Evan Ratliff spent over four years writing and reporting The Mastermind: Drugs, Empire, Murder, Betrayal (Random House). It’s the incredible true story of criminal mastermind Paul Calder La Roux, who began his criminal career with a host of sites selling gray-market drugs to Americans using American doctors and pharmacists to fulfill the orders. The beginning of his downfall was in using the same Fed Ex account to send the drugs to customers. But once the DEA starts to investigate him, what they find is astounding. Eventually they catch La Roux through a sting operation which involved a complex deal between La Roux, a Colombian cartel, a shipment of meth originally from North Korea which he moves to Liberia, and plenty of bribes of government officials. Operating his empire from the Philippines, La Roux was involved in everything from murder for hire to setting up fake fisheries in Somalia. I spoke to Ratliff in a mutually inconvenient Brooklyn café, where he talked about the mysteries of the brilliant and reclusive La Roux, an ambitious tech guy gone very wrong.
Lisa Levy: How did you find out about this case?
Evan Ratliff: It was in the news when one of the guys, Joseph Hunter—he’s a Rambo type—was arrested. There was such a detailed backstory story it was insane. He was arrested for agreeing to kill a DEA agent. I spent a little bit of time on it, doing some reporting. Nothing else came out, and I kept just scratching at it over time.
There was a big mystery: there was some individual involved and it was not clear who that person was. And then the name Paul Le Roux leaked in 2014. That was where I got completely hooked on it, because Paul Le Roux really was at the intersection of my interests. He was this mysterious, criminal overlord who had built his own cartel, but he had done it via the internet, and nobody could really figure out what his story was or how this happened, and how he did it without anyone knowing and being able to find out anything about him. The mystery of him was the thing that drove me.
The book is really about a tech guy who goes totally insane and commits amazing crimes on the internet.
Yeah, if you took away the end point of what he was doing and just looked at what he built, it would be exactly like building a start-up, and people who do that are lauded all the time on the covers of magazines.
He did everything he was supposed to do. He scaled up, he got his cash flow to where he needed it to be, he started expanding.
He disrupted a market that was ripe for disruption—
Several markets. Most entrepreneurs should be so lucky to build the kind of empire he built.
And he diversified.
He was the only one who knew everything.
Yes. He never had anyone who he thought was smart enough to run it with him. So it really all lived inside his head.
Could you summarize the Le Roux empire, and how it was built?
I refer to him sometimes as the most prolific criminal in history. He didn’t make billions of dollars like El Chapo, although some people who worked for him thought he was a billionaire. His criminal empire started as this online pharmaceutical company. His original business was selling painkillers over the internet to American customers. The genius part of it was that he’s using American doctors, and American pharmacists to do it for him; recruiting them into a network, and then sending them customers. He was able to have all of the retail action happen within the borders of the United States while he was operating from the Philippines. He made hundreds of millions of dollars, and distributed hundreds of millions of doses of painkillers to Americans through just that.
Perhaps the most unusual thing about him is that he decided from that point to diversify into real world crime. Non-internet crime. Which included arms dealing, drug dealing, drug trafficking, cocaine, methamphetamine, selling weapons technology to Iran, laundering money in all variety of ways including gold. Buying and selling gold in Africa—
The description of the gold bars is just… it’s a truly crazy person who wants to keep their money in gold bars.
He loved keeping it in gold. Burying the gold all over the place. Buying gold in Hong Kong and shipping it in by crates to the Philippines.
It ends up being such alphabet soup of agencies going after him. It started with the DEA investigation in Minneapolis, right?
Yes. Basically, the entire investigation originated with one woman, Kimberly Brill, who’s an investigator in Minneapolis, and her partner Steven Holdren. The two of them figured out that one of the pharmacists who got busted was using a Fed Ex account, and they subpoenaed that account which showed that there were dozens of pharmacies on the same account. And that was the first string that was ever pulled on Paul La Roux.
Now the way it actually unraveled took years because of the way he’d set it up. There were so many people all over the world, it was just hard to get a grip on. They eventually figured out that Le Roux was the person at the top of it all. Then the question was how to catch him. After five years of chasing him, he finally moved to Brazil from the Philippines. They were every close to catching him and then another part of the DEA called the 960 group came in to orchestrate the arrest of Le Roux. They set up a sting operation with a guy who was an insider to lure him into this trap.
So really it was these two parts of the DEA working together, although they did not eventually seem like they were working together. They had clashed and continue to this day to clash over who should get credit for Le Roux when in fact all of them worked together to capture him. There were also agencies all over the world chasing him at different points. It touched the FBI, the CIA, the British police, and then of course the Filipino authorities who had a very conflicted role in all of it.
How do you think La Roux went from being a programmer interested in encryption to building this criminal empire?
I wouldn’t say there was a definitive, rosebud type reason why he did that. Clearly part of the reason was that he wrote this encryption software, and then made it open source, and gave it away and didn’t make any money on it. Then there was an effort to commercialize it, and that didn’t go well. So he was very frustrated with not making any money, and seeing other people in the tech world making a lot of money. That was really probably his motivation.
Can you talk about the deal that brought him down?
“He had always wanted to work with the Colombians. He was very enamored by the Colombians, and so it felt like this perfectly aligned to his desires.”This guy showed up with a Columbian cartel that wanted to start manufacturing meth in Liberia so they could get into both European and American markets. There is a drug trade in West Africa so it made sense. As part of the original deal [the Colombians] were going to pay Le Roux to help them set up their labs. But also, Le Roux had a large stock of meth that he had purchased out of North Korea and they were going to trade cocaine for meth. That was the contour of the deal, but it also offered this promise of working with this Columbian cartel. He had always wanted to work with the Colombians. He was very enamored by the Colombians, and so it felt like this perfectly aligned to his desires.
Did his employees just think they’re working for a big internet corporation, and they didn’t know the management structure but that’s not that strange?
Exactly. It was all very compartmentalized. Even in the illegal businesses that was definitely true. All the hundreds of people who worked for Paul did not know the name Paul Le Roux. People were silos in their particular endeavors.
Do you think you got too involved with the story at any point? Or was the only way to tell the story to get involved in it?
I feel like the only way to really do it was to get out there and find people. There’s a version of this type of story that’s like cops and robbers. We know that story. What interested me was actually that all of the people entered this universe in different ways, and why they did so, and what it meant to them. And what we would think when we look at moral choices that they made. That’s the part that resonates with me, so I wanted to find as many people that had worked for him, which was thousands of people.
I also talked to the investigators on all sides and eventually was in contact with everyone, but the problem with that was Paul Le Roux himself was being kept secret through most of this, and information about him was being kept secret to where only the U.S. government knew. Everywhere I went people wanted to know something from me also, which is not usual. People asked, “What do you know about what he did to this person, or this person, or do you know if this person’s alive?’ And I’d say, ” Oh no, I heard that person’s dead.”
There’s so many outrageous parts of this story. What are some of your favorites?
I’m oddly obsessed with this whale trainer. It’s a trivial part of the book, but it illustrates how when I started getting into it, every little road you go down just leads to some other bit of weirdness. He was a guy who wanted to build a water park with dolphins and whales and stuff. He trained Free Willy, from the movie. He hired a guy for security who actually ended up once working for Le Roux and was connected to murders. I thought well I’ll go ask this whale trainer guy what he remembers about the security guy and then I find out that guy’s a fugitive for some other reason. It’s a fraud. There was a lot of that.
“[H]e wanted to invade the Seychelles and take over the government. It sounded so crazy when someone told me but then it’s been confirmed to me by multiple people…The dream was to have a kingdom.”But what was actually happening on the ground was just madness. There’s hiring militias, like hundreds of militia mandates with heavy weapons and setting up their own compound. Then it gets to where he wanted to grow drugs. He wants to kidnap people and get ransom money. And then one of the many of these wild things is he wanted to invade the Seychelles and take over the government. It sounded so crazy when someone told me but then it’s been confirmed to me by multiple people to me that plan actually existed and they went and scouted it out in the Seychelles. The dream was to have a kingdom.
When you interviewed Le Roux’s associates were they afraid of him?
Yes.
Do a lot of them still feel like something could happen?
Yes, they do. I think less so now that the book is out. But there are definitely people who think that he will come after them, like he has a list. At the time that he was arrested he was going down this list of people that he was going to assassinate. There’s no question that he is and was full of vengeance. So they have good reason to be afraid.
Where is Le Roux now?
As far as I know he’s in a facility in New York City. There’s a date for a sentencing for March. He’ll probably be sentenced sometime this year if there’s no strange delay.
And what did they finally get him on?
They arrested him in Liberia for intent to move meth to the United States, because when they set up the sting they told him that [the meth was] going to New York. You don’t even have to distribute real meth in the United States, you just have to have intent to do it. So they had him for that, and he cooperated. Ultimately what they charged him with in his plea deal was that, selling weapons technology to Iran, bribing a government official, which was a weird thing where he bribed an official in I think Tanzania to keep a guy from being extradited to the United States. He’s bribed hundreds of officials around the world. This one happened to be to prevent extradition of someone to the U.S. so they got to charge it in the U.S. There was some fraud and money laundering stuff, and one prescription drug thing. The things he was not charged with are any violent murders or drug trafficking. But those things will be made known to the judge.
Did you ever fear for yourself and your own safety when you were doing this?
Couple times. For the most part, no. Because even the people who were involved, who were at some point dangerous, by the time I’m showing up to talk to them, there’s not really much advantage in them doing anything to me.
Sure.
Mostly they wanted information from me. They wanted to know how I knew they were involved, or they wanted to tell me about their involvement as well.
Nothing people like as much as talking about themselves.
Yeah. I mean you would think that people would want to hide their involvement in an actual criminal investigation, but they think they’re never going to get caught. They want credit for it. “He wasn’t in charge, he almost never met with Le Roux, I met with Le Roux all the time!” People again, even now, say, “You said this guy was close to Le Roux, I was much closer to him, and you didn’t put me in your book.”
