DEA admitted to confiscating only $300,000. The Hong Kong government had clearly gotten much more. In his testimony, Le Roux claimed somewhat laughably that this constituted “the bulk of my assets at the time of arrest,” and that his other properties and money “were stolen by unknown parties.” I was hard-pressed to find someone from his former organization, or in the U.S. gov- ernment, who believed him.

Bailey told me that the DEA found one bank account with $8 million in it in Mauritius, which was drained before they could seize it. By whom, they had no idea. “He’s betting he’s going to do ten years, and he’s got millions,” Bailey said. “He decided, through self-preservation, that the only way I have a chance to get out of here was to cooperate, give up the information that I can give up, do the guys that I can, hope to get out of jail with a lot of money left. Guarantee that’s what he did. He sold a song.”

A former employee at an investment firm in Hong Kong, who contacted me after my first series of stories on Le Roux, bolstered the assertion that Le Roux maintained plenty of assets to start again. The firm, the employee said, had helped Le Roux settle por- tions of his fortune into a trust in the British Virgin Islands, filtered through accounts in Gibraltar and the Netherlands. The trusts listed the children from his marriage to Lilian as beneficiaries. (The former employee also noted that the firm had studiously avoided inquiring as to where the money originated, and ignored red flags like the fact that Le Roux never showed up in person, supplied multiple passports, and added signatories to the accounts that were clearly his own aliases.) I was able to confirm the names of the trusts, but the assets remained hidden from view—and possi- bly from the reach of the U.S. government, should they even choose to look for them. The former employee said that tens of millions of dollars may have passed through the accounts, which Le Roux ac- cessed as recently as late 2014 or early 2015, well after he was captured by the DEA.

“He’s still not done, believe me,” Klaussen concluded. “That’s