The mastermind, p.29
The Mastermind, page 29
“Paul, nice to meet you.”
“Good meeting you.”
The video from Klaussen’s watch camera bounced from floor to wall and back as the men shook hands. He and Le Roux walked to the exit, the sound of flip-flops echoing off the tile floors. “I think the boss is satisfied,” Le Roux whispered, as the elevator doors closed.
“He is,” Klaussen said. “Like I said, he’s a nice guy.”
“We’re not going to fuck him,” Le Roux said as they walked out to the waiting car. “But the weapons is interesting. It doesn’t make sense why someone wants it shipped to the fucking U.S.”
“Yeah, I dunno,” Klaussen said.
“That’s asking for trouble.”
* * *
—
“That was it,” Klaussen said later. “We went back to the hotel.” He returned to his room and downloaded the watch video to a USB drive. When a DEA agent came by and knocked, he slid it under the door. Then he sat down and waited.
The end, from Klaussen’s perspective at least, was anticlimactic. He was idly staring out the window when he saw a group of officers from the Liberian National Security Agency escorting a handcuffed Le Roux through the hotel’s parking lot. They put him in the back of a van and drove off.
Minutes later there was a knock at Klaussen’s door. It was Stouch. “It’s time to pack your bags, let’s go,” he said. Everything so far had run exactly according to plan. But now that Le Roux was in custody, it was impossible to predict what would happen next—how soon his operators across the globe might find out, and what they might do. The agents hustled Klaussen out of his hotel and checked him into another one. A few days later, he was on a plane to the United States.
Later, the agents filled him in on the details of what happened back in Monrovia. How, when the local officers had stormed Le Roux’s room, the first thing he’d done was slam his laptop lid shut to activate the encryption software, just as he’d always instructed his employees to do. How for a few hours in a local Liberian jail he’d alternated between raging at the police and offering to bribe them. How, when he first saw an American agent, he had railed that they had no jurisdiction to arrest him in Liberia.
None of it worked. The Liberians handed Le Roux over to a group of five DEA agents, including Stouch and Cindric. The agents calmly explained that he had been indicted in New York by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy to import methamphetamine, a violation of sections 959 and 960a of the U.S. federal code. He would be taken by chartered plane to the United States.
“I apologize in advance, but I do not want to get on your plane,” Le Roux told them, and then went limp. Dragging his body into a van took several agents, “like trying to move somebody who’s dead weight,” Stouch later testified.
Once on board and in the air, the agents were exhausted, ready to collapse for the flight home. But suddenly Le Roux wanted to talk. It didn’t take any clever interrogation techniques, or indeed any persuasion at all, to flip one of the DEA’s most sought-after targets, a man who just hours before had been reveling in his ability to obtain unfathomable amounts of drugs and unlimited supplies of powerful military weapons—a man who had routinely ordered even his closest confidants dead.
As the plane cruised out over the Atlantic, he seemed to have already decided. First he congratulated the agents on catching him. Then he said he wanted to talk. “Just promise me I don’t die in jail,” he said. “That’s all I want.” He waived his Miranda rights, signed a consent form to search his laptop and phone, and agreed to start telling them what he knew. “To Paul, everything is a negotiation,” a former 960 agent said.
Eleven hours later the plane approached an airport just north of New York City. Paul Calder Le Roux was about to step out of view and into a new life of public service.
28
The Investigators
2012…Le Roux turns on a dime…A boat lost at sea…Chasing Oz and Berkman…The story begins again
A few hours before dawn on a balmy September morning in 2012, Kimberly Brill and Kent Bailey stood on a tarmac in White Plains, New York, awaiting a plane carrying the man they’d been chasing for five years. Beside them was Derek Maltz, the Special Agent in Charge of SOD. Weeks ago, the plan had been different: Maltz had agreed that Brill should travel on the mission to capture Le Roux in Monrovia. But the agents from 960 had pushed back, insisting there was no room for her on the flight. Instead, Brill and Bailey had been invited to meet the plane when it arrived.
It was an ominous sign of things to come, but on this morning, at least, Bailey recalled that Maltz was in a complimentary mood. “ ‘Kent,’ he was telling me, ‘I’ll never forget the first time you briefed me on this case. You were absolutely right: This guy is the largest international criminal that I’ve ever dealt with.’ ” The plane touched down around 3 A.M., and Bailey noted to himself that it seemed large enough to have accommodated not just Brill but a dozen more agents. The investigators from Minnesota caught a quick glimpse of Le Roux as he lumbered down the stairs, handcuffed and wearing a pair of cut-off sweatpants and a polo shirt. Then the SOD agents hustled him away, loading him into an SUV headed for the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
Brill and Bailey had booked rooms in a downtown Brooklyn Marriott, just across the East River from the MCC and the offices of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. They’d been preparing to join in the initial questioning of Le Roux, who was scheduled for his first formal court appearance later that morning. After breakfast, they decided to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, together with an agent from SOD, to attend the hearing. Partway across, the agent got a phone call: the hearing was off. Hours before, Le Roux had met for the first time with a court-appointed attorney named Jonathan Marvinny, and promptly signed an agreement stating his intention to cooperate. The deal affirmed what he’d declared on the plane: he was ready to help. The 960 agents were hustling him to a hotel room at the same Marriott where Bailey and Brill were staying, to begin debriefing him.
Bailey turned to Brill. “Well, he’s on Team America now,” he said.
There would be no press conference announcing the capture of one of the most prolific criminals the DEA had ever faced. The agency had other plans, which now required that no one know Le Roux was off the street. They’d snatched him out of view of any of his employees or associates, and now he would start working from DEA custody as if he were still at large.
It took Bailey and Brill the better part of that day to realize they were being shut out of Le Roux’s case. The U.S. Attorneys in the Southern District who’d obtained his indictment now had control of Le Roux, and they didn’t intend to relinquish it, no matter who had first opened the case or how long they’d spent on it. “We waited all that day, we never talked to him,” Bailey said. An agent from SOD advised Bailey to return home to Minneapolis, but he demanded that he and Brill receive a briefing on Le Roux’s status. “It probably wasn’t until dinnertime, six or seven—I wasn’t leaving until we got a briefing,” Bailey said. “I think they probably hoped that we would go away.”
That evening Bailey sat in a bar with a group supervisor at SOD who told him that Le Roux had offered not just to help catch his associates, but to share information about dealings he’d had with Iran and North Korea. He was now more than a drug and arms dealer, the supervisor said. He was a national security asset.
At the bar, Bailey warned that Le Roux was smart enough to manipulate them, if the agents weren’t careful. “Don’t get enamored with him,” he told the supervisor. “He’s a killer. Don’t start dancing here because he can sell you a song.”
On both sides of the DEA, the ambitions that emerged from a prize like Le Roux had begun to harden into resentment. Bailey believed that the case belonged to Brill—a diversion investigator who had devoted five years of her life to it, clawing and scraping at the evidence to find a way to Le Roux. They’d agreed to let the 960 agents make the arrest, but never expected that 960 would refuse to share the prize with the people who had handed it to them.
Within the 960 group, Bailey’s objections were viewed as the grumblings of an agent who hadn’t been able to land the case. Minnesota hadn’t handed them anything, they believed—they had started with a name in a file and ended with Le Roux in custody. “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if Kent Bailey knows what probable cause is,” a former 960 agent told me. “One of his big things was, ‘Well, your charge is just too simple. We have a much bigger project going.’ What’s the old adage: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Why go after an intergalactic conspiracy? Take a strategic strike. That was our thought.”
From my vantage point, hearing about it years later, the intra-agency grappling all seemed a little juvenile, and counterproductive. Lost in the battles over what to do with Le Roux, it seemed to me, was any real accounting for what he’d done, and what he deserved.
One thing was certain: The months and years that Bailey and Brill had pressed Linda Marks for an indictment that never came were now coming back to haunt them.
“I’m sorry your lawyers suck and mine don’t,” the SOD group supervisor told Bailey.
A version of that conversation would repeat on a continuous loop over the coming weeks, after Brill and Bailey returned to Minnesota, denied a chance to sit across from their white whale. “Those guys were already saying, ‘It’s national security, he can’t talk to you,’ ” Bailey said. “My ass it’s national security.” As the agents back in New York were pumping Le Roux for information, Brill was sitting on a pile of evidence accumulated over years of investigation. “I said, ‘Come out and meet with her for a week, she’s got all the books,’ ” Bailey said. “Now he’s talking, and they are going and looking up those names, and she already had them. She had lists of targets.” The response, he said, was always the same. “ ‘Thanks, nope.’ And they went out not knowing. Because they wanted it to be their case.”
Everything that followed sprang from that decision, based on the hope that Le Roux would deliver to the U.S. government something worth more than what they had: a multiple murderer, a prodigious global drug and arms trafficker, a solicitor of rogue regimes, and a man who had supplied hundreds of millions of doses of painkillers to its citizens. If he failed to deliver, Team America would be the ones getting played.
* * *
—
While the agents in New York were recalibrating their plans for Le Roux, the yacht JeReVe was cruising across the Pacific with two hundred kilos of cocaine and the DEA’s tracker on board. Then, on October 5, the tracking signal died. The 960 group thought the two shipmates might have discovered it, while Bailey assumed a more conventional explanation: Its battery had drained, perhaps due to the extra days the boat had spent idling off the coast of Peru. Either way, somewhere north of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, the DEA lost the boat.
The 960 agents handling Le Roux had him make a call on the boat’s satellite phone, hoping to reestablish its location. “My car broke down,” the captain told him. “You have to send a car for me.” Then Le Roux called the captain’s wife, in Thailand, who told him, even more cryptically, that her husband had called her to say he had been “captured by the fish people.” The 960 agents suspected he was perhaps being held by pirates.
A massive hunt for the boat was soon under way. The DEA activated a system called the Pacific Transnational Crime Network, and authorities from the Cook Islands and Tonga were on the water, all looking for signs of the JeReVe. But a storm was brewing in the region, further reducing the already long odds of finding one forty-four-foot yacht in the vastness of the South Pacific.
On November 5, 2012, a pair of spear fishermen diving in southern Tonga spotted a yacht washed up on a shallow reef. The boat was lying on its side, saltwater lapping against its red hull and broken tiller. A tattered French flag fluttered from a small flagpole at the stern. Its name was written in golden script across the back of the hull: JeReVe.
One of the divers climbed onto the clean white deck of the ship, a Sun Odyssey 44, and made a grisly discovery. At the helm was the badly decomposed body of a man, much of it picked away by seagulls. The divers fled the ship, climbed into their own boat, motored to the nearby port of Neiafu, and called the local police.
Bad weather rolled in, and the authorities couldn’t return to the JeReVe for two days. When they did, a group of Tongan officers examined it. Inside the hull, they took an ax to the interior walls and found a pile of clear garbage bags filled with neatly wrapped brown plastic bricks. Each contained a kilo of cocaine. All told, the boat had been carrying 204 kilos, worth more than $90 million on the street in Australia, where authorities suspected the drugs had been headed. It was the largest drug haul ever confiscated in the South Pacific.
Tongan authorities identified the dead man as a thirty-five-year-old Slovakian named Milan Rindzak. They found several passports on the ship, along with several hundred American dollars, over a thousand dollars’ worth of Dominican pesos, and a handful of Polish zloty. At first the local police asserted that there was no foul play in Rindzak’s death, but following an autopsy, they amended their assessment to “cause of death inconclusive.” He had been dead for days, if not weeks.
No other body was ever located. For months afterward, the Tongan police tried to locate Rindzak’s next of kin in Slovakia, but were unable to track down anyone who would claim him. As for Ivan Vaclavic, the man the DEA knew had been on the boat, his fate remained uncertain. An investigation by several Slovakian news outlets would soon reveal that Vaclavic was a cover identity of a man named Maroš Deák, a Slovakian mobster who had disappeared from the country years earlier. (He was rumored to have been fleeing for his life; Deák’s brother was later shot dead back home.) In 2011, a man resembling Deák had been stopped in Phuket, Thailand, by local authorities. He was carrying a high-powered Bushmaster rifle that he said he’d bought in the Philippines, and a Thai marine captain’s license in Vaclavic’s name. Now he seemed to have disappeared with the JeReVe.
Bailey, remembering the call that Le Roux had been allowed to make to the boat, theorized that Vaclavic might have killed his fellow passenger, engineered a transfer off the boat, and left it to drift. “He had blunt-force trauma all over his head and body,” Bailey said of the dead man. “It could have been caused by the captain or the boat.” The former 960 group agent I spoke with was confident about a different theory, albeit one that seemed to me to contain an equal amount of conjecture: Vaclavic, he said, had been captured by pirates at sea. I suggested that if that were so, perhaps the pirates had later set him free. “Yeah, and I’m Santa Claus,” he said.
The Tongan authorities, for their part, seemed eager to put the mystery behind them and let the matter drop. They buried the sailor’s remains in a local cemetery overlooking the placid blue waters of a harbor called the Port of Refuge.
* * *
—
In Minneapolis, Bailey and Brill still had an ongoing case to confront. Even if they’d lost control of Le Roux himself, they continued to hold out hope of indicting him in Minnesota for his role as one of the biggest black-market painkiller importers in history. And there was the rest of the RX Limited network to dismantle. In October 2012, they flew in Le Roux’s cousin, Mathew Smith, along with two other Zimbabweans, to testify in front of a grand jury. Each of them identified photos of Le Roux, to verify that he was on the surveillance tapes and images in Brazil. They described the web of companies, like Wilex and Southern Ace, that they had been sent to Hong Kong and elsewhere to create. Afterward, the investigators took the witnesses to a Vikings-Titans football game.
Brill and Bailey had also coordinated with local DEA offices across the country to round up doctors and pharmacists who’d been some of the largest prescribers and suppliers in the network. Three RX Limited physicians, four affiliate website operators, and a pharmacist, arrested in New York and New Jersey, quickly entered guilty pleas. A housewife in Pennsylvania copped to forging a medical license and authorizing more than fifteen thousand prescriptions. She’d answered an ad for stay-at-home work on Craigslist. Babubhai Patel, the Detroit-area pharmacist captured on the wiretap, was brought in on unrelated charges of massive healthcare fraud.
But these were small targets, not the ones Brill and Bailey were most eager to arrest. They were after bigger fish like Moran Oz, Alon Berkman, and others higher up in the RX Limited chain of command. But arresting Le Roux’s lieutenants posed some of the same problems that capturing Le Roux himself had. Moran Oz, Alon Berkman, and Omer Bezalel were living in Israel, whose government might prove resistant to extradition. Most of the crimes they had supposedly committed weren’t crimes under Israeli law. Lachlan McConnell and Shai Reuven were both still in Manila, living under a Philippine government that had so far proven less than fully cooperative. To capture these guys, Brill and Bailey needed to lure them somewhere else. And to do that, they needed Le Roux.
The 960 group, however, was focused on putting Le Roux to work in their own sting operations against the likes of Joseph Hunter. They allowed him only enough communication with his RX Limited employees—and enough access to his bank accounts—to keep the network barely alive.
* * *
—
For Felix Klaussen, Le Roux’s arrest meant an abrupt and disorienting end to the project that had consumed his life. For nearly a year, he’d spent most of his waking moments thinking about how to convince Le Roux that he was bringing him the deal of a lifetime, constantly vigilant to any slipup that could expose the ruse. Now he spent weeks in a Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, video-chatting with his fiancée, idling while the Justice Department worked through their arrangement with Le Roux and determined whether they needed Klaussen as a witness. He was elated that it had all worked, but unsure how to feel about the deal Le Roux was striking, and where the story might go now that he had exited it.
“Good meeting you.”
The video from Klaussen’s watch camera bounced from floor to wall and back as the men shook hands. He and Le Roux walked to the exit, the sound of flip-flops echoing off the tile floors. “I think the boss is satisfied,” Le Roux whispered, as the elevator doors closed.
“He is,” Klaussen said. “Like I said, he’s a nice guy.”
“We’re not going to fuck him,” Le Roux said as they walked out to the waiting car. “But the weapons is interesting. It doesn’t make sense why someone wants it shipped to the fucking U.S.”
“Yeah, I dunno,” Klaussen said.
“That’s asking for trouble.”
* * *
—
“That was it,” Klaussen said later. “We went back to the hotel.” He returned to his room and downloaded the watch video to a USB drive. When a DEA agent came by and knocked, he slid it under the door. Then he sat down and waited.
The end, from Klaussen’s perspective at least, was anticlimactic. He was idly staring out the window when he saw a group of officers from the Liberian National Security Agency escorting a handcuffed Le Roux through the hotel’s parking lot. They put him in the back of a van and drove off.
Minutes later there was a knock at Klaussen’s door. It was Stouch. “It’s time to pack your bags, let’s go,” he said. Everything so far had run exactly according to plan. But now that Le Roux was in custody, it was impossible to predict what would happen next—how soon his operators across the globe might find out, and what they might do. The agents hustled Klaussen out of his hotel and checked him into another one. A few days later, he was on a plane to the United States.
Later, the agents filled him in on the details of what happened back in Monrovia. How, when the local officers had stormed Le Roux’s room, the first thing he’d done was slam his laptop lid shut to activate the encryption software, just as he’d always instructed his employees to do. How for a few hours in a local Liberian jail he’d alternated between raging at the police and offering to bribe them. How, when he first saw an American agent, he had railed that they had no jurisdiction to arrest him in Liberia.
None of it worked. The Liberians handed Le Roux over to a group of five DEA agents, including Stouch and Cindric. The agents calmly explained that he had been indicted in New York by a grand jury on charges of conspiracy to import methamphetamine, a violation of sections 959 and 960a of the U.S. federal code. He would be taken by chartered plane to the United States.
“I apologize in advance, but I do not want to get on your plane,” Le Roux told them, and then went limp. Dragging his body into a van took several agents, “like trying to move somebody who’s dead weight,” Stouch later testified.
Once on board and in the air, the agents were exhausted, ready to collapse for the flight home. But suddenly Le Roux wanted to talk. It didn’t take any clever interrogation techniques, or indeed any persuasion at all, to flip one of the DEA’s most sought-after targets, a man who just hours before had been reveling in his ability to obtain unfathomable amounts of drugs and unlimited supplies of powerful military weapons—a man who had routinely ordered even his closest confidants dead.
As the plane cruised out over the Atlantic, he seemed to have already decided. First he congratulated the agents on catching him. Then he said he wanted to talk. “Just promise me I don’t die in jail,” he said. “That’s all I want.” He waived his Miranda rights, signed a consent form to search his laptop and phone, and agreed to start telling them what he knew. “To Paul, everything is a negotiation,” a former 960 agent said.
Eleven hours later the plane approached an airport just north of New York City. Paul Calder Le Roux was about to step out of view and into a new life of public service.
28
The Investigators
2012…Le Roux turns on a dime…A boat lost at sea…Chasing Oz and Berkman…The story begins again
A few hours before dawn on a balmy September morning in 2012, Kimberly Brill and Kent Bailey stood on a tarmac in White Plains, New York, awaiting a plane carrying the man they’d been chasing for five years. Beside them was Derek Maltz, the Special Agent in Charge of SOD. Weeks ago, the plan had been different: Maltz had agreed that Brill should travel on the mission to capture Le Roux in Monrovia. But the agents from 960 had pushed back, insisting there was no room for her on the flight. Instead, Brill and Bailey had been invited to meet the plane when it arrived.
It was an ominous sign of things to come, but on this morning, at least, Bailey recalled that Maltz was in a complimentary mood. “ ‘Kent,’ he was telling me, ‘I’ll never forget the first time you briefed me on this case. You were absolutely right: This guy is the largest international criminal that I’ve ever dealt with.’ ” The plane touched down around 3 A.M., and Bailey noted to himself that it seemed large enough to have accommodated not just Brill but a dozen more agents. The investigators from Minnesota caught a quick glimpse of Le Roux as he lumbered down the stairs, handcuffed and wearing a pair of cut-off sweatpants and a polo shirt. Then the SOD agents hustled him away, loading him into an SUV headed for the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan.
Brill and Bailey had booked rooms in a downtown Brooklyn Marriott, just across the East River from the MCC and the offices of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District. They’d been preparing to join in the initial questioning of Le Roux, who was scheduled for his first formal court appearance later that morning. After breakfast, they decided to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, together with an agent from SOD, to attend the hearing. Partway across, the agent got a phone call: the hearing was off. Hours before, Le Roux had met for the first time with a court-appointed attorney named Jonathan Marvinny, and promptly signed an agreement stating his intention to cooperate. The deal affirmed what he’d declared on the plane: he was ready to help. The 960 agents were hustling him to a hotel room at the same Marriott where Bailey and Brill were staying, to begin debriefing him.
Bailey turned to Brill. “Well, he’s on Team America now,” he said.
There would be no press conference announcing the capture of one of the most prolific criminals the DEA had ever faced. The agency had other plans, which now required that no one know Le Roux was off the street. They’d snatched him out of view of any of his employees or associates, and now he would start working from DEA custody as if he were still at large.
It took Bailey and Brill the better part of that day to realize they were being shut out of Le Roux’s case. The U.S. Attorneys in the Southern District who’d obtained his indictment now had control of Le Roux, and they didn’t intend to relinquish it, no matter who had first opened the case or how long they’d spent on it. “We waited all that day, we never talked to him,” Bailey said. An agent from SOD advised Bailey to return home to Minneapolis, but he demanded that he and Brill receive a briefing on Le Roux’s status. “It probably wasn’t until dinnertime, six or seven—I wasn’t leaving until we got a briefing,” Bailey said. “I think they probably hoped that we would go away.”
That evening Bailey sat in a bar with a group supervisor at SOD who told him that Le Roux had offered not just to help catch his associates, but to share information about dealings he’d had with Iran and North Korea. He was now more than a drug and arms dealer, the supervisor said. He was a national security asset.
At the bar, Bailey warned that Le Roux was smart enough to manipulate them, if the agents weren’t careful. “Don’t get enamored with him,” he told the supervisor. “He’s a killer. Don’t start dancing here because he can sell you a song.”
On both sides of the DEA, the ambitions that emerged from a prize like Le Roux had begun to harden into resentment. Bailey believed that the case belonged to Brill—a diversion investigator who had devoted five years of her life to it, clawing and scraping at the evidence to find a way to Le Roux. They’d agreed to let the 960 agents make the arrest, but never expected that 960 would refuse to share the prize with the people who had handed it to them.
Within the 960 group, Bailey’s objections were viewed as the grumblings of an agent who hadn’t been able to land the case. Minnesota hadn’t handed them anything, they believed—they had started with a name in a file and ended with Le Roux in custody. “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know if Kent Bailey knows what probable cause is,” a former 960 agent told me. “One of his big things was, ‘Well, your charge is just too simple. We have a much bigger project going.’ What’s the old adage: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Why go after an intergalactic conspiracy? Take a strategic strike. That was our thought.”
From my vantage point, hearing about it years later, the intra-agency grappling all seemed a little juvenile, and counterproductive. Lost in the battles over what to do with Le Roux, it seemed to me, was any real accounting for what he’d done, and what he deserved.
One thing was certain: The months and years that Bailey and Brill had pressed Linda Marks for an indictment that never came were now coming back to haunt them.
“I’m sorry your lawyers suck and mine don’t,” the SOD group supervisor told Bailey.
A version of that conversation would repeat on a continuous loop over the coming weeks, after Brill and Bailey returned to Minnesota, denied a chance to sit across from their white whale. “Those guys were already saying, ‘It’s national security, he can’t talk to you,’ ” Bailey said. “My ass it’s national security.” As the agents back in New York were pumping Le Roux for information, Brill was sitting on a pile of evidence accumulated over years of investigation. “I said, ‘Come out and meet with her for a week, she’s got all the books,’ ” Bailey said. “Now he’s talking, and they are going and looking up those names, and she already had them. She had lists of targets.” The response, he said, was always the same. “ ‘Thanks, nope.’ And they went out not knowing. Because they wanted it to be their case.”
Everything that followed sprang from that decision, based on the hope that Le Roux would deliver to the U.S. government something worth more than what they had: a multiple murderer, a prodigious global drug and arms trafficker, a solicitor of rogue regimes, and a man who had supplied hundreds of millions of doses of painkillers to its citizens. If he failed to deliver, Team America would be the ones getting played.
* * *
—
While the agents in New York were recalibrating their plans for Le Roux, the yacht JeReVe was cruising across the Pacific with two hundred kilos of cocaine and the DEA’s tracker on board. Then, on October 5, the tracking signal died. The 960 group thought the two shipmates might have discovered it, while Bailey assumed a more conventional explanation: Its battery had drained, perhaps due to the extra days the boat had spent idling off the coast of Peru. Either way, somewhere north of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, the DEA lost the boat.
The 960 agents handling Le Roux had him make a call on the boat’s satellite phone, hoping to reestablish its location. “My car broke down,” the captain told him. “You have to send a car for me.” Then Le Roux called the captain’s wife, in Thailand, who told him, even more cryptically, that her husband had called her to say he had been “captured by the fish people.” The 960 agents suspected he was perhaps being held by pirates.
A massive hunt for the boat was soon under way. The DEA activated a system called the Pacific Transnational Crime Network, and authorities from the Cook Islands and Tonga were on the water, all looking for signs of the JeReVe. But a storm was brewing in the region, further reducing the already long odds of finding one forty-four-foot yacht in the vastness of the South Pacific.
On November 5, 2012, a pair of spear fishermen diving in southern Tonga spotted a yacht washed up on a shallow reef. The boat was lying on its side, saltwater lapping against its red hull and broken tiller. A tattered French flag fluttered from a small flagpole at the stern. Its name was written in golden script across the back of the hull: JeReVe.
One of the divers climbed onto the clean white deck of the ship, a Sun Odyssey 44, and made a grisly discovery. At the helm was the badly decomposed body of a man, much of it picked away by seagulls. The divers fled the ship, climbed into their own boat, motored to the nearby port of Neiafu, and called the local police.
Bad weather rolled in, and the authorities couldn’t return to the JeReVe for two days. When they did, a group of Tongan officers examined it. Inside the hull, they took an ax to the interior walls and found a pile of clear garbage bags filled with neatly wrapped brown plastic bricks. Each contained a kilo of cocaine. All told, the boat had been carrying 204 kilos, worth more than $90 million on the street in Australia, where authorities suspected the drugs had been headed. It was the largest drug haul ever confiscated in the South Pacific.
Tongan authorities identified the dead man as a thirty-five-year-old Slovakian named Milan Rindzak. They found several passports on the ship, along with several hundred American dollars, over a thousand dollars’ worth of Dominican pesos, and a handful of Polish zloty. At first the local police asserted that there was no foul play in Rindzak’s death, but following an autopsy, they amended their assessment to “cause of death inconclusive.” He had been dead for days, if not weeks.
No other body was ever located. For months afterward, the Tongan police tried to locate Rindzak’s next of kin in Slovakia, but were unable to track down anyone who would claim him. As for Ivan Vaclavic, the man the DEA knew had been on the boat, his fate remained uncertain. An investigation by several Slovakian news outlets would soon reveal that Vaclavic was a cover identity of a man named Maroš Deák, a Slovakian mobster who had disappeared from the country years earlier. (He was rumored to have been fleeing for his life; Deák’s brother was later shot dead back home.) In 2011, a man resembling Deák had been stopped in Phuket, Thailand, by local authorities. He was carrying a high-powered Bushmaster rifle that he said he’d bought in the Philippines, and a Thai marine captain’s license in Vaclavic’s name. Now he seemed to have disappeared with the JeReVe.
Bailey, remembering the call that Le Roux had been allowed to make to the boat, theorized that Vaclavic might have killed his fellow passenger, engineered a transfer off the boat, and left it to drift. “He had blunt-force trauma all over his head and body,” Bailey said of the dead man. “It could have been caused by the captain or the boat.” The former 960 group agent I spoke with was confident about a different theory, albeit one that seemed to me to contain an equal amount of conjecture: Vaclavic, he said, had been captured by pirates at sea. I suggested that if that were so, perhaps the pirates had later set him free. “Yeah, and I’m Santa Claus,” he said.
The Tongan authorities, for their part, seemed eager to put the mystery behind them and let the matter drop. They buried the sailor’s remains in a local cemetery overlooking the placid blue waters of a harbor called the Port of Refuge.
* * *
—
In Minneapolis, Bailey and Brill still had an ongoing case to confront. Even if they’d lost control of Le Roux himself, they continued to hold out hope of indicting him in Minnesota for his role as one of the biggest black-market painkiller importers in history. And there was the rest of the RX Limited network to dismantle. In October 2012, they flew in Le Roux’s cousin, Mathew Smith, along with two other Zimbabweans, to testify in front of a grand jury. Each of them identified photos of Le Roux, to verify that he was on the surveillance tapes and images in Brazil. They described the web of companies, like Wilex and Southern Ace, that they had been sent to Hong Kong and elsewhere to create. Afterward, the investigators took the witnesses to a Vikings-Titans football game.
Brill and Bailey had also coordinated with local DEA offices across the country to round up doctors and pharmacists who’d been some of the largest prescribers and suppliers in the network. Three RX Limited physicians, four affiliate website operators, and a pharmacist, arrested in New York and New Jersey, quickly entered guilty pleas. A housewife in Pennsylvania copped to forging a medical license and authorizing more than fifteen thousand prescriptions. She’d answered an ad for stay-at-home work on Craigslist. Babubhai Patel, the Detroit-area pharmacist captured on the wiretap, was brought in on unrelated charges of massive healthcare fraud.
But these were small targets, not the ones Brill and Bailey were most eager to arrest. They were after bigger fish like Moran Oz, Alon Berkman, and others higher up in the RX Limited chain of command. But arresting Le Roux’s lieutenants posed some of the same problems that capturing Le Roux himself had. Moran Oz, Alon Berkman, and Omer Bezalel were living in Israel, whose government might prove resistant to extradition. Most of the crimes they had supposedly committed weren’t crimes under Israeli law. Lachlan McConnell and Shai Reuven were both still in Manila, living under a Philippine government that had so far proven less than fully cooperative. To capture these guys, Brill and Bailey needed to lure them somewhere else. And to do that, they needed Le Roux.
The 960 group, however, was focused on putting Le Roux to work in their own sting operations against the likes of Joseph Hunter. They allowed him only enough communication with his RX Limited employees—and enough access to his bank accounts—to keep the network barely alive.
* * *
—
For Felix Klaussen, Le Roux’s arrest meant an abrupt and disorienting end to the project that had consumed his life. For nearly a year, he’d spent most of his waking moments thinking about how to convince Le Roux that he was bringing him the deal of a lifetime, constantly vigilant to any slipup that could expose the ruse. Now he spent weeks in a Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, video-chatting with his fiancée, idling while the Justice Department worked through their arrangement with Le Roux and determined whether they needed Klaussen as a witness. He was elated that it had all worked, but unsure how to feel about the deal Le Roux was striking, and where the story might go now that he had exited it.
