[imagesource:vice]

Back in 2016, Paul le Roux was called “the most dangerous man in the world”, and tales of his antics swept the internet.

Arming the Somalian militia, smuggling guns and drugs and gold as a “swashbuckling international criminal mastermind”, a yacht that washed ashore on the Pacific island of Tonga with $120 million worth of cocaine and a dead body onboard – he could probably tell a few stories around the campfire.

Now, in an excerpt from The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal by Evan Ratliff and covered on WIRED, more details about his life have emerged.

Here’s the intro, to whet the whistle:

How a brilliant self-made software programmer from South Africa single-handedly built an online startup that became one of the largest individual contributors to America’s burgeoning painkiller epidemic. In his world, everything was for sale. Pure methamphetamine manufactured in North Korea. Yachts built to outrun coast guards. Police protection and judges’ favor. Crates of military-grade weapons. Private jets full of gold. Missile-guidance systems. Unbreakable encryption. African militias.

Explosives. Kidnapping. Torture. Murder.

It’s a world that lurks just outside of our everyday perception, in the dark corners of the internet we never visit, the quiet ports where ships slip in by night, the back room of the clinic down the street.

The excerpt describes various clandestine meetings in great detail, which we’ll skip over for now, and focus on Ratliff’s amazement at what le Roux, who lived in Zimbabwe until moving to South Africa in his teens, has managed to pull off:

He would leverage that fortune into a sprawling criminal empire, fulfilling his seemingly insatiable appetite for the clandestine and the illegal. His ambition for wealth and power would slip the bonds of the Internet and enter the realm of flesh and blood. “The scope of his criminal conduct,” as one US federal prosecutor later put it, “is simply staggering.”

The full WIRED piece might take you 15-20 minutes to read, so you might want to bookmark it for lunch, or power through now while you pretend you’re ‘catching up on emails’.

Always nice to see a South African crack it big overseas, right?

Thanks, Marcus

[source:wired]