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“Michael Archangel,” or “Michael Vaughn”—who had risen to prominence in Le Roux’s organization as a jack-of-all-trades. Reuven was the flashiest of Le Roux’s men, “always dressed to the nines in Gucci,” as Lachlan McConnell put it, and was rumored among The Company’s employees to have ties to organized crime back in Jerusalem. From Manila, he had managed some of The Company’s gold and timber ventures. He was also among the most disliked by the mercenaries, known for an unpleasant cocktail of arrogance and incompetence. “Most of the people I knew there hated [him],” Tim Vamvakias, the American soldier, recalled. “But the boss had a special interest and protection over him, so it was what it was.”

The Ufuk was a kind of unintended coming-out party for Le Roux’s criminal expansion, from online pharmaceuticals into large-scale illegal drug and arms trafficking. Among his employees, that transformation was increasingly an open secret. His entry into the drug trade was partly a product of happenstance. In late 2009, a fishing vessel called the King Yue I, bound for Hong Kong—and unrelated to Le Roux—was intercepted in the Pacific and pursued for seventeen days by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter out of Guam. As the chase approached the Philippines, the King Yue’s crew tossed two tons of cocaine overboard, a bounty that proceeded to wash ashore over the next year in shrinkwrapped bricks. Sensing a busi- ness opportunity for Le Roux, Dave Smith scoured the country, buying the found coke for pennies from Philippine fishermen and generating an enormous stash that Le Roux could now sell on the streets at outlandish profits. “That was by complete fluke,” a for- mer employee who helped distribute the drugs told me. “He got some of it free, and he bought some of it very very very cheap. Dave scooped a lot of the stuff up, and different parts were pack- aged and sent to different countries.”

The lucky haul whetted Le Roux’s appetite for the drug trade, and Smith became the point man for a new narcotics arm of the business. To more easily move contraband in and out of the Philip-