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duties for the larger company, working even more closely with Le Roux. The boss had always been direct in his communications; he knew what he wanted and didn't solicit his employees' opinions. Now Oz found him increasingly controlling and easily enraged. Le Roux began asking for daily "task emails" from employees. "An employee must apply to the company's rules or actions will be taken against him," Le Roux wrote. "This is Manager's request and he will stand to his word. (You know.) Please take responsi- bility for this so we won't need to go there." Over time Le Roux became more and more threatening, berating employees when something wasn't done in the way he'd asked, and explicitly sug- gesting what might happen to them if they didn't rectify it. "Alon better answer the phone or he won't have a hand to do it with or a tongue to speak," he told one of Berkman's coworkers. Occa- sionally, when he was angry with Oz, Le Roux would bring up the boat incident as a threat, asking him whether he wanted to "go back in the water."

Oz and Berkman had once held on to their boss's veneer of being an Internet mogul with some unusual tastes. They assumed that he ultimately aspired to mainstream business success, even respectability. "Paul had, at some point, a plan to build two tow- ers [in Manila] and call them the Le Roux Towers," one call center manager said. "He wanted to create an investment company in Dubai to invest in startups. Those were his plans in 2008 when I got to the Philippines." Le Roux was even rumored to have brought in an architect from Zimbabwe to design the "Le Roux Towers" and scout for locations. But a year later he'd abandoned the plans, and the employees' talk of an initial public offering was a distant memory. "Something happened that flipped him completely," the manager said. "He always had tendencies to the dark side. I guess he said, Fuck it, I'm in the Philippines, I'm already bribing the po- lice, the NBI, judges, whatever. I can just use that to make some real money. He wanted something that made a 5000 percent re- turn on his investment, not something that made 10 percent a year."