watch over Steve Hahn, one of the Zimbabwean brothers who had lost over a million dollars of Le Roux’s money. As Klaussen understood it, Le Roux had offered a straightforward answer to the problem of the Hahn brothers. “Many times he told Dave Smith, ‘Just fucking kill them. I don’t want to hear about it anymore,’” Klaussen said. Smith came up with an alternative plan: lure the brothers to Manila on the prom- ise of more money and then set them up. They bought the ruse, and when they arrived in the Philippines Le Roux instructed them to pick up a briefcase full of cash at a lawyer’s office. As they left the office, their taxi was pulled over by police, who had been con- veniently tipped off by Smith. Inside the briefcase they found not money but five kilograms of cocaine. The cops arrested Andrew, while Steve remained free, held in a Manila townhouse under the supervision of Klaussen until he could come up with the money. “Smith kept them alive,” Klaussen said. “Smith kept it floating because I think he smelled money.” Le Roux, on the other hand, “didn’t have the patience to wait. ‘Fuck them, they don’t have the money. They lost it? They lose their life.’ That was Le Roux.”

Guarding a target of extortion while his brother languished in a Philippine prison was the kind of task that would feel like madness in the outside world—“mental,” as Klaussen liked to put it. But it somehow seemed perfectly logical within the morally scrambled confines of The Company. Soon, Smith was dangling more money in front of Klaussen to take on “wet work” with De Meyer and Hunter.