drug cartel, for a price of $800,000. “Today’s arrests,” Bharara said, “are the culmination of a bold and brave global investigation conducted by some of the most extraordinary law enforcement agents in the world—the men and women of the DEA’s Special Operations Division.” The Thai police had captured Hunter two days before, at a safe house on a golf course in Phuket, Thailand. Two members of Hunter’s assassination squad had been picked up at the same time in Liberia, as they prepared to carry out the hit. The fourth and fifth were caught in Estonia, charged with providing security for a drug shipment to the United States. All five would be extradited to New York to stand trial.

The announcement made international headlines, not least because Hunter’s actual nickname, according to prosecutors, was “Rambo.” When I read about it in the news the next morning, I couldn’t disagree with Bharara’s flash of showmanship: The whole thing did sound as if it were concocted by a novelist. Curious if there was more to the story, I went online and downloaded the indictment. Paging through it, I discovered that if the allegations read like fiction, it was in part because, in some sense, they were. The whole thing—the murder-for-hire of the DEA agent, the drug deal—had been an elaborate setup, a version of what’s known as a “reverse sting” operation. The two people that Hunter and his crew were plotting to murder never existed. They were inventions of the DEA, who laid an elaborate trap for Hunter’s crew, enticing them into plotting a crime against imaginary victims.

Most of the case had been sealed by a federal judge, but the indictment described a world of amoral mercenaries operating with utter impunity, arranging paid assassinations without a second thought. On recordings made by the DEA using microphones hidden in the Phuket safe house, Hunter was captured preparing his team to carry out jobs for the supposed Colombians, including killings-for-hire that he referred to as “bonus work.” “This is real stuff,” he told his team. “You see James Bond in the movie and you’re saying, ‘Oh, I can do that.’ Well, you’re gonna do it now.” He bragged about the kind of bonus work he had done in the past,