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less. Without putting Le Roux on the stand to testify to how it all worked and who did what, they were left to connect fragments of disparate dots themselves. Making matters worse, the prosecutors seemed inexperienced in basic trial procedures. Over and over Judge Nelson sustained defense objections to the prosecution's evidence as third-hand information contained in emails, or as- serted by witnesses—at one point stopping to explain to them the basic principle of what constituted hearsay evidence.

If the prosecution was going to convince the jury, it would have to be through its star witnesses, the federal agents who worked on the case. On the second day, Steven Holdren meticulously ex- plained how the RX Limited model worked, and how he and Brill had first uncovered it. But even basic questions about the con- trolled buys unavoidably devolved into technical arcana.

HOLDREN: The receipt contained an address, SystemCA.com.

Q: And what, if anything, did you find out about SystemCA.com?

HOLDREN: Conducted a WHOIS search. “WHOIS” is a public database that allows you to identify the owner of a domain name or an IP address. So I conducted a WHOIS search on SystemCA .com and also Cartadmin.com that was observed during the payment process, and discovered that both names were registered by the domain name registrar ABSystems.

Q: And so that's what led you to requesting records from ICANN on ABSystems?

HOLDREN: Correct.

All of it was fascinating, and certainly would have implicated Paul Le Roux, had he been the one on trial. But he wasn't. He was the man the prosecutors were desperately trying to keep out of the courtroom. It was as if the government had decided to proceed with the case they would have tried against Le Roux, instead of the one they were left with, the case against his underlings.

Kimberly Brill testified twice over the course of the prosecu- tion's case. Each was long and grueling: first she was questioned