Korean meth group and Hunter's team-but Cindric and Stouch were careful not reel them in too fast. For Hunter's team, the Co- lombians first offered up purposefully pedestrian jobs, like con- ducting surveillance at a distance on a large shipment of drugs in a Thai port. Next, the Colombians dispatched them to Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean just east of Madagascar, to provide security for a meeting. Here, the two groups of DEA targets would cross paths for the first time. Scott Stammers and Philip Shackels were there, at Le Roux's direction, to negotiate weapons purchases for the Colombians, who said they wanted to buy surface-to-air missiles. Hunter's team was brought for security. The following day, Stammers, Shackels, and the Colom- bians met with a pair of actual drug dealers, Serbians who were offering to help replace the cocaine lost on the JeReVe. The "Serb crew," as Stammers reported to Le Roux, could supply seven hun- dred to a thousand kilos in South America, for shipment to Aus- tralia.

Cindric and Stouch, stationed nearby to monitor the proceed- ings, watched their already complex operation mushroom into something that required an organizational chart to follow. Besides their faux-Colombian cartel bosses and their five targets-Gögel, Filter, Soborski, Stammers, and Shackels-the April meetings in- volved ten other criminals who weren't even subjects of their inves- tigation. The chances that someone would find a hole in the sting operation mushroomed with every new mark that showed up.

But as he had in his real business, Le Roux had little problem juggling operations. He would call multiple times a day to check in on their progress, pressing his employees to hurry things up. None of them seemed to find it unusual. Le Roux told Shackels that the organization had suffered huge losses, and that moving the North Korean meth should be his top priority. In mid-May, Stammers and Shackels returned to Thailand to meet with the Colombians about the logistics of the meth shipment.

Shackels, for his part, appeared to be struggling to keep it to-