Among his papers were dossiers on Michael Lontoc, the target shooter who had been gunned down in broad daylight, and Nestor Del Rosario. A third file targeted Mar Supnad, the reporter who had interviewed Bruce Jones.

More exposed than he’d ever been, Le Roux needed to find an- other operating base while the heat in the Philippines dissipated. “He knows the political climate,” the former DEA agent said. “Just wait four years: It’ll change.” Le Roux had nearly endless means at his disposal to escape the attention. He held a fistful of passports, real and fake, including a diplomatic passport that he hoped would provide him criminal immunity. He owned property across Asia, Africa, and Australia. For transportation, he had bought a 115-foot Denison super yacht named the Texas Star II, built for maximum speeds of forty knots, fast enough to outrun many coast guards. The yacht, which in a past life had sailed under the name Thunderball, was emblematic of Le Roux’s transforma- tion from an online pill kingpin to a true mogul of the interna- tional drug trade. He was having it serviced in Europe to add night vision capabilities so that the boat could easily spot loads of drugs dropped with a buoy offshore.

For now there remained the practical problem of avoiding the American government’s reach. So as he started to feel claustropho- bic in late 2011, Le Roux put a safe harbor plan into action. “I got this call from Paul saying, ‘I’m going out of the Philippines for a while, maybe a week or a few weeks,’” said Scott Stammers, a security contractor who was working for Le Roux in Thailand at the time. “That was the way Paul was. I wouldn’t hear from him for a month and then he’d call me fifty times in a day. He said, ‘I pay your salary to be ready.’ Then he called and said he was in Brazil.”

Paul Calder Le Roux stood on the brink of a future in which he would no longer be just the programmer-made-good with a clever idea for online pharmacies. He was already earning hundreds of millions of dollars online. But as much as money he was chasing a