Cape Town - He established hothouses in lawless Somalia, protecting them with a private militia to grow opium poppies, cocaine and other narcotic substances under scientifically controlled conditions.
He went to North Korea to source industrial quantities of crystal methamphetamine - which would then be swopped for South American cocaine.
He operated a prescription medicines scam that turned over an estimated $300 million a year in the grey areas of the law.
He wrote a computer encryption programme that provided the platform for an encryption that continues to be used by Islamic jihadists and which has not been cracked by US law enforcement (see sidebar). He was linked in passing to at least seven murders and, towards the end of his career as a master criminal, operated a hits-for-hire business using former special forces soldiers and Iraq veterans as operatives.
It is not an exaggeration to say that, over the past half-decade, Zimbabwean-born South African-Australian citizen Paul Calder le Roux has popped up like a malign algorithm on news and media screens. But his odd and baleful presence has been evident only in glimpses.
Last month that began to change - after American journalist Evan Ratliff published the first of what was to be a seven-part series of articles in a “long-form” investigation into the life and crimes of Le Roux.
The project has been two years in the making and appears on the website of The Atavist Magazine, co-founded by Ratliff, who is also its chief executive officer.
Four parts have been released, with the fifth expected the week after next.
Shortly after the start of Ratliff’s series, The Australian newspaper began publishing a series of articles and trawling much the same territory, although in less detail.
What has emerged, and from bits and pieces carried elsewhere, is a picture of a villain more contemporary maybe than any fiction has yet invented - a Richard Branson or Elon Musk on the dark side.
Le Roux first appeared on the radar when he was named in 2011 by the UN’s Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group as constituting a threat to peace in the war-torn failed state of Somalia.
As reported by the UN, Le Roux had assembled and illegally armed a militia in the badlands of Somalia, in part as a private army for his Somali warlord partners, but also to protect hothouses where he planned to grow narcotic plants, among them opium poppies to be turned into heroin.
But, as later became apparent, the Somali adventure was far from Le Roux’s first engagement on the wrong side of the law. In the first decade of the new millennium, he ran a huge prescription medicines scam in which instant prescriptions were provided by registered doctors and scheduled medicines dispatched by registered pharmacies.
As has been established from debriefings of former employees and associates by journalists and law enforcement, he was also diversifying: buying and selling black market gold and conflict diamonds, looking to secure resources contracts from assorted developing world strongmen, dealing in illegal weapons, and trafficking in narcotic drugs.
As early as 2009, a consignment of Indonesian-manufactured assault rifles and ammunition was seized by authorities in the Philippines and traced back to Le Roux.
After the captain of the boat on which the weapons were found was murdered, the case against Le Roux - like several others - fell apart.
Then, in 2012, Le Roux overreached when he entered into a drug deal with undercover agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), posing as members of a Columbian cocaine syndicate. Le Roux was to source crystal meth (tik) from North Korea and in exchange receive South American cocaine for distribution, particularly in Australia.
When he was bust, as Ratliff reports it, Le Roux, after an initial panic, shrugged, admitted it was a fair cop, and offered his services to law enforcement henceforth. This led in 2014 to an entrapment operation on Le Roux’s one-time close associate, former US Army sniper Joe Hunter, in which Le Roux - acting undercover for the DEA - contracted Hunter to assemble a hit squad to take out a target who was in fact an agent of the DEA.
0 comments:
Post a Comment