he could get them, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which, according to notes that Inspector R later showed me, was "monitoring the illegal activities of LE ROUX and his cohorts, particularly their involvement in terrorist financing." The Royal Malaysia Police had information that Le Roux was "trans- porting methamphetamine hydrochloride and its chemical compo- nent in different Southeast Asian Transshipment points."

All of it added up to a murderous criminal cartel operating openly in the Philippines. But the memos Inspector R sent to his superiors about Le Roux were answered with silence. Finally, he decided to bypass the chain of command and send a report to the general in charge of the entire Philippine National Police. The gen- eral didn't mince words. "I'm not interested," he said. "Make yourself busy with other things."

"That was Le Roux's style," Inspector R told me. "If somebody was investigating him, he would find a way to make sure that they go easy on him. He would just go up the ladder; he knew how the system worked here."

Inspector R's experience reminded me of a story one of Le Roux's most trusted mercenaries once told me. One day in a meet- ing, he said, Le Roux casually recounted a time when a woman declined to fulfill a certain sexual desire of his. "So he beat her up with a baseball bat," the mercenary told me. "I never saw it. I just heard a story from him and it was confirmed afterwards by the other employees." The woman, he said, turned out to be "the daughter of a senator. It was a big, big, big deal. Of course you can't beat up a senator's daughter, that's not going to happen. In the Philippines you're gone, or you going to a hellhole for the rest of your life. Because that's the kind of people you don't touch."

But in the end, Le Roux turned his grotesque violence to his own advantage, or so the story went. He invited the senator to his office and offered him "two or three million dollars" and a spot on the payroll as compensation "for your baby girl." The senator ac- cepted it all, the mercenary said, "because that was Le Roux, his power in the Philippines. He had . . . not the president, but up the