from the CIA about United States operations in the Philippines. (He later sold them to other potential U.S. law enforcement tar- gets, including a local terrorist leader.)

When he couldn't pay for information, he gathered it himself. One former DEA agent told me that Le Roux had tapped into the country's 4G cellphone network to collect his own intelligence. He had even forged a request from the Australian Federal Police and sent it to the Philippine authorities—on what appeared to be actual AFP letterhead—inquiring about investigations into Paul Le Roux.

Le Roux could certainly see that the foreign law-enforcement interest in him was gaining intensity. That, too, had always been a problem he assumed money could solve. In the Philippines, by one employee's estimate, Le Roux was paying upward of $50,000 a month in routine bribes to protect himself. Others talked of judges, police generals, and national politicians that the organization had in its pocket. Le Roux himself would brag that he'd paid a relative of one of the country's highest-ranking officials $1 million in cash, delivered in a bag. There was nowhere that Le Roux's money couldn't reach.

Or so it seemed. In the end, he may have discovered there were limits to whom he could buy off—or, more to the point, whom he could kill. In 2010 a new president, Benigno Aquino, came into office. One of Aquino's top aides, as it happened, had gone to school with Joe Frank Zuñiga, the lawyer for the ship captain Bruce Jones. When Zuñiga disappeared, his wife appealed directly to the aide for help. The local investigation against Le Roux that Inspector R at the Philippine National Police had been discour- aged from pursuing suddenly cranked to life. Not long after, Inspector R lucked into a new lead: Le Roux's Filipino head of surveillance, Noyt—whose real name was Ronald Baricuatro— was arrested for stealing a motorcycle. When police searched his backpack they found a shoe box full of papers, seven IDs under different names, a camera, four cellphones, a wig, and two bullets. Under questioning, he told them he'd been hired years before by a man named Dave Smith but now worked directly for Le Roux.