gether. “You seem tense,” one of the Colombians said during a meeting.

“Of course, I’m fucking stressed,” Shackels said. At one point, Shackels’s hands were shaking so badly he spilled a cup of water on one of the supposed cartel bosses. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” the Colombian said. “You need to stay cool. Just relax.”

In meetings with Lim and Peralta, meanwhile, the Colombians set the amounts and price of the shipments, proposing an initial sixty kilos of meth, at $60,000 per. “My friends, can you do the sixty, a little bit, a little more, like one hundred?” Peralta asked. The Colombians agreed, and over the summer months the groups hammered out the details. In emails about the arrangement, they referred to the drugs as “car parts.”

Now it was Le Roux, the informant, who had his targets eating out of his hand, just as Felix Klaussen had once duped him. After Mauritius, Hunter proposed to Le Roux that they add Tim Vam- vakias to his crew. Now forty-one, Vamvakias had been back in The Company since 2012, stationed at a stash house in Texas. For $7,500 a month, he guarded a large supply of contraband trama- dol, the generic version of Ultram, awaiting shipment to buyers on the East Coast.

Hunter thought Vamvakias could be put to better use on the security team. Le Roux agreed to a transfer and a raise to $10,000 a month, as long as Vamvakias was willing to engage in “bonus work.”

Stouch and Cindric had planned out the stings so that they in- tersected just enough with Le Roux’s actual business to seem real. And now, after months of slowly establishing that authenticity, the agents began to spring the trap. It was time to begin offering the security team bonus work. Le Roux informed Hunter that he and the Colombians had found a snitch in their organization, a boat captain who had tipped off the DEA and Australian Federal Police to the JeReVe: