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The Reporter

2013–2015 . . . Rambo gets arrested . . . Murder and North Korean methamphetamine . . . The mysterious Paul Le Roux . . . Lost in the data . . . A lawyer and a deal

"Today we announce the arrest of Joseph Hunter," said Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern Dis- trict of New York, standing at a podium in a dark suit and pat- terned tie on the morning of September 27, 2013. Photographers snapped away in the front-row briefing room in downtown Man- hattan. Television cameras in the back broadcast Bharara's press conference live for the international news. "The bone-chilling al- legations in today's indictment read like they were ripped from the pages of a Tom Clancy novel," Bharara said. "The charges tell a tale of an international band of mercenary marksmen who enlisted their elite military training to serve as hired guns for evil ends."

That morning, a federal court had unsealed an indictment out- lining precisely what those evil ends were. Hunter, a forty-eight- year-old decorated U.S. Army veteran, stood accused of organizing an international hit squad composed of ex-soldiers from the United States, Poland, and Germany. Their mission: to carry out the mur- der of a DEA agent and his informant, on behalf of a Colombian