Hunting LeRoux
The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire
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発行者による作品情報
With a foreword by four-time Oscar nominated filmmaker Michael Mann.
The story of Paul LeRoux, the twisted-genius entrepreneur and cold-blooded killer who brought revolutionary innovation to international crime, and the exclusive inside story of how the DEA’s elite, secretive 960 Group brought him down.
Paul LeRoux was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. After a first career as a pioneering cybersecurity entrepreneur, he plunged hellbent into the dark side, using his extraordinary talents to develop a disruptive new business model for transnational organized crime. Along the way he created a mercenary force of ex-U.S. and NATO sharpshooters to carry out contract murders for his own pleasure and profit. The criminal empire he built was Cartel 4.0, utilizing the gig economy and the tools of the Digital Age: encrypted mobile devices, cloud sharing and novel money-laundering techniques. LeRoux’s businesses, cyber-linked by his own dark worldwide web, stretched from Southeast Asia across the Middle East and Africa to Brazil; they generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of arms, drugs, chemicals, bombs, missile technology and murder. He dealt with rogue nations—Iran and North Korea—as well as the Chinese Triads, Somali pirates, Serb mafia, outlaw bikers, militants, corrupt African and Asian officials and coup-plotters.
Initially, LeRoux appeared as a ghost image on law enforcement and intelligence radar, an inexplicable presence in the middle of a variety of criminal endeavors. He was Netflix to Blockbuster, Spotify to Tower Records. A bold disruptor, his methods brought international crime into the age of innovation, making his operations barely detectable and LeRoux nearly invisible. But he gained the attention of a small band of bold, unorthodox DEA agents, whose brief was tracking down drugs-and-arms trafficking kingpins who contributed to war and global instability. The 960 Group, an element of the DEA’s Special Operations Division, had launched some of the most complex, coordinated and dangerous operations in the agency’s history. They used unorthodox methods and undercover informants to penetrate LeRoux’s inner circle and bring him down.
For five years Elaine Shannon immersed herself in LeRoux’s shadowy world. She gained exclusive access to the agents and players, including undercover operatives who looked LeRoux in the eye on a daily basis. Shannon takes us on a shocking tour of this dark frontier, going deep into the operations and the mind of a singularly visionary and frightening figure—Escobar and Victor Bout along with the innovative vision of Steve Jobs rolled into one. She puts you in the room with these people and their moment-to-moment encounters, jeopardy, frustration, anger and small victories, creating a narrative with a breath-taking edge, immediacy and a stranger-than-fiction reality.
Remarkable, disturbing, and utterly engrossing, Hunting LeRoux introduces a new breed of criminal spawned by the savage, greed-exalting underside of the Age of Innovation—and a new kind of true crime story. It is a look into the future—a future that is dark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Shannon (The Spy Next Door) delivers an exceptional account of the outlaw career of Paul LeRoux, who here emerges as perhaps the most significant contemporary criminal not known to the general public for his having "introduced the principles of twenty-first century entrepreneurship to the dark side of the global economy." LeRoux, who grew up in South Africa, used his sophisticated computer skills to create an online pharmaceutical business in 2004 that yielded him millions. Carefully constructed to appear on the up-and-up, RX Limited linked pill-buying consumers with a network of physicians and pharmacies, randomly assigning repeat customers to different providers to allow them to make as many purchases as they wanted without raising any red flags. LeRoux moved on to create a "digitally powered, high-volume warehousing and delivery operation for drugs and arms" or, put another way, a "black-market Amazon." Unlike Evan Ratliff's recent book on LeRoux, The Mastermind, which focuses on the lower-level DEA investigators who first found evidence that RX Limited was a criminal scheme, Shannon starts with the DEA's 960 Group, an elite unit of undercover agents whose efforts led to LeRoux's arrest in 2012. True crime fans will want to read both to get the full story.
