same, and they were both creations of Paul Le Roux. He wasn't buying website domains, he was minting them himself, by the thousands.

He had built what the corporate world would call a "fully inte- grated vertical business"—a structure in which he controlled every layer, from top to bottom—and hijacked the very architecture of the Internet to do it. The technical acumen behind it was frighten- ing. "We knew he was a legitimate drug kingpin," Holdren said. "He wasn't a low-level or mid-level guy that we were trying to turn into something bigger. We knew he was the real deal. And he was a genius to put this all together."

To build a case that could be prosecuted, though, Brill and Holdren needed more than just an understanding of Le Roux's brilliance. They needed to establish how the whole thing broke American laws, and then link it to the undercover buys being de- livered to their nearby FedEx mail drop. Much of the information the investigators had gathered so far, like the FedEx records re- quests, required only so-called administrative subpoenas, which the DEA could issue without a court order. Now it was time to go get search warrants.

Poring over the list of domain names controlled by ABSystems, they noticed one nonpharmaceutical website, E4M.net—the home of Le Roux's encryption software in the early 2000s. A search on the site's history turned up another email address for Le Roux: paulca@rocketmail.com. Brill and Holdren, with the help of a fed- eral prosecutor in Minneapolis, convinced a judge to sign off on a warrant for Rocketmail, owned by the Internet giant Yahoo!. The warrant enabled them to capture the previous thirty days' worth of messages from the account. The emails confirmed their suspi- cion that Le Roux was directing every aspect of the business: mak- ing arrangements with credit card processors, manipulating a web of international bank accounts, and using other people's identities to register shell companies around the world. But many of the threads led to yet another email account, pleroux@server73.net. There, the trail went cold. Server73.net, unlike a Gmail or Hot-