in Liberia as a military adviser to Charles Taylor, the country's notorious warlord-president. Smith grew particularly close to Taylor's son, Chucky, mentoring him in combat strategy as the younger Taylor worked to build his own independent military force. After the unit was involved in the slaughter of a rival political group, Smith disappeared from the country. (Charles Taylor was later convicted of crimes against humanity by an international court in The Hague, while Chucky landed in an American prison, convicted of torture.) A few years later, Smith turned up in Iraq as a contractor for Crucible, a United Kingdom-based outfit filling one of the countless security gaps opened by the American invasion. "The difference between a contractor and a military guy is I'm getting paid five times as much," Smith told Esquire in a 2004 story on contractors working in Iraq. "And I can tell you to get fucked if I don't want to do it." Along the way, Smith had left his wife and relocated to Manila, where he eventually quit the war zones and started working for Paul Le Roux.

Smith's nominal job was head of security, charged with hiring muscle like McConnell and using it to project his bosses' authority. But the scope of duties sometimes felt limitless. McConnell's first task was to oversee the construction of a shooting range Le Roux was building in Manila, connected to a gun shop he owned called Red White & Blue Arms. A month later, seemingly satisfied with McConnell's work, Smith began dispatching him on international missions. "Dave gave me instructions on what needed to be done," McConnell said. "It was pretty harmless stuff. Good money, working for a rich guy." Le Roux had enlisted what he called "dummies"—family members and associates with clean criminal records he could use as proxies—to register his companies under their own names, or open bank accounts. McConnell's job was to keep an eye on the dummies and make sure they went where they were told. Most were Filipino, but Le Roux also counted among his dummies an out-of-work Zimbabwean named Robson Tandanayi, and an elderly South African man named Edgar van Tonder. "It was just babysitting," McConnell said.