“Out of curiosity did the gov minister just come out and ask you?”

“No, we provided him hookers in Philippines when he was here,” Le Roux said. “My man promised him a white one next time.”

That a man who was making as much money as Le Roux would bother to arrange the transport of prostitutes across the ocean was itself mind-boggling. But there was something much darker I had heard about Le Roux's exploitation of women. In the chats, I was surprised to find a passing mention of it. “Getting more bitches here from around the region,” Le Roux wrote.

Two sources told me that in the late 2000s, Le Roux's appetite for sex became so voracious that he sent emissaries out to remote parts of the Philippines, directing them to pay women to travel to Manila, move into his condos, and remain at the beck and call of Le Roux's desires. I'd first heard it from Moran Oz, who said that he knew an employee who had been assigned to the task. “He went to far-away villages where they have no money,” Oz said. “He used to send him pictures, to choose, ‘Here: one, two, three, four.’” Le Roux's aims, Oz had been told, were more than just carnal: He intended to produce as many children as possible, to eventually create a trusted brigade of his own offspring.

After months of searching, I finally found the employee in ques- tion. I told him what I'd heard and that it seemed hard to believe. “First of all,” he said, “when you talk about Paul Le Roux, every- thing you hear is probably true.” He had been working in the call center, he said, when Le Roux came to him with a new assignment. “He proposed it to me in a way I couldn't really say no,” he said.

At first he thought he was collecting women for Le Roux to open a bar. “It's a very common thing to do in the Philippines. You have a girly bar, you bring politicians to the girly bar.” That was not the reason. “What you heard is what he told me,” the em- ployee said. “ ‘I'm going to impregnate them, and build an army of kids.’ I really thought he was kidding. Yeah, what the fuck are you on about, man?” Le Roux asked him to make a spreadsheet to