other Israeli employee of Le Roux’s who had been dispatched from Manila. After a locksmith dismantled the gate, the group set to cutting open the safe inside.

By May 2, the three or possibly four Israelis—in the confu- sion, the Hong Kong police lost track of a number of Le Roux employees—divvied up the gold bars, worth around $18 million, and climbed into taxis. They drove to Chungking Mansions, a sprawling seventeen-story gray edifice widely regarded as the cheapest immigrant lodging in Hong Kong, and holed up in a dingy room the organization maintained there. The bags were so heavy that they had to drag them through the lobby.

Over the next two days, together with a Filipino named Gordo who had also arrived in the intervening time, they alternated trips to Metalor, selling back the gold where it had originally been pur- chased. They unloaded eighty-five, then thirty-two, then sixty-four of the bars, depositing over $9.4 million in the bank account of Cycom, the Le Roux-controlled company.

In the days that followed, a herd of bumbling Le Roux opera- tives converged on Hong Kong in a frenzied attempt either to keep Le Roux’s massive store from slipping away, or to get some of it for themselves. Besides Gordo, someone traveling under the name John Miller arrived, collected corporate documents for Cycom, and disappeared. The authorities arrested Ivan Vaclavic trying to enter Hong Kong on May 2. While out on bail, he cruised out of the harbor in a speedboat headed for the Philippines, and then flew on to Rio. There was a mysterious South African referred to only in passing in the court documents, and another Filipino arrested at the airport holding bank-transfer records for $8 million. He, too, jumped bail.

As the Israelis desperately tried to hide the remaining gold, scouting a new house in Yuen Long, the police were on their trail. Officers arrived too late at the two stash houses, finding that both safes had been forced open and emptied, but CCTV footage from one of the houses showed a few men loading heavy bags into a cab. The police located the cab company and then tracked the men