everything from guarding industrial sites to personal protection for VIPs to corporate surveillance. He’d gotten his start in his native Canada, working protection details for politicians and diamond dealers, before moving to L.A., where he’d provided security for the likes of Sylvester Stallone and O. J. Simpson. Although he’d never served in the military, McConnell was fluent enough in its lingo—“mission planning,” “comms”—that colleagues often as sumed he had. He arrived in Manila in the late 1990s, on a con tract to oversee protection for a dam project, and stayed. He’d met Dave Smith while both were working for a Manila-based security outfit. Smith left the company under acrimonious circumstances around 2005, and then resurfaced not long after in the employ of Le Roux. How the job came about exactly, McConnell was never sure. But in short order Smith had become Le Roux’s de facto head of security and right-hand man, and he offered to bring McCon nell on board. Le Roux wasn’t just looking for people to help him wash his money. He was looking to expand his criminal ho rizons.

Smith himself epitomized the kind of untethered international mercenary he would soon hire to fill Le Roux’s ranks. He hailed from Northern Ireland and had served in the British military—often he claimed to have been a member of the Special Air Services, an elite special forces unit. “I was in the Regiment,” he would say, employing the SAS shorthand. Some Le Roux employees doubted it, but Smith at least carried himself like a well-trained military of ficer, and his work history seemed to back it up. So, too, did the scars crisscrossing his upper torso, which he said he’d gotten fight ing in the Falklands War. He’d spent time in the United States, where he married an American, working as a SWAT team trainer in Boston. “Dave bred loyalty,” said Scott Stammers, another con tractor Smith brought into Le Roux’s organization. “I kicked down doors with Dave. Dave had two sayings: ‘Train how you fight’ and ‘Smooth is fast.’”

In the late nineties, Smith joined the security contracting cir cuit, working for a series of unusual clients. In 1998, he surfaced