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The Reporter

2016-2017 … Social media mercenaries … Finding Robert McGowan … The files of Mathew Smith … Sex for fun and profit … Patrick Donovan's last encounter

It was strange, at times, how easy it was to find many of Le Roux's former employees. I'd expected that, as a criminal diaspora spread around the globe, they would be hunkered down, off the grid. But all I needed was a starting place—a few names from an indictment, an address on a website registration. Thanks to social networking, one source would quickly turn into three, and then five. Often their Facebook pages were left unprotected, open to the public, and I perused their list of friends for new contacts, or con- nected them back with old names. They'd posted photos of their adventures working for Le Roux, posing in front of sparkling cityscapes in Hong Kong or draped in bandoliers in a Somali com- pound. Sometimes I found fake Facebook profiles they had created using their aliases, easily discoverable because they'd then made the mistake of friending their own real identity, collapsing the ruse. Le Roux, despite being an influential cryptographer and noted paranoid, himself appeared to have once set up a Facebook profile under one of his false identities, Bernard Bowlins. He'd