peared to constitute the largest Internet drug ring the DEA had ever uncovered.

The problem wasn't the amount of evidence, but the type. The virtual fingerprints of Le Roux and his operators were all over RX Limited, but they were just that: virtual. The federal prosecutors who had taken on the case, Linda Marks and her team at the DOJ's Consumer Protection Branch, needed more. Without a source in- side the organization—someone they could flip and put on the stand to testify to what they had seen firsthand—the prosecutors lacked the ultimate proof. "We didn't have evidence saying that was him behind the keyboard, writing those emails," said Bailey. They needed informants, or another way to catch Le Roux work- ing in real time.

The investigators had started to sense that Le Roux was in- volved in larger and more sinister endeavors than just the online drug business. There had been signs since the beginning: the mys- terious calls to Somalia on Le Roux's cellphone, the story in The Hill outlining Le Roux's millions in payments to Ari Ben-Menashe. The warrant on Le Roux's email turned up cryptic references to exotic-sounding projects and Le Roux-funded mercenaries that seemed to have no relationship to RX Limited.

Among their most perplexing discoveries was a pair of Le Roux employees in Kentucky. Joseph Hunter, from the small city of Owensboro, a hundred miles southwest of Louisville, had turned up on a list of calls to and from Le Roux's Philippine cellphone. When the investigators ran a background check, they discovered he was a former U.S. Army soldier with a cabinet full of awards who had left the service in 2004. Bailey had Hunter flagged in the federal government's flight passenger tracking system, and discov- ered he was traveling regularly back and forth between the United States and the Philippines. "What the frick are you doing with Le Roux?" Bailey wondered.

The other Kentuckian was an Israeli American named Jon Wall, who had worked as a call center manager for RX Limited in the Philippines, then returned to his native Louisville in 2008. After