lack of discretion seemed particularly ill-advised, his fellow merce- naries thought, given that the boss was known to order disloyal employees dead. The fact that Smith himself was the one often ordered to carry out those killings had, perhaps, made him over- confident. But there he was, out on P Burgos Street, the central artery of Manila’s red-light district, in a Lamborghini. He’d also bought a carbon-fiber Mercedes, custom-built for racing and shipped in from Germany, a Hummer, and a McLaren. He’d purchased a mansion in a tony suburb of Manila where Le Roux himself owned a house. “He bought the million-dollar place in Alabang, had these exotic cats, and he was going around town splashing money every- where,” Patrick Donovan, Smith’s former employer and fellow Irishman, said. “I mean, fuck me, you’re going to steal money from someone, you stash that shit away. You keep your lifestyle as it is.”

“Dave was skimming drugs, he was skimming gold,” another employee of Le Roux’s, and a friend of Smith’s, said. “I remember driving with Dave to see Le Roux, and he would park way down the street. I said, ‘Why are you parking this far away?’ He said, ‘You know Boss wants us to keep a low profile.’” They’d all been warned against flaunting their money in ways that might attract the authorities: no Rolexes, no flashy cars, no drugs. Smith ig- nored all three prohibitions.

In late 2010, Smith began acting even more strangely. He told the friend cryptically that he was getting some accounts in order, almost as if he had a terminal disease. “Then I couldn’t get ahold of him,” the friend said. “And that wasn’t Dave. He would call me ten times a day. His wife couldn’t find him. So I emailed Le Roux. I got a response: ‘Call me, here’s my number.’”

“What’s going on?” Le Roux asked nonchalantly when the friend called.

“Have you seen Dave?”

“I sent him to South America a few days ago,” Le Roux said. “He’s going to be out of contact for a while. You’ll report directly to me.”