One afternoon in late September 2012, Paul Calder Le Roux was sitting in a hotel room in Monrovia, Liberia, working out the final details of a large cocaine and methamphetamine deal with the head of a Colombian drug cartel. As the pair discussed prices and drop-off points, Le Roux—a programmer who had turned an online pharmacy business into a global criminal empire, trafficking in drugs, arms, and violence—reflected aloud on the two ways he kept his criminal organization in line. The first was zero tolerance for stealing: He’d ordered his top lieutenant killed for as much.
The second, he said, was ensuring that employees never informed on him, or the business. “You get caught doing anything, remember: You keep your mouth shut,” he would tell them. There were those, we went on, 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.” For them, he said, he always had a message: “What’s going to happen when you get out, you make the deal? You think we’re going to forget about you?”
Le Roux’s philosophy was quickly put to the test when he was arrested the same day in a sting operation orchestrated by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. The supposed Colombian cartel leader, it turned out, was a paid informant, and the trusted Le Roux employee who had orchestrated the drug deal had been working with the DEA for months. By the time the DEA’s plane carrying Le Roux was over the Atlantic headed for New York, he was already asking how he and the government could help each other.
Nearly eight years later, that cooperation finally came full circle as Le Roux, 47, was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison on Friday in New York. Le Roux, who will be credited with his seven-plus years in custody, had faced up to a life sentence after pleading guilty to crimes ranging from methamphetamine trafficking to selling weapons technology to Iran. Both Le Roux’s attorney and federal prosecutors had argued that Le Roux’s extensive assistance to the DEA, in which he helped set up his former employees and testified against them, warranted a lesser sentence. “The violence in this case was wrong, and I am sorry for this,” Le Roux wrote in a letter to Judge Ronnie Abrams, who carried out the sentencing in the Southern District of New York. “I accept full responsibility for my actions. I have blood on my hands.”
In a video hearing marred by the kind of technical