“It probably wasn’t until dinnertime, six or seven—I wasn’t leav- ing until we got a briefing,” Bailey said. “I think they probably hoped that we would go away.”

That evening Bailey sat in a bar with a group supervisor at SOD who told him that Le Roux had offered not just to help catch his associates, but to share information about dealings he’d had with Iran and North Korea. He was now more than a drug and arms dealer, the supervisor said. He was a national security asset.

At the bar, Bailey warned that Le Roux was smart enough to manipulate them, if the agents weren’t careful. “Don’t get enam- ored with him,” he told the supervisor. “He’s a killer. Don’t start dancing here because he can sell you a song.”

On both sides of the DEA, the ambitions that emerged from a prize like Le Roux had begun to harden into resentment. Bailey believed that the case belonged to Brill—a diversion investigator who had devoted five years of her life to it, clawing and scraping at the evidence to find a way to Le Roux. They’d agreed to let the 960 agents make the arrest, but never expected that 960 would re- fuse to share the prize with the people who had handed it to them.

Within the 960 group, Bailey’s objections were viewed as the grumblings of an agent who hadn’t been able to land the case. Minnesota hadn’t handed them anything, they believed—they had started with a name in a file and ended with Le Roux in custody. “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if Kent Bailey knows what probable cause is,” a former 960 agent told me. “One of his big things was, ‘Well, your charge is just too simple. We have a much bigger project going.’ What’s the old adage: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Why go after an intergalactic con- spiracy? Take a strategic strike. That was our thought.”

From my vantage point, hearing about it years later, the intra- agency grappling all seemed a little juvenile, and counterproduc- tive. Lost in the battles about what to do with Le Roux, it seemed to me, was any real accounting for what he’d done, and what he deserved.

One thing was certain: The months and years that Bailey and