me, was baffled about the black hole that seemed to surround Paul Le Roux. “The government doesn't want to tell us anything,” he said. “They have all these people indicted and they don't have the guy indicted who owned it and started it. We'd at least like to know where he is and where he's been.” The government's prose- cutor, a D.C.-based attorney named Linda Marks, had proven equally unhelpful. (Why the case was being prosecuted out of D.C., rather than by federal prosecutors in Minneapolis, was an- other mystery.) Marks had told the defense attorneys, Friedberg said on our call, that she had no idea where Le Roux was. I hung up having learned little more than I already knew.

A week later, Friedberg called back with a proposal. “Typically I would not let a client speak to the press before their trial,” he told me. But the defense team was operating so deeply in the dark that they were prepared to take a gamble. They would let me inter- view Oz on the condition that I not quote him by name before his trial, which was then scheduled for seven months later, in June 2016. Their hope was that I could follow leads Oz might generate for me, then publish information that would inform their case.

A few weeks later, I landed in Minneapolis and checked into a room at a downtown hotel, connected to Friedberg's building by one of the city's Habitrail-like overhead tunnels. When he walked into the conference room the next morning, Friedberg exuded the witty charm that had served him well in some of the most high- profile criminal cases in the city. Richman arrived soon after, seem- ing quiet and reserved alongside his gregarious partner. But Richman had taken on much of the heavy lifting for the upcoming trial. “This case is extraordinary,” he said as we sat down across from each other at a long wooden table. “There are a million documents and probably tens of millions of pages,” so many that they'd had to contract with a private company to organize them into a data- base.

Oz arrived a few minutes later. He was trim and stylish, in his early thirties, with a dark beard and a yarmulke. For a man facing an eighty-plus-count federal indictment, he radiated a natural calm-