Le Roux’s North Korean connections, via a Chinese triad group, similarly fizzled. Ye Tiong Tan Lim, the man convicted in the North Korean meth sting, had declined to cooperate, leaving the DEA with no path into the organization. “Lim plays a role of a poor, little old guy,” the former 960 agent said. “Lim is legit. He’s scared his family would be murdered. And he’s probably right. We just never got far with him. We needed him because we didn’t under- stand it. And we would have had to go into Hong Kong. They don’t like the Americans.”

Le Roux had leveraged his way into a deal with the U.S. govern- ment based on a promise that had largely dissolved into vapor, aside from the former employees he’d helped set up. Kent Bailey, for one, believed that the 960 agents had been starstruck by headline-grabbing possibilities and let themselves believe that Le Roux could deliver something bigger than himself. “These are the countries that are in the news, these are hot frickin’ items,” Bailey said. “His pipe dream was that he was dealing directly with some general in the Iranian army, and Iran was talking about building missiles for nuclear weapons. But people in that world think they are bigger than they are.”