van took several agents, “like trying to move somebody who's dead weight,” Stouch later testified.

Once on board and in the air, the agents were exhausted, ready to collapse for the flight home. But suddenly Le Roux wanted to talk. It didn't take any clever interrogation techniques, or indeed any persuasion at all, to flip one of the DEA's most sought-after targets, a man who just hours before had been reveling in his abil- ity to obtain unfathomable amounts of drugs and unlimited sup- plies of powerful military weapons—a man who had routinely ordered even his closest confidants dead.

As the plane cruised out over the Atlantic, he seemed to have already decided. First he congratulated the agents on catching him. Then he said he wanted to talk. “Just promise me I don't die in jail,” he said. “That's all I want.” He waived his Miranda rights, signed a consent form to search his laptop and phone, and agreed to start telling them what he knew. “To Paul, everything is a nego- tiation,” a former 960 agent said.

Eleven hours later the plane approached an airport just north of New York City. Paul Calder Le Roux was about to step out of view and into a new life of public service.