cades. He'd hired a team of more than twenty engineers to work on the project at a warehouse in the Philippines. Most had been recruited from Romania—including several through Craigslist— having been told they were working on "spectral analysis" soft- ware for underground mining.

So eager was Le Roux to find his way into more and bigger il- licit deals that he was often willing to take a chance on highly speculative ventures, based on little more than a trusted employ- ee's assertions. "If you had an idea and you came to him with the figures, and if he liked the money, he would give you three million, five million, twenty million just like that," one former employee said. "He would give me 10 million in a Pelican box if I asked for it, in an hour, in cash, in perfect notes."

The M/V Ufuk, in other words, represented only the visible outer edge of the dark universe that Le Roux now inhabited. Lach- lan McConnell felt the gravitational pull of Le Roux's schemes. "At one point they wanted me to go somewhere in Eastern Europe to buy weapons," he said. "I said, 'Sorry, that's illegal, I'm not going to do it.' I'm not stupid. You have to not cross a line, and I said from the beginning there were certain things I wouldn't do."

McConnell instead shepherded gold in Hong Kong and helped arrange international shipments of equipment to Le Roux's vari- ous projects, including Somalia. He had little idea what was hap- pening in the Somali outpost, only that it required an array of gear: military uniforms, shipped through Hong Kong; outboard motors, sent to Dubai. Le Roux had offered the fanciful explana- tion that he was starting a lobster farm. It sounded odd, but it wasn't even the oddest thing McConnell had heard from Smith about Le Roux's various schemes. "I didn't put much into it," McConnell said. "Dave tended to brag a lot."

Over the course of 2010, Dave Smith's behavior had become increasingly erratic. He confided in McConnell that he had been "borrowing" gold bars from under a hot tub behind a house in the Philippines—where he'd stashed them for Le Roux—and selling them to cover his own debts. He was planning to pay it all back,