> After a two-year stint, he spent another year with a similar outfit, Triple Canopy.(The Panama Papers leak recently revealed that Triple Canopy, which has received more than a billion dollars in U.S. government contracts over the past decade, operated a series of shell companies overseas.)<p>This. One million times this is true journalism, making seemingly worthless bits of information into an expanding web of knowledge, where 99% readers would have no clue.
> <i>All of the teams’ email communications, with their macho posturing and detailed ops plans, were being simultaneously collected by the DEA’s Special Operations Division.</i><p>Would that be the same division here that was pooh-poohed for parallel construction?<p><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805" rel="nofollow">http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130...</a>
This is fascinating. We live in the cyberpunk future that William Gibson and others wrote about in the 1980's. The former US soldier in this article even sounds a bit like Gibson's character Armitage from <i>Neuromancer</i>.
<i>Hunter earned both a National Defense Service Medal and a Global War on Terrorism Medal.</i><p>I just want to point out that these medals just mean that he was a soldier at some point between September 11, 2001 and now. Service medals are given out just for showing up.
Another great installment. It is more mind-bending to me each week, the level of planning, the number of ties Le Roux has to so many different places and people with varied histories and interests. Even assuming conservatively that only 50 percent of what is written is fact, it is still crazy to think about.<p>It is quite a story, Le Roux going from a gangly teenager hunched over his computer to a man who is able to amass a small commando squad at a moments notice...it seems as though Hollywood would struggle to come up with such a plot.
Glad to see this keep getting attention by way of this site. I saw Vice News also has a long-form piece, and even interviewed and referenced the author and the Atavist piece! This looks like the definitive write-up and account. I hope the potential film rights are lucrative. However, if Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant's screenwriting bible is any indication, the Hollywood system will most definitely find a way to monkey with the formula and deliver some kind of mutated...thing...for us. Many compliments on the fine journalism!
Couple of thoughts - I feel that those complicated stings are almost entrapment. And cannot help but feel just sad about some of the guys. The skills that they learn in the military are hardly marketable in the civil society.<p>And the series fail to deliver - it started promising, but it lacks the big crimes and operations outside of the pill business. It is serialized novel of "Pivoting Bad with Mediocrity."