In this sprawling epic, investigative journalist Evan Ratliff sets himself a monumental task: to use the results of a decade long investigation into a continent spanning criminal organization in order to paint a picture of the mysterious figure at the center of everything, Paul Le Roux. It’s easy to see why Ratliff is fascinated with Le Roux, who he dubs a “new kind of crime lord.” Le Roux is physically unassuming, a perpetual schlub, not to say slob. But he’s also a technical genius, using the internet and his vast knowledge of networks and online security to connect everyone from small town pharmacists in the American heartland to naïve medical students in intense schools to murderous hitmen in the Philippines to cold-blooded drug runners in South America in a web of barely legal prescription drug pedaling. Things don’t stay on the “barely” side of legal for long, however, and Le Roux also boasts a truly profound sociopathy; at one point he muses to a compatriot that he doesn’t understand why more people aren’t just murdered since it’s a simple and relatively cheap way to solve a problem. As one would expect, the body count rises and before the book is over, Le Roux is dabbling in everything from attempted government coups, daring daylight assassinations, kidnapping, torture and, in one of the books strangest sections, a bizarre scheme to hold extradition proof citizenship in a multitude of countries by fathering children all over the globe. The book is often suspenseful and thrilling as in a lengthy section involving the murder of a real estate agent in the Philippines and Ratliff has several characters from Le Roux’s organization that he follows over long periods of their time working for him; it goes without saying that the names are all changed as just about everyone Ratliff talks to indicates that they’re basically still afraid of Le Roux and still convinced that, if he wanted to, he could have them murdered with a single word. Has the legend of Le Roux outstripped the reality? Well, that’s a question that the book raises, but isn’t really able to answer; and unfortunately the enigma remains at the center of the book as well because, though he tried, Ratliff was unable to get a sit-down interview with Le Roux, which, honestly, he should probably be thankful for. But both of those threads, the legend vs. the reality and Le Roux’s dodging of an interview with Ratliff, play well thematically; Le Roux is slippery in both a literal and an existential sense.
The book does have flaws. There are sections that are overly technical about matters both technological and legal and those are quite dull. And it’s hard to keep the myriad characters all straight and, especially toward the end, the book is often confusing even on a careful reading in terms of who exactly did what and when and why. But given the wealth of material Ratliff had to work with, it’s kind of amazing he was able to structure any sort of book out this story. He leaps around in time and from perspective to perspective over a period of more than a decade using thousands of pages of legal documents, confiscated documents and pre-existing interviews, to say nothing of his own on-the-ground detective work. I genuinely don’t know how a person would even start out to write a book like this; I don’t even know how you get the clarity necessary to even start OUTLINING it. So I’m going to cut Ratliff some slack on the fact that the book is confusing in patches. But, if you pick this book up, know what you’re getting into. The content is often filled with adventure, investigations, murder and crime, but it’s not a beach read. It requires a lot of attention if you want to keep up with even most of what’s going on and ultimately it’s a pretty bleak book, one that ends up coming up with not much of an answer in the way of either of its two main questions: why do men like Paul Le Roux exist in the first place and, in the second, what do they even really want? 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – sprawling epic covers more than a decade of the crime empire of Paul Le Roux in a story that is exciting, sometimes confusing, filled with wild characters and, ultimately, pretty bleak. 3 ½ stars.