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covered a cache of Indonesian-made assault rifles they suspected had come from the M/V Ufuk. “What happened to Tiu?” I asked. “He is also missing,” Lugay said. Next, Lugay’s colleague asked me if I’d ever heard of Michael Lontoc. I hadn’t. It turned out he was the world-class Philippine target shooter listed as the owner of Red White & Blue Arms. His name had also surfaced publicly in the Ufuk case. By now, I could guess the end of Lontoc’s story: One afternoon in September 2011, a year after the murder of Bruce Jones, Lontoc had been driving home from a shooting competition in a Manila suburb. As he slowed down at a busy intersection, he received a call on his cell- phone. Simultaneously, four men surrounded his pickup truck, fir- ing into it with an Uzi and several handguns. He drove another hundred feet before slamming into a concrete wall, and died on the scene.

Unsurprisingly, with witnesses and informants disappearing, the investigation into the owners of the Ufuk fizzled. The Georgian crew members were deported back to their home country. A Phil- ippine court declared that the remaining cases, including one against “Johan” aka “Paul Leraux” and his top deputies, had been “archived.” Only one participant, the South African ship captain Lawrence John Burne, was tried and convicted in absentia, after jumping bail.

One former employee of Le Roux’s later estimated to me that Le Roux had spent millions making the case go away, funneled through a Filipina lawyer. The source believed he had bought off contacts at the highest level of the government, and paid to have certain friendly officials installed in powerful posts. Another told me that Le Roux had hired a former NBI official to take charge of distributing bribes to law enforcement. He even had a desk at the company’s call center, at the BDO building in Makati. Yet another told me that Joe Frank Zuñiga had been part of the syndicate all along—he had actually been in charge of the bribes aimed at keep-