mail account, wasn’t a commercial email service to which the in- vestigators could send warrants. Instead it was a private, secure email program that Paul Le Roux appeared to have built himself, much as he had built ABSystems. The investigators had no way to tap into it. “Every time we turned a corner he controlled every aspect of this,” Holdren said.

Fortunately, not all of Le Roux’s employees were so sophisticated, or so cautious. Many of his correspondents were using commercial addresses, and eventually Brill and Holdren obtained warrants on more than twenty separate email accounts. Each produced hundreds and sometimes thousands of messages to sort through.

One particular address, ron_oz11@hotmail.com, seemed to be a hub for communications with many of the pharmacies, and the investigators concluded it belonged to the primary operations manager for RX Limited, a man who went by the names Ron Martin and Ron Oz. The Oz email address and several others— including ones under the names Levi Kugel and Alon Berkman— traced to Israel, where the investigators determined Le Roux was running a customer service center for RX Limited. Most of Oz’s email traffic involved problems with shipments, questions about pricing, and other routine correspondence with doctors and phar- macies eager to expand the number of orders they prescribed and shipped.

Oz’s responses evinced what appeared to be Brill and Holdren to be a detailed knowledge of American law, and he was careful to assert the legality of the operation in writing. “We are happy to know you are interested in joining us in our company,” he wrote to a phar- macist in mid-2008. “All products are non-controlled and can only ship to states where our business type is legal. . . . For exam- ple we do not work with Florida, Kentucky, Nevada, and Arkansas at all due to local state laws.”

“I really love filing these rxs,” one pharmacist wrote to Oz, ex- plaining that he had a paralyzed son to support. “If this is going to be a long term thing I need to get the rxs faster off the computer. . .