The mastermind, p.1
The Mastermind, page 1
Copyright © 2019 by Evan Ratliff
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Portions of this work were originally published in different form in The Atavist Magazine (magazine.atavist.com).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ratliff, Evan, author.
Title: The mastermind: drugs, empire, murder, betrayal / by Evan Ratliff.
Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035751 | ISBN 9780399590412 | ISBN 9780399590429 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Le Roux, Paul Calder. | Criminals—Biography. | Drug traffic.
Classification: LCC HV6248.L343 R37 2019 | DDC 364.1092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2018035751
Ebook ISBN 9780399590429
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Carlos Beltrán
v5.4
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Cast of Characters
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part I: Openings
Chapter 1: The Investigators
Chapter 2: The Pharmacist · the Doctor
Chapter 3: The Reporter
Chapter 4: The Operators
Chapter 5: The Investigators
Chapter 6: The Mercenaries
Chapter 7: The Mastermind
Chapter 8: The Reporter
Chapter 9: The Operators
Part II: Pawns and Kings
Chapter 10: The Investigators
Chapter 11: The Mercenaries
Chapter 12: The Doctor · the Pharmacist
Chapter 13: The Operators
Chapter 14: The Reporter
Chapter 15: The Ship
Chapter 16: The Mercenaries
Chapter 17: The Investigators
Chapter 18: The Reporter
Chapter 19: The Mercenaries · the Operators
Chapter 20: The Investigators
Chapter 21: The Pharmacist · the Doctor
Chapter 22: The Mercenaries
Part III: Endgame
Chapter 23: The Mastermind
Chapter 24: The Investigators
Chapter 25: The Mole
Chapter 26: The Investigators
Chapter 27: The Mole
Chapter 28: The Investigators
Chapter 29: The Stings
Chapter 30: The Investigators · the Operators · the Pharmacist · the Mercenaries · the Reporter
Chapter 31: The Mastermind
Chapter 32: The Trial
Chapter 33: The Investigators · the Reporter · the Mole
Epilogue
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.
CORMAC MCCARTHY, No Country for Old Men
Cast of Characters
THE MASTERMIND
Paul Calder Le Roux
THE INVESTIGATORS
Kimberly Brill, Steven Holdren, Kent Bailey (DEA)
With: Rizaldy Rivera, Peter Lugay, and Inspector R (Philippines); Thomas Cindric and Eric Stouch (DEA)
THE OPERATORS
Moran Oz, Alon Berkman
With: Boaz and Tomer Taggart, Levi Kugel, Yehuda Ben-Dor, Shai Reuven, Robert McGowan, Asaf Shoshana, Nestor Del Rosario, Omer Bezalel, Babubhai Patel
THE PHARMACIST
Charles Schultz
THE DOCTOR
Prabhakara Tumpati
THE MERCENARIES
Lachlan McConnell, Dave Smith, Felix Klaussen, Joseph Hunter
With: Chris De Meyer, Marcus, Scott Stammers, Tim Vamvakias, Mathew Smith, Patrick Donovan, Andrew and Steve Hahn, Adam Samia, Bruce Jones, John Nash, Doron Shulman, Philip Shackels, David Stillwell
THE CONNECTORS
Patrick Donovan, Ari Ben-Menashe
THE ATTORNEYS
Joe Friedberg and Robert Richman (Moran Oz defense), Linda Marks (U.S. Department of Justice), Joe Frank Zuñiga (Philippines)
Author’s Note
This book is a work of nonfiction. It is based on more than four years of reporting, including hundreds of interviews, hundreds of thousands of pages of law enforcement reports, government databases, court documents, and internal communications from a criminal organization that involved thousands of people and conducted business on six continents. I have worked to corroborate every fact found in these pages, and to speak with as many participants as possible. Unfortunately, I couldn’t speak to them all. Some are dead, murdered because of what they knew. Others declined to talk to me, out of a fear that they might meet the same fate. Still others are in prison and desperate to avoid the perception that they have turned on their compatriots. A few are in hiding, running from prosecution or vengeance, real or imagined.
But dozens of the people involved did share their stories with me, at risk of physical danger, legal jeopardy, or professional consequences. In three cases, specified in the source notes, I have altered subjects’ names. I did so because they feared for their safety and that of their families, because they were never prosecuted for the crimes described here, and because their names didn’t appear in legal proceedings connected to these events. In other instances I have described certain minor players, including some law enforcement officials or family members, only by their job descriptions or connections to more principal figures.
Every individual in this book is real. The events they describe happened.
Prologue
2012…The puzzle
MONROVIA, LIBERIA
September 26, 2012
On a gray afternoon, three men enter a drab hotel room for a business meeting, months in the making. Two are white: a portly South African and his muscled European deputy. The other, with dark hair and a paunch of his own, is Latino—Colombian, or so he says. The hotel is in the Liberian capital, abutting the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of West Africa, but it could be any number of places in the world. The men’s business is drugs and weapons, and drugs and weapons are everywhere. They shake hands, nod heads, and begin speaking in the elliptical but familiar way of people who share the vernacular of a trade. They are cautious, but not cautious enough. A video exists to prove it.
“I can see why you picked this place,” says the South African, settling his substantial bulk into a maroon leather couch pressed against the wall. “Because it’s chaotic. It should be easy to move in and out, from what I’ve seen.” His name is Paul, and to a trained ear his cadence carries a tinge of not just South Africa but his childhood home, Zimbabwe, where he lived until his teens. His large white head is shaved close, and what hair remains has gone gray as he approaches forty. He has the look of a beach vacationer cleaned up for a dinner out, in an oversize blue polo shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. His clothes seem out of keeping with both the scope of his international influence and the deal he is about to complete, with a man he believes to be the head of a South American drug cartel.
“Very easy,” replies the Colombian, whom Paul refers to only as Pepe. In the video recording of the meeting, Pepe sits down just offscreen, on a matching couch. His disembodied voice speaks in flawless, if heavily accented, English.
“Very few people, not too many eyes. It looks like the right place.”
“Trust me—what’s your name again?”
“Paul.”
“Paul, trust me, it’s the right place. I’ve been here already for quite a bit of time. And always, me and my organization, we pick places like this. First of all, for corruption. You can buy anything you want here. Anything. You just tell me what you need.”
“Yeah, it’s safe here,” Paul says. “If there’s a problem here, you can fix it. I understand this type of place.”
“Everything is easy here. Just hand to hand, boom boom boom, you can see,” Pepe says, laughing. “Well, thanks to your guy here, now we are meeting.” He gestures at the third man in the room, the European employee of Paul’s who goes by the name Jack. It was Jack who made the initial connection between Paul and Pepe.
The deal Jack brokered was complex enough that, when I meet him years later, I need him to walk me through it several times. The Colombians, who deal primarily in the cocaine produced in their own country, are looking to expand into methamphetamine, which they want to manufacture in Liberia and distribute to the United States and Europe. Paul, a computer programmer who heads his own kind of cartel based in the Philippines, will provide t
After months of back-and-forth, Jack has urged Paul to travel to Liberia and meet his new associate “boss to boss” to finalize the deal.
“So where do you want to start?” Pepe says. “First of all is the clean room.”
Paul tells him that the parts needed to build it are already en route by boat. “If you have any problem, I’ll send guys here to assemble it like that.” He snaps his fingers.
“We shouldn’t have any. I got my guys here, my chemist.”
“To compensate you for the delays, we will just, when we do business, we will give you back the money.”
“Paul, you don’t have to compensate me for nothing.”
Paul flicks his hand in the air. “We feel bad it took so long.”
“This is just business,” Pepe says. “We don’t have to compensate, just doing business. This is about money.”
Pepe turns to the second part of the deal: the trade of his Colombian cocaine for Paul’s methamphetamine, a sample of which Paul has shipped to him from his base in the Philippines. “Let me ask you a question,” Pepe says.
“Sure.”
“You are not Filipino, why the Philippines?”
“Same reason you are in Liberia. Basically, as far as Asia goes, it’s the best shithole we can find, which gives us the ability to ship anywhere. It’s the best position in Asia. And it’s also a poor place. Not as bad as here, but we can still solve problems.”
“You are cooking your shit in the Philippines?” Pepe says.
“Actually, right now we manufacture in the Philippines and we also buy from the Chinese. We’re getting it from North Korea. So the quality you saw was very high.”
“That’s not just very high. That is awesome.”
“Yeah.”
“I was going to tell you that later on, but now that you talk about it: That stuff is fucking incredible.”
“That is manufactured by the North Koreans,” Paul says. “We get it from the Chinese, who get it from the North Koreans.”
“So my product is going to be the same, the amount that I’m going to buy from you?”
“The same. Exactly the same.” Paul nods. “I know you want the high quality for your market.”
“Yeah, because the product—you know that one of the best customers, and you probably know that, is the Americans.”
“Number one.”
“It’s the number one. They are fucking—they want everything over there. I don’t know what the word is from Spanish. Consumistas? Consumists?”
“Consumers,” Jack interjects, off-camera.
“Yeah, they buy everything and they never stop,” Paul says.
“So everything that I ship is to America,” Pepe says. “Trust me, when I brought this, fucking everyone was asking me for it. Everyone.”
Paul and Pepe consider different payment possibilities. First they will trade the cocaine for meth. After that, Paul says that he is happy to be paid in gold or diamonds. If they need to conduct bank transfers, he works primarily through China and Hong Kong, although he sounds a note of caution. “We just had, in Hong Kong, twenty million dollars frozen, by bullshit,” he says. “You need to be cautious. It becomes worse, because the American, he likes to control everything. And they are there, making a lot of trouble.”
“I say fuck Americans,” Pepe says. “Americans, like you say, they think that they can control everything, but they cannot. It’s not impossible, but they cannot. We have to be very careful.”
They discuss shipment methods, and how many kilos of each drug the other could move in a month. Paul owns ships already picking up loads in South America and traveling to Asia, but he much prefers to work in Africa, territory he knows well. His customers are in Australia, Thailand, China. “We are not touching the U.S. right now,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Actually we move pills in the U.S.,” Paul says. “These American fucks, they have an appetite for everything. They will just spend and spend and spend.” Indeed, Paul has gotten rich, fabulously rich, by selling tens of millions of prescription painkillers to Americans over the Internet for nearly a decade. But unlike Pepe’s organization, Paul carefully avoids shipping street drugs like meth to the States. “It generates too much heat,” he says.
As the meeting winds down, Paul flashes a hint of his technical prowess, offering to send Pepe mobile phones that he has set up with encryption software to allow the two organizations to communicate securely. He tells Pepe he can get him any weapons he needs out of Iran, particularly if a Liberian general can be produced to make the transaction look official. Then he pauses to reflect. “I can tell you, you won’t find a better partner,” he says. He is a man, he explains, who keeps his organization in line. “One thing I tell all the guys, okay, everyone I deal with: Just don’t fucking steal. You know what I’m saying? That’s the one thing that pisses me off.” Earlier he described an employee who stole five million dollars from him, then began driving a Lamborghini around Manila, buying his girlfriends designer handbags and diamond necklaces. The employee was no longer a problem, he said. “He’s moved on, let’s put it that way.”
Now Paul has more management advice. “Don’t steal,” he repeats, “and don’t fucking run your mouth to the government. You get caught doing anything, remember: You keep your mouth shut. You’ve got some guys—I’m sure you’ve had this: They come like this”—he makes a motion as if operating a jabbering puppet—“they get afraid in jail and then they think that the government is going to help them. They think the government is their best friend. I’m sure you’ve seen this, right?”
“That is only in movies,” Pepe says.
“They are running their fucking mouth like this. What’s going to happen when you get out, you make the deal? You think we’re going to forget about you?” He slaps his hands together. “You have a problem, we help you. Your family has a problem, we help them. Nobody has a problem. Just follow these rules, we are very straight on that. So I tell you, we do business, you trust me one hundred percent. We will deliver for you. One hundred percent.”
“This is a trust deal,” Pepe says, before the three men stand up to shake hands. “That’s exactly what we are going to do.”
* * *
—
In the months before and after Paul and Pepe’s meeting, a series of strange events occurred in disparate parts of the globe, events that appeared unrelated. I say “appeared” as if anyone on the outside was observing them at all. At the time no one was, including me. Even if anyone had been, none of these incidents appeared tied to any other as they filtered into public view. Like a handful of random jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each one was incomprehensible without an understanding of the larger picture. It would be a year before I picked up even one of those pieces to examine it, and several more before I began to understand the image that the whole collection of them combined to reveal.
In March 2012, six months before Paul and Pepe’s meeting in Liberia, agents from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration walked through the glass doors of a small pharmacy on Main Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. They were armed with search warrants targeting its eighty-two-year-old owner, Charles Schultz. A pillar of the local community for four decades, Schultz had been charged with shipping more than 700,000 illegal painkiller prescriptions from the back of his two local pharmacies. In return, the agents calculated, he had received over $27 million in wire transfers from a mysterious Hong Kong bank account.
