jump out of helicopters and that’s why he surrounded himself with all of us. He didn’t care about life, I’ll tell you that. In my opinion it meant nothing to him to have someone killed. He demanded loyalty and then he turned into a coward. He couldn’t do his own time.”

Other convicted Le Roux employees, when they agreed to talk to me, sounded almost wistful about their time working for him. “I always considered it a very unique lifestyle that not anyone could slide into,” Tim Vamvakias wrote me via email. “For me personally it felt like a life of Indiana Jones, Jason Bourne, and James Bond all wrapped up in one. You never knew what was coming next.” Vamvakias was serving a twenty-year sentence on murder conspiracy charges in Big Spring, a maximum-security fa- cility in Texas. After I succeeded in getting a visit approved, he suddenly wrote and apologized that he could no longer talk to me. “Unfortunately I’m against the wall at the moment due to other factors,” he said vaguely. A few months later, in a document the government filed mistakenly and quickly withdrew, I discovered that he had flipped and would testify against Hunter in his murder trial. Vamvakias’s name then disappeared from the Bureau of Pris- ons system.

Vamvakias had suggested I try to find Chris De Meyer, who’d worked closely with Hunter for years. “If you could get ahold of him then I’m sure he could tie up a lot of loose ends,” he wrote. “But you’d most definitely have to earn his trust.” From what sources told me, De Meyer had quit the organization around 2011 and moved back to Europe. He hadn’t been charged in any of the Le Roux–related cases, although his name had surfaced in Le Roux’s attorney’s letter to the judge in Minneapolis, claiming that De Meyer was a threat to Le Roux’s family. He’d shown up in the Noimie Edillor murder case file in the Philippines, which named De Meyer as a suspect, along with “Daddy Mac.” The former 960 agent told me that the DEA could never identify Daddy Mac— although they suspected he was an American of Samoan descent— and lacked the jurisdiction to go after De Meyer.