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The Stings

2012-2013 ... Back in the game ... News from the boss ... The Colombians arrive ... The perfect hit ... History repeats

n a typical organized-crime case, authorities work their way up a kind of pyramid, flipping lower-level participants to inform against the lieutenants above them, flipping those lieutenants to inform against bosses, sacrificing small-scale prosecutions in order to pursue the powerful figures at the apex. With Le Roux, the DEA had captured the man who not only sat atop the organization, but the one who had created it, from his own mind, and ran it with ruthless specificity. Le Roux was not just the most powerful force behind The Company—or RX Limited, or any of a dozen names the organization traveled under. He was The Company.

The U.S. Department of Justice might have touted that triumph. They might have chosen to prosecute Le Roux to the fullest extent of the law—as they had done with similarly high-profile cases like Viktor Bout's—and then publicly celebrated their almost-certain victory in federal court. But now they decided to invert the pyra- mid, working their way to the base, cloaked in a blanket of se- crecy. Instead of allowing the organization Le Roux had built to quietly disintegrate from neglect, they would use him to hold