Lifestyles Of The Rich And Malevolent

Elaine Shannon’s Hunting LeRoux explores an invisible empire of internet wizardry and murder

- Mary Kaye Schilling

SHE COULD RIGHTLY CLAIM TO BE the Boswell of thugs and drugs. A veteran former correspondent for Newsweek and Time, Elaine Shannon emerged as a leading expert on the evil alliances of drug kingpins and corrupt officials with her tingling, real-life 1988 thriller, Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win, which was adapted by filmmaker Michael Mann for his Emmy–winning NBC miniseries Drug Wars: the Camarena Story and its Emmy–nominated sequel, Drug Wars: The Cocaine Cartel. Now, Shannon and Mann have teamed up again to bring her latest investigative tour de force, Hunting LeRoux: The Inside Story of the DEA Takedown of a Criminal Genius and His Empire (William Morrow), to a theater near you.

How did you get onto the story of Paul LeRoux?

I was in Afghanistan, writing about the world heroin trade and how it finances war and terrorism; the Taliban, as far as I can tell, is 90 percent funded by heroin. One of my contacts told me about this very strange but powerful figure that he had been investigating. I took a quick right turn and found out everything I could.

LeRoux was a pioneering criminal— just extraordinary. He went way beyond what we have normally thought of as a drug dealer. You describe him as wanting to be Pablo Escobar plus Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout plus Jeff Bezos. You also compared him to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, with anti-aircraft emplacements on all sides of his place in Manila. Is that what made LeRoux different from any other big-time drug kingpin?