“So how much gold did he give you?” Looking down at the folder, McConnell decided it was best to come clean. “First of all, he didn’t give me gold,” he told Le Roux. “He wanted to take the gold, utilize it, and pay it back. I told Dave to just ask you for the loan. I know you are pretty generous, you would have probably done it.”
    “I should have kept Dave in a cage,” Le Roux said. McConnell asked if Le Roux was responsible for Smith’s disappearance. “Yes, yes,” Le Roux said dismissively. “We killed him.”
    Le Roux demanded banking information for accounts that McConnell had used to stash Smith’s money, along with his ATM cards. McConnell would repay every cent, Le Roux told him, de- ducted from his paycheck. Then he picked up the folder, pulled out pictures of Smith’s girlfriends, and asked McConnell if he knew where any of them lived.
    Le Roux told McConnell that from that point forward he was going to be assigned to new duties in the United States, opening shell companies for the pharmaceutical side of the business. “I didn’t need Dave,” he said. “You’re lucky I need you.”

    The reason Le Roux needed McConnell stemmed from a growing set of problems that Oz and Berkman were encountering with RX Limited. In 2011 the online pill business was getting squeezed by the companies handling its credit card payments, known as mer- chant processors. Afraid that they might be liable for payments on illegal drug sales, the merchant processors began demanding that RX Limited prove it was accredited by a National Association of Boards of Pharmacy program called Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Site. The VIPPS system, as it was known, had been estab- lished to bring some order to the wild west of online drug sales. It was a way to certify which websites were abiding by the DEA’s regulations. FedEx, RX Limited’s main conduit for shipping pills, began issuing similar demands that RX Limited prove its VIPPS certification.