lion dollars from him. Yes, he had sent Joseph Hunter and Chris De Meyer to firebomb his cousin Mathew’s house. Yes, he had ordered Smith to intimidate Moran Oz, an order Smith had car- ried out with Hunter and De Meyer by throwing Oz off a boat and shooting at him. On Le Roux’s orders, De Meyer had also thrown a hand grenade at a real estate broker’s house—not Catherine Lee nor Noimie Edillor but a third one.

“Why did you target this other person?” the prosecutor asked. “That other person owed me approximately one thousand dol- lars,” he said.

Le Roux did clear up one lingering mystery for me, around John Nash, the man who had been among the last to see both Bruce Jones and his attorney, Joe Frank Zuñiga, alive. Nash, Le Roux testified, had once sold Le Roux fake weapons and cocaine. Le Roux said that he had hired Nash to kill Zuñiga, in exchange for a partial forgiveness of his debt.

When he arrived at the details of the Lee murder, Bove spent hours projecting emails up on the screen. He guided Le Roux through the plans for Samia and Stillwell, who had reported back to him at the time through emails from Hunter.

When the cross-examination began, Le Roux transformed com- pletely, from the helpful witness to the intransigent, reluctant ver- bal combatant. (“Could you break down that question into smaller parts?” he responded to a two-part question. “It’s not precise,” he complained about other questions. “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘intelligent,’” he said, when asked whether he considered him- self such.) Much of his resistance relied on extreme literalism: When shown a copy of his own cooperation agreement, including his signature, he quibbled that he was seeing “only a photocopy of my signature.” “I’m not saying I doubt it’s the agreement,” he said. “I just can’t be certain that the text matches the agreement I have.” At times he projected the air of a CEO being asked, to an- swer for the actions of a sprawling corporation. “I already testified there were two thousand people who were employed,” he said in response to a question about insulating himself from culpability.