Mann Michael - Hunting Leroux: The Inside Story of the Dea Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire

WERE SITTING IN A GULFSTREAM II, STARING AT A STEROID-POPPED, MUSCLE -bound exNATO sniper in handcuffs. He looks out the window. We lift off from Monrovia, Liberia. That look of ennui on his face decays into self-pity, because he knows hes bound for long-term incarceration in the United States. He hasnt uttered a word about the irony. He and his partner, Tim Vamvakias, a former U.S. Army military policeman, flew from Phuket, Thailand, to murder a Libyan sea captain and drug transporter turned informant and the DEA agent for whom he worked. The Libyan informant has just arrested him. The targets were a setup. So were the coordinators who supplied staged surveillance photos of the targets, a daily log of their movements, the opportune kill spot, and the French mercenary in charge of their West African transportation and the supplier of silenced .22 caliber pistols and Heckler & Koch MP7s.

On that Gulfstream, the man opposite Dennis Ggel, the hired killer, is Taj. Taj is a superstar undercover DEA agent, working with the agencys elite and secretive 960 Group. Taj and the groups boss, Lou Milione, staged themselves as targets. Another pair of mercenaries just as dangerous as Ggel and Vamvakias have been arrested simultaneously in Tallinn, Estonia. Yet another team of killers, including their leader, Joseph Rambo Huntera retired US Army sniper traineris being apprehended at this very moment in Phuket. We have been dropped inside a complex operation in which five separate undercover stings, involving three different nations police forces in different parts of the world, all needed to be synchronized to conclude with arrestssimultaneously. That was so that none of LeRouxs teams could alert any of the others.

Elaine Shannons Hunting LeRoux delivers us into close proximity to dangerous people in the most ungoverned places on the planet. The moment-to-moment, heartbeat-to-heartbeat suspense of the five takedowns pervades many sections of Shannons book. Fiction would be hard pressed to match the tension and color and the new dimensions of criminality revealed here. There is nothing else quite like it. Its authenticity is based on her knowledge of federal and transnational law enforcement, criminal enterprises, and the trust of her sources, who are exclusive to her.

It, simply, is better than most crime stories people can make up. Shannon has the magical ability to write from inside the flow of actual events, making them come alive. You know its real, and you are there.

Reading Shannons partial manuscript almost two years ago, I felt I had never been taken inside an organized criminal empire within day-to-day proximity of its lethal and brilliant entrepreneur with such specificity. The atmosphere of danger and continual scrutiny is tangible. Its as if were captive in a series called Lifestyles of the Rich and Malevolent.

Equally, the manuscript parachutes us into the lives of Tom Cindric and Eric Stouch, the two agents in the DEAs secretive 960 Group, who initiated and are the protagonists driving the mainstream investigation into LeRoux. Across continents and time zones, in dark motel rooms and in dangerous countries, we are with law enforcements most major-league big-game hunters.

The revelation at the center of this true-crime saga is Paul Calder LeRoux and the transformation he innovated. LeRoux is a cybertech genius turned crime lordcommitting cold-blooded murders along the way. He created a revolution in how transnational organized crime organized itself. LeRoux deconstructed the conventional ways even sophisticated drug cartels or arms merchants operated. They still had farm-to-the-arm, vertically integrated business models often locking them to physical locales. Infrastructure and personnel hierarchies made them vulnerable, visible, and out-of-date to LeRoux. He deconstructed that model and created something completely different. His criminal enterpriseslinked by a dark web of his own inventionwere like a cutting-edge Silicon Valley start-up, using the gig economy, pivoting quickly off failed ideas, capable of rapid scalability, and climbing a hockey-stick curve of success.

Heand those who have followedtraffic in advanced weapons systems, tonnages of drugs, and exotic fissile materials, and engage in money laundering. They corrupt struggling small countries into failed nation-states to provide transport hubs and service regional conflicts. This new worlds innovator and its architect is Paul Calder LeRoux.

Early on, the 960 Group came to the realization that LeRoux was the Elon Musk, the Jeff Bezos of transnational organized crime. They believe LeRoux is the new now as well as the near future.

Many in LeRouxs presence describe his lethal aura of brilliance, deviance, and sociopathy.

As a dramatist, it is this additional quality of Hunting LeRoux that appeals to me, perhaps even more compellingly than its revelations. That is, our proximity. We are there. We are brought there because people trust Elaine Shannon. She has a reputation among intelligence agencies and top-echelon law enforcement as a highly respected journalist who courageously goes where the story is, never betrays confidences, and gets it right. Their confidence in her, their openness, and the acuity of her insightplus her irony and charmis why the book has its unique ambiance and close-up engagement.

The agents driving the investigationCindric and Stouch; their bosses, Lou Milione and Derek Maltz; the undercover DEA agent Tajshare their first-person perspectives, diaries, memos, documents, personal feelings, intuitions, suspicions, fears, and, sometimes, triumphs with Shannon. Their perspectives are woven into the compelling fabric of this narrative.

So, too, is the perspective of Jack, the man LeRoux calls his golden boy. Through the eyes of Jack, we are taken into LeRouxs strangely empty, twin luxury Manila penthouses and read his body language and experience the brainstorm-a-minute outbursts of this blond three-hundred-fifty-pounder. Were flattered by his seductive speech and feel the danger of his MRI-like stare. Threat is redolent in the heat and humidity.