Bulawayo boy who became an international criminal mastermind

Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
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 open-source 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 underworld, moving to the Philippines, 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.

As his empire grew larger, his name made it higher up the list of the most sought-after criminals in the world. In September 2012, as he waited on a drug shipment from a Colombian drug kingpin in Liberia, Le Roux told him about his strict code of conduct, and how he would not hesitate to end the life of any employee that crossed him.

“You get caught doing anything, remember: You keep your mouth shut,” he said.

There were those, he added, who “get afraid in jail and then they think that the government is going to help them.

They think the government is their best friend…

What’s going to happen when you get out, you make the deal?

You think we’re going to forget about you?”

Unknown to Le Roux, the supposed head of the Colombian drug cartel was an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who had mounted an elaborate sting operation to net the elusive programmer turned criminal mastermind.

Eight years later, in the midst of a global Covid-19 pandemic, Le Roux would be slapped with 25 years in jail for all his crimes, with his sentence mitigated by the fact that he assisted the DEA, helping them haul in some of his dangerous lieutenants.

“The violence in this case was wrong, and I am sorry for this,” Le Roux wrote in a letter to Judge Ronnie Abrams. “I accept full responsibility for my actions. I have blood on my hands.”

Although unconvinced by his late show of remorse, saying that there was “no question in my mind that Paul Calder Le Roux deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison,” Judge Abrams still gave Le Roux a lesser sentence.

“If judges don’t give cooperating witnesses a significant benefit at sentencing,” she said, “the criminal justice system will suffer, fewer people will be willing to cooperate.”

The ruling brought to an end Le Roux’s blockbuster criminal career, bringing to a close a run that made him one of the most infamous criminals born, and partly bred, in Bulawayo.

At his arrest and sentencing, more than a few lungs around the globe might have heaved a hefty sigh or two in relief.

One of them was his cousin, Matthew Smith, whose house in Zimbabwe Le Roux had firebombed after a dispute over money in 2008.

“It’s closure to a long hard journey for everyone involved. Paul is a phenomenon that caused a lot of pain and hurt. Thank you to the brave people who helped end this nightmare,” Smith said.