than fully cooperative. To capture these guys, Brill and Bailey needed to lure them somewhere else. And to do that, they needed Le Roux.

The 960 group, however, was focused on putting Le Roux to work in their own sting operations against the likes of Joseph Hunter. They allowed him only enough communication with his RX Limited employees—and enough access to his bank accounts—to keep the network barely alive.

For Felix Klaussen, Le Roux's arrest meant an abrupt and disori- enting end to the project that had consumed his life. For nearly a year, he'd spent most of his waking moments thinking about how to convince Le Roux that he was bringing him the deal of a life- time, constantly vigilant to any slipup that could expose the ruse. Now he spent weeks in a Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, video- chatting with his fiancée, idling while the Justice Department worked through their arrangement with Le Roux and determined whether they needed Klaussen as a witness. He was elated that it had all worked, but unsure how to feel about the deal Le Roux was strik- ing, and where the story might go now that he had exited it.

I came to know a version of the same feeling, years later. I'd never been face-to-face with Le Roux, never tried to sell him a story and risked his wrath. But I could certainly claim a similar obsession with trying to understand him. It had chewed up years of my life as I tried to wrestle the facts to fit a simpler frame, some- thing with a cleaner ending, a story I could hold in my head all at once. In that version of the story, Le Roux's arrest was the close of his saga, justice done. But the maddening contradictions of Le Roux's world were part of what had hooked me in the first place— which is why I knew the story wasn't over yet. This wasn't the end of the game. Just a reshuffling of the teams.