Korea’s drug production, they would presumably need Lim to give them access. But Lim deflected them, arguing that non-Korean speakers would raise suspicions.

The next month, Lim provided two small meth samples to Per- alta, who delivered them to Philip Shackels. Together with Stam- mers, he shipped the samples via FedEx to Monrovia, hidden inside a photo album. Stammers emailed the tracking number to Le Roux.

The Colombians reported back to Stammers that the two sam- ples had tested at 96 and 98 percent pure, respectively. “I just re- ceived the following on the two samples,” Stammers then informed Le Roux. “A—Whiter and in smaller granules, B—Clear and big- ger shards and harder to break. As per the boys, they are both very good and very strong, but they preferred B.” The deal was on.

By March 2013, Joseph Hunter had spent several months collect- ing and sorting résumés from mercenaries in Poland, Germany, and South Africa. He forwarded his top picks to Le Roux for ap- proval. Together, they settled on three men. None had worked for The Company before. Now they would be unwittingly working for its DEA-constructed mirage.

Dennis Gögel was a twenty-seven-year-old German whose life followed the path of so many of the other contractors who had joined Le Roux over the years. He had been raised by his grand- mother in Stadthagen, a small city in northern Germany, after his mother died of asthma and his father abandoned him. He joined the army, he said, “to take control” of his life. He’d served in an elite unit deployed for peacekeeping in Kosovo. On his discharge, in 2010, he’d shifted into private security, first in Afghanistan and then working as an antipiracy specialist on boats threatened by Somali pirates. His Facebook profile consisted largely of photos of him posing with weapons or working shirtless on the decks of ships.