About this item
With a foreword by four-time Oscar nominated filmmaker Michael Mann.The story of Paul LeRoux, the twisted-genius entrepreneur and cold-blooded killer who brought revolutionary innovation to international crime, and the exclusive inside story of how the DEAs elite, secretive 960 Group brought him down.Paul LeRoux was born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. After a first career as a pioneering cybersecurity entrepreneur, he plunged hellbent into the dark side, using his extraordinary talents to develop a disruptive new business model for transnational organized crime. Along the way he created a mercenary force of ex-U.S. and NATO sharpshooters to carry out contract murders for his own pleasure and profit. The criminal empire he built was Cartel 4.0, utilizing the gig economy and the tools of the Digital Age: encrypted mobile devices, cloud sharing and novel money-laundering techniques. LeRouxs businesses, cyber-linked by his own dark worldwide web, stretched from Southeast Asia across the Middle East and Africa to Brazil; they generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of arms, drugs, chemicals, bombs, missile technology and murder. He dealt with rogue nations - Iran and North Korea - as well as the Chinese Triads, Somali pirates, Serb mafia, outlaw bikers, militants, corrupt African and Asian officials and coup-plotters.Initially, LeRoux appeared as a ghost image on law enforcement and intelligence radar, an inexplicable presence in the middle of a variety of criminal endeavors. He was Netflix to Blockbuster, Spotify to Tower Records. A bold disruptor, his methods brought international crime into the age of innovation, making his operations barely detectable and LeRoux nearly invisible. But he gained the attention of a small band of bold, unorthodox DEA agents, whose brief was tracking down drugs-and-arms trafficking kingpins who contributed to war and global instability. The 960 Group, an element of the DEAs Special Operations Division, had launched some of the most complex, coordinated and dangerous operations in the agencys history. They used unorthodox methods and undercover informants to penetrate LeRouxs inner circle and bring him down. For five years Elaine Shannon immersed herself in LeRouxs shadowy world. She gained exclusive access to the agents and players, including undercover operatives who looked LeRoux in the eye on a daily basis. Shannon takes us on a shocking tour of this dark frontier, going deep into the operations and the mind of a singularly visionary and frightening figure - Escobar and Victor Bout along with the innovative vision of Steve Jobs rolled into one. She puts you in the room with these people and their moment-to-moment encounters, jeopardy, frustration, anger and small victories, creating a narrative with a breath-taking edge, immediacy and a stranger-than-fiction reality.Remarkable, disturbing, and utterly engrossing, Hunting LeRouxintroduces a new breed of criminal spawned by the savage, greed-exalting underside of the Age of Innovation - and a new kind of true crime story. It is a look into the future - a future that is dark.
About the Author
Elaine Shannon was born in the Blue Ridge foothills of North Georgia, where folks made everything they needed, including excellent moonshine. After graduating from Vanderbilt U. in Nashville, she went to work for the Tennessean and covered, among other things, the moonshiners' move into coke and the original meth craze. She moved on to Washington, Harvard (as a Nieman fellow) , Newsday, Newsweek and, for two decades, Time Magazine, where she investigated the globalization of the drug trafficking industry, arms smugglers, transnational crime and terrorism -- among other things, the early years of Al Qaeda. She authored "Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, US Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win," published in 1988 by Viking-Penguin; "No Heroes -- Inside the FBI's Secret Counter-Terror Force," with Danny O. Coulson, published in 1999 by Pocket Books; and "The Spy Next Door -- The Extraordinary Secret Life of Robert Philip Hanssen, the Most Damaging FBI agent in US History," with Ann Blackman, published in January, 2002, by Little Brown. A New York Times best-seller, "Desperados" was the basis for Michael Mann's Emmy award-winning NBC miniseries, "Drug Wars: The Camarena Story" and the Emmy-nominated :Drug Wars: The Medellin Cartel." Elaine is now an independent journalist working on a book about drug lords who finance wars in the Middle East and South Asia,rogue regimes Iran and North Korea and other militants, mercenaries, warlords and bad actors. Her other passion is keeping the Blue Ridge and the rest of the wilderness thriving. She is editor-in-chief and publisher at the Environmental Working Group, an energy and environment non-profit investigative news group with an online audience of 1.6 million subscribers and 1 million online readers monthly. Her film credits include technical consulting on "The Kingdom" (2007) and "Public Enemy" (2008) . She and her husband Dan Morgan, a veteran Washington Post correspondent, spend their spare time traveling off the grid.
