Former crime boss reveals the truths behind murders and arms smuggling

Paul Le Roux has been helping the American government round up his associates since 2012 in the hope of avoiding a life sentence

The South African businessman had illicit interests that spanned four continents (Shutterstock)

Paul Le Roux, one of the world’s least known but most prodigious criminals, emerged from the shadows this week and testified for the first time about the myriad illegal schemes he committed in his 20-year career on the wrong side of the law.

In a spellbinding two-day turn as a prosecution witness, Le Roux confessed to an astonishing array of crimes. He said he had once sold missile technology to Iran, shipped guns from Indonesia, and trafficked methamphetamine out of North Korea. He calmly told a jury in New York that he had taken part in at least five murders. With a businesslike demeanour, he admitted not only to arming a 200-man militia in Somalia but also to hatching plans to use mercenaries to overthrow the government of the Seychelles.

When a prosecutor asked what he had smuggled over the years, Le Roux responded without affect: “Cash, chemicals, drugs and gold.” He said that he had also smuggled weapons and when asked to whom, he answered: “Rebels, warlords, criminals — essentially anyone who had money.”

A South African businessman with illicit interests that spanned four continents, Le Roux recounted all of this at the murder conspiracy trial of three soldiers-of-fortune on his payroll who stand accused of killing a Filipino real estate agent in 2012. The agent, Catherine Lee, was shot in the face while taking two of the defendants, Adam Samia and Carl D. Stillwell, on a tour of properties near Manila, prosecutors say, after which her body was dumped on a pile of garbage. Joseph Hunter, the third defendant at the trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, New York, was charged with overseeing the assassination.

Silver-haired and hulking in his prison-issue shirt, Le Roux spoke about Lee in his first few moments on the stand, saying he had ordered her murder because he believed she had stolen from him. “I had her killed,” he said matter-of-factly, adding that Hunter handled the details and that Samia and “a partner” did the actual work.

The chilling testimony was part of Le Roux’s cooperation with the government. In late 2012, he was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration after being lured to Liberia. Ever since, Le Roux, 45, has been assisting the authorities in rounding up the members of his sprawling organisation in an effort to reduce a possible life sentence.

In 2013, he helped the DEA launch a sting operation in Thailand that led to Hunter’s first arrest and eventual sentence of 20 years in prison. In that case, the drug agency caught Hunter and three others agreeing to murder one of its agents and an informant. Because the charges included a plot to bring cocaine to New York, the case was handled by prosecutors in Manhattan. They are also handling Lee’s murder, claiming it evolved from the same investigation.

The trial so far has focused on the car bombs, arsons and assassinations that Le Roux employed to protect his smuggling routes — violence that was previewed so unnervingly in opening arguments on Tuesday that a juror told the judge she feared for her safety and was excused the following day.

The trial has also pulled back the veil on the covert world of mercenary work. Le Roux testified that he paid his guns-for-hire $5,000 to $10,000 a month, plus expenses. He said he paid an extra $25,000 for “bonus work,” which he described as “acts of killing and any other acts of violence.”

“The word ‘mercenary,'” he explained, “means a trained person with military experience and an aggressive posture who will beat, shoot, intimidate or kill anyone on instruction.”

On Wednesday afternoon, Le Roux said that for two years his chief mercenary was a man named David Smith who in 2008 formed a company called Echelon Associates to recruit what amounted to a private Praetorian guard. Its members traveled the globe — from Mozambique to Papua New Guinea — often using false passports and code names like Daddy Mac and Rambo to scout locations for Le Roux, watch his assets and maim or murder on his behalf.

Among those murdered was Smith, Le Roux admitted. He said he had his henchman killed in 2010 after finding out that Smith was cheating him. Le Roux subsequently named Hunter his security chief.

A former U.S. Army sergeant with Special Forces training, Hunter, 52, had served in the military and with two private security firms in Iraq. During the sting in Thailand, he was caught on camera boasting of the vicious acts he committed for Le Roux: how he waterboarded one man, shot a second in the hand and pitched a third — another suspected thief — overboard at sea.

On Thursday, Le Roux testified that after two men on his hit team — a gunman from New Zealand and a former member of the French Foreign Legion — quit their jobs, he instructed Hunter to replace them. Hunter, emails show, reached out to Samia, a onetime Army sniper, who lived near Stillwell, a firearms instructor, in the small town of Roxboro, North Carolina.

Flight records indicate that Samia, 43, and Stillwell, 50, flew to Manila in January 2011, where, Le Roux recalled, he supplied the men with a rifle (for long shots), a pistol (for close-range shots) and an MP5 submachine gun from a weapons warehouse he maintained. He also gave them Lee’s address.

One month later, Le Roux said, the two men followed the plan he had concocted: posing as real estate buyers, they lured Lee in a Toyota van into the countryside near Las Piñas. Stillwell later told the DEA that he was driving the van as Samia fired the pistol into Lee’s face.

In early March, Hunter drove both men to the airport and put them on a plane, Le Roux said. Three years later, the DEA tracked them down in Roxboro — with arrest warrants.

The New York Times