In Manila, the man Le Roux increasingly relied upon to execute that vision was a Filipino deputy named Nestor Del Rosario, who had managed legitimate call centers for Accenture before joining RX Limited. Despite his denigration of Filipinos, Le Roux had come to trust Del Rosario, who had a knack for accomplishing the most outlandish tasks that sprang out of his mind. “Nestor was his go-to guy,” Felix Klaussen said. “You didn’t fuck around with Nestor. He hired every Filipino that worked for Le Roux. They all came through him, had to answer to him. If a Filipino screwed up Le Roux called Nestor, and Nestor would sort it out. He wasn’t a scary guy. Straight guy, protecting his boss and his boss’s interests. Very loyal.”

Del Rosario confided in the Israeli call center manager that Le Roux had ratcheted up his duties over time, pushing him into in- creasingly illicit endeavors. First he was managing the gun store that Le Roux owned in Manila, Red White & Blue Arms. Then, he said, he’d been involved in framing one of Le Roux’s Zimbabwean employees, Andrew Hahn, arranging for drugs to be planted on him and tipping off the police. Even more extraordinary, the call center manager said, Del Rosario was increasingly being sent abroad—along with a guy from HR named Ogie—on weapons- buying missions to Iran and Pakistan.

Del Rosario’s claims were of a piece with the constant swirl of whispers about Le Roux. “I heard he was doing human trafficking, he was doing arms trades, he was having people killed,” one Israeli call center manager said. “It sounded like a comic book, and I didn’t know what to believe and not to believe. I heard that he had an airplane business where he was making airplane engines and hiring people to fly to other countries to smuggle drugs. It was too surreal to believe that this guy was actually getting away with stuff like this. I didn’t know what of it was credible information. I could only confirm what I knew.”

Occasionally, Le Roux himself would muse cryptically to call center employees about grandiose ambitions that were hard to take seriously. “He never told me his exact plans,” another call