ing “close-in security or snipers” ready to deploy to Manila or Somalia. “I was down and out,” Marcus told me. He had left the police force and gone into private security. “Then one or two things happened and my whole life fell apart. I couldn't find work. I was financially fucked. So it was a stupid, stupid move to get in- volved. But fuck, I did.” Seven days later he was in Manila, where he was hired by Le Roux directly—outside of the purview of Smith and his teams. “It was so secretive, if anything went wrong I was on my own,” Marcus said. “There was no connection between him and me. Nothing. I eventually had a Filipino guy working with me, but I was kept in the dark. They hid me in hotels and then they would send people to go and fetch me.”

Marcus’s initial job was to surveil employees Le Roux believed were betraying him. He traveled to Bulawayo, hunting for Le Roux’s cousin Mathew Smith, only to conclude that the cousin had spotted him and gone into hiding. Then Le Roux ordered him to look into a real estate agent named Catherine Lee, who he claimed had stolen money in a failed real estate transaction— about 50 million pesos, or just under a million dollars. “He wanted to get some of the money back and find all the details,” Marcus told me. “So first I had to find her. And then I sort of—I almost had like a relationship with her, trying to get information out of her. I took her out to dinner a couple of times. We had a whole fucking thing going.”

I asked him if he thought Lee had in fact stolen the money from Le Roux. “No, no,” he said. “The way she was living, I doubted it. She didn't live the lifestyle of somebody that had a lot of money. But you know with Paul, once he believed that you stole from him, it doesn't matter what you say. There's no negotiations.”

Before Le Roux could deal with Lee, however, he had a more pressing matter: Dave Smith was stealing from him, and flaunting it. “He said Dave stole a lot of gold from him and sold it,” Marcus said. “And Dave lived the lifestyle of a very rich guy. I mean, he had all these girlfriends and houses and cars. It was unbelievable.” Finally, Le Roux decided he'd had enough. One day in December