Greetings Book Club, this week I’m going to talk about The Mastermind by Evan Ratliff. It’s a nonfiction crime thriller about the international drug kingpin Paul Le Roux. I read American Kingpin by Nick Bilton back in 2019 and have been fascinated with the non-fiction “True Crime” genre ever since. Catch and Kill, Bad Blood, The Devil in the White City, Killers of the Flower Moon and Red Notice have been amongst my favorites over the last few years. Over the holidays (funeral) my cousin recommended The Mastermind, and it immediately shot near the top of my list.
The Mastermind is an awesome read, and I’m always impressed with how well researched this genre is. It reads like fiction but has all the sources to back it up. Truly a great read. It starts with telling the story of Paul Le Roux, a brilliant but troubled software engineer from the nation formerly known as Rhodesia. He was big on data encryption and pioneered (or allegedly pioneered) a lot of modern tech security and encryption software. After bouncing around in his 20’s, he starts an online network selling non-prescription drugs. The operation is shady, call centers based all over the world created a billion-dollar empire. He was able to capitalize on the limitedly restricted wild west of telemedicine and had a network of pharmacies and doctors filling and shipping thousands of orders a week without any in-person visits.
My first take on this is, holy shit this is immoral. Every doctor and pharmacist who got away with this (spoiler, it’s almost all of them) should never be allowed to see patients again. Fed Ex as well. They knew what they were doing, the fact that they shipped painkillers to people all over the country for years deserves so much more punishment than the 300 million dollar fine they ended up paying. The fact that the government let this go on for years before scheduling these drugs is just catastrophic failure from multiple administrations.
Anyways, back to the story. Le Roux lost it somewhere along the way. He went from pushing off-brand painkillers, to trafficking and developing war heads for the Iranian government (allegedly). He paid off governments and police forces around the world and even carried a diplomatic passport from some. Sex trafficking (allegedly), weapons trafficking (allegedly), drug trafficking (allegedly), murder for hire (allegedly) and so much more became a staple of his organization – I think this is all confirmed, please don’t kill me if it hasn’t that’s why I put “allegedly”. He even allegedly bought a bunch of islands to develop new explosives technology.
The guy becomes one of the most wanted criminals in the world but operates in countries where he is protected, so he escapes the law for years. Another big takeaway I had with this (as I did with American Kingpin) is that good law enforcement officers will find you no matter what. The whole investigation was fascinating, and it takes a lot of ingenuity and discipline to figure something like this out. It’s incredibly frustrating that those other countries allowed this guy and his team to operate freely.
I was shocked at how many people were killed as a part of this. Le Roux had an on-call hit squad that would execute any perceived enemies and consistently double-crossed allies. He also funded and armed an opposition group in Somalia as a part of some eugenics inspired desire to be a king in Africa. Everything about this read like a Tom Clancy novel. He laundered most of his money through gold, diamonds, bitcoin – conspiracy theorists think he might have been the guy who created Bitcoin. Despite the governments/citizens of the countries raiding his stashes, he still must have a fortune still out there. The guy was burying gold in the ground and storing it in vaults all over the world.
Eventually, they get some members of the organization to start turning and when Le Roux flees to Brazil, the government cooperated in a joint effort to bring him down. Here’s where everything gets kind of fucked. Several US law enforcement groups rush in to take credit, and they do end up capturing Le Roux and extraditing him to the US. But that’s where the prosecution failures begin. The government was using Le Roux as an asset in an attempt to leverage his dealings with the North Koreans and Iranians – therefore they did everything in their power to keep him disconnected from the rest of the organization’s prosecution. Multiple people walked, most of the murderers were locked up so I guess that’s a win. The book ends before Le Roux’s sentencing, but I read up on it afterwords and what a letdown it was. He got 25 years. 25 years for being responsible for hundreds of deaths around the world and trafficking weapon and drugs that killed many more. 25 years for playing a large role in the American opioid epidemic that has killed millions. I’m sure he gave the government all sorts of information, but this is a failure of justice on every level.
All in all, this was a fantastic read that I will recommend to everyone. It is incomprehensible that some of the stuff described actually happened, and it shines a light on the brutal reality of the dark web’s relationship with organized crime. And once again fuck the pharmaceutical industry for enabling and playing a part in this. They’ll get away with it like always, but people won’t forget! Score: 5.0/5.0.
