Byo boy who became an international criminal mastermind
IN his prime, an American judge said, he lived the life similar to that of a villain in a James Bond movie. A glance at the fantastic life he lived on the dark edges of the criminal underworld for a decade suggests that Le Roux was indeed a fearsome, twisted work of fiction that somehow managed to escape the screen and spring into life.
His criminal exploits, which spanning continents, seem like they were ripped off the most explosive episodes of a thrill-a-minute Hollywood action blockbuster. How else can one explain how a computer programmer somehow managed to build a drug distribution empire that could rival some of the biggest tech companies on Wall Street?
Or how he managed to enlist some of the United States’ elite military officers as his personal henchmen, ordering “hits” on people such as estate agent Catherine Lee.
“The scope and severity of Mr Le Roux’s criminal conduct is nothing short of breathtaking. I have before me a man who has engaged in conduct in keeping with the villain in a James Bond movie,” Ronnie Abrams, a judge in the southern district of New York said as Le Roux appeared before her in 2020.
When Judge Abrams uttered those words, the chickens had finally come back home to roost in their numbers for Le Roux, whose sprawling drug empire had been apportioned at least some of the blame for America’s opioid crisis, a pandemic that has caused more than 500 000 deaths over 20 years in the United States.
This criminal mastermind, whose operations reportedly netted him as much as US$400 million between 2002 and 2012, certainly bore little resemblance to the bouncing baby boy that was born at Lady Rodwell Maternity Home in Bulawayo back in 1972.
Raised by his adoptive parents, Paul Sr and Judy Le Roux, after his teenaged mother had been shamed into giving him up as a child, Le Roux reportedly grew up as much loved, precocious child that was the apple of his parents’ eyes.
“He was fought over, everyone wanted him,” a relative of his told author and journalist Evan Ratliff. “Our grandparents worshipped the ground he walked on, honestly. I know this sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s true.”
It was in Bulawayo, with Zimbabwe still embroiled for a war for its soul as the liberation struggle raged on, where a young Le Roux seemed to lose his moral compass, even at a young age.
“Things like smuggling precious metals or doing business in the gray areas of the law were not seen as wrong, per se, in the eyes of many, simply because there were so many conflicts and chaos in the region at the time,” Ratliff said.
With his parents in search of better schools for Le Roux, they reportedly relocated to Krugersdorp, South Africa in 1984. Moved away from his comfort zone in Bulawayo to sports-mad South Africa, it was here that Le Roux began developing character traits that would in time germinate and make him full-blown international villain sought the world over.
While other boys took delight in muscular, bruising endeavours like rugby, Le Roux retreated into himself, becoming a recluse who loved the company of video games instead of other people.
Showing an increasing disregard for formal education, Le Roux dropped out of school in South Africa and soon found himself taking a keen interest in computer programming, showcasing his genius by enrolling at a college and completing a year’s worth of course material in eight weeks, and picking up programming certificates from three separate training courses over a single year in the process.
Le Roux would then leave for London with nothing else but the clothes on his back and a suitcase full of programming books. Le Roux spent the 1990s in London, Hong Kong and Amsterdam, where he made a name for himself as the developer of the opensource encryption software E4M, a software which notorious whistleblower Edward Snowden claims that even the US secret service NSA had problems with over the years.
However, after failing to find great wealth in the world of formal programming, Le Roux allegedly turned to the underwor l d, moving to the Phi l ippi n e s , where he used his computer skills to set up RX Limited, a company that made a fortune shipping, with the aid of American medical practitioners he recruited to write prescriptions, pain medicine to the United States. RX and other companies would precipitate an opioid crisis that has claimed the loves of half a million people in two decades.
From his Philippines hideout, Le Roux’s empire grew tentacles that reached far and wide, expanding its operations into cocaine and methamphetamine trafficking, gold smuggling, and weapons dealing. Over the next decade Le Roux, whose first major crime had come in South Africa where he was arrested for selling pornography at the age of 16, would become one of the most wanted and feared criminals around the globe.
From yachts built to outrun any Coast Guard, police protection and judges’ favour to crates of military-grade weapons, Private jets full of gold, Le Roux did it.