right as rain,” Bailey said. “And I firmly believe that in New York they let their personal interests cloud their judgment.” He'd seen plenty of deals cut in his career, but Le Roux's didn't sit right with him. “He had the most information to give,” he admitted. “But you can't forget that he was the shot caller. He does not deserve to get out. He deserves to spend the rest of his life in jail.”

Kimberly Brill, true to form, was more diplomatic than her co- worker when I asked her how she felt about Le Roux's coopera- tion. If anything, she noted, the acquittals in Minnesota showed the risks that would have come with taking him to trial. “It could have ended much worse,” she said, “as we saw.” But she allowed herself a rare moment of disappointment about the way the ver- dicts had gone. “It's ridiculous,” she said. “Because there was a lot of clear evidence of what they were doing. And I don't think that story was conveyed. I don't know if that's a politically correct an- swer. It was very disheartening.”

For years, I tried to convince anyone in the Department of Jus- tice to articulate their motivation for cooperating with Le Roux, and to give me the view from the 960 side of the case. In response, I received a string of variations on “no comment.” The DEA's spokesman in Washington told me in several different ways that none of the agents who'd worked on the sting operations would talk. Even former agents who had worked on the case, when I found a number of them, refused my questions and warned me away from digging too far. “You need to be real careful in that you don't want make yourself a witness,” one former SOD supervisor told me.

Finally, in early 2018, the DEA allowed me to speak to a former 960 agent who had worked closely on the case. “Look, he's in jail, and is not killing people he would have killed,” the former agent said, sitting across from me at a Brooklyn diner one spring eve- ning, a few blocks from the Marriott that out-of-town DEA agents book when in New York for trials. The Iran and North Korean leads might not have born fruit, he said, but the likely conviction of four Americans—including two former U.S. soldiers—who would