As an English major at 91ĢĘ²®»¢, Elaine Shannon learned critical thinking and self-relianceāand that she was not cut out to sit in a library and write papers about poets. Instead she lined up a job as a reporter and launched a career as an investigative journalist and New York Times best-selling author that has led her to crisscross hot spots around the globe during the past five decades, including for her newly released fourth book, Hunting LeRoux (2019, William Morrow/HarperCollins).
Shannonās reporting has put her in the midst of historyāfrom the social upheaval of the late 1960s to drug cartels in the 1980s to post-9/11 terrorism. She covered the nationās capital for Nashvilleās daily Tennessean, spent a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, and later held positions at Newsweek and Time magazines, all while building an extensive network of sources as she covered the FBI, DEA, Customs and Justice departments, intelligence and terrorism.
In 2008, Shannon felt it was time to move on. She wanted to go to Afghanistan and write about how the heroin trade financed warlords and terrorist groups. āIām fascinated with the machinations of the human mind,ā she says. āThe investigators who get inside a bad guyās head to catch them are a very special breed.ā
During that time she learned about Paul LeRoux, whom she describes as āa twisted-genius entrepreneur and cold-blooded killer who brought revolutionary innovation to transnational crime.ā
āSomeone I had met in Afghanistan knew about the LeRoux case,ā she says. āHe had flipped, and the best agents in the DEA were using him to lure in LeRouxās hit menāa crew of mercenaries he had hired to kill people who annoyed him.ā
Shannon began piecing together the story about LeRoux and the elite special operations group of the DEA that tracked him as a chapter in a larger book. She shared her ideas with Michael Mann, the award-winning writer, director and producer who developed Shannonās first book, Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Canāt Win, into the Emmy-winning miniseries Drug Wars.
āMichael read what I had written,ā Shannon recalls, āand said, āI think this story is the book youāre looking for, and I want to do the movie.āā
Hunting LeRoux recounts the harrowing efforts to bring down LeRoux and his global criminal operations. Mann wrote the forward for the book and is developing Hunting LeRoux as a movie.
Shannon is now on the hunt for her next bookāmaybe in Afghanistan, maybe Mexico. These danger zones donāt scare her. What scares her is that she may miss something.
āIām a fierce competitor and always want to be first on a story Iām covering. In fact, I want to own it,ā she says. āI take calculated risks, physically and intellectually. I try to strike out for uncharted territory. I donāt ever want to miss an opportunity. Thatās what keeps me up at nightāmissing out.ā
āJAN READ