cash from his Infiniti SUV. “Everybody he had to pay had to come to the car, open the trunk,” Klaussen said. “Put it in the brown paper bag, there you go. It was mental.” The crews crisscrossed continents, from Vietnam to Ghana to Zambia to South Africa. One day they might be protecting a Le Roux employee who had arrived in Kinshasa carrying a duffel bag full of American cash; the next they might be crossing a border in a pickup with millions of dollars in gold hidden in the tailgate, on their way to a remote airstrip. A week later they could be in Malaysia, conducting sur- veillance on a wealthy executive. Le Roux’s businesses seemed at times to be independent arms of some conglomerate larger than them all. He’d purchased timber concessions in Africa and Asia and deployed employees to supervise logging operations: teak logs out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, sold through La Plata Trading; tali logs in the neighboring Republic of the Congo under the banner of Martenius Trading.

Most of the men on the ground had little idea what it all added up to. “You have to understand: things were very compartmental- ized,” the American former sailor said. “There were times, many times, that one person would not know what the other was doing. To the point that you had no idea how many people are working on this particular contract, let alone that the person you are travel- ing with might have no idea what his particular mission was.” It was a testament to Le Roux’s penchant for secrecy in his busi- nesses that Klaussen and McConnell, despite occupying roughly equivalent positions in the operation, never so much as met. There was only one person who maintained a picture of the entire opera- tion in his head, and that was Paul Le Roux.