otherwise still be roaming the world as paid assassins? That was significant. "Do I think it was worth it? Yeah. Should he get fifteen years, should he get thirty years? Probably everybody who was involved in that operation should get a bullet behind the ear. Seri- ously. They are not good people. They are never going to be pro- ductive members of society, ever. So what's justice? I don't know. I did my job, is how I look at it."

The prosecutors who'd worked on the cases refused to speak a public word about Le Roux. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District repeatedly declined to talk, telling me back in 2015 that "we have no public record information on Le Roux." I got a version of the same answer from the Consumer Protection Branch, where Linda Marks worked. When I intro- duced myself to Marks one morning outside of a courtroom in Minneapolis, she replied only with a tight smile and a curt "no comment."

The void left by the government's silence was filled, at least in some corners, by wild theories about Le Roux and his exploits. Many of them trickled down to me, and I felt duty bound to at least consider them. I got emails suggesting that Le Roux had been the inventor of bitcoin, and I wasted countless hours trying to de- termine if there was any connection. (As far as I could tell, there wasn't.) A person close to a former employee of Le Roux's, now in prison, was convinced that Le Roux was part of a larger geo- political conspiracy—the Clintons, George Soros, et cetera, et cetera—and sent me long explanations of how it all tied together. It didn't. Other people contacted me with implausible stories of how they themselves had crossed paths with Le Roux, how he'd threatened to kill them, or destroyed their business. "You have been fed/led a narrative that has been orchestrated by three-letter alphabet agencies," one of them informed me. When I pressed them for details, they faded away. "There's more to the story," they would tell me, and in some sense, they were right: There were always details, people, connections just out of my reach.

Even my more reliable sources sometimes threw out rumors