THE MASTERMIND 47

it found its way onto Bailey's desk in Virginia. Immediately he knew that he was looking at the financial skeleton of Le Roux's organization. "We had identified the vast majority of those phar- macies through the RX Limited shipping account," Bailey said. "Nine of those ten pharmacies were a hit." For the first time, they had a window into the organization's bank accounts.

To open it, the investigators needed legal backup. Most DEA investigations, when they begin to bear fruit, are placed in the hands of a federal prosecutor from the closest U.S. Attorney's of- fice. For Brill and Holdren that office was a few blocks away, in downtown Minneapolis. They had enlisted an attorney there to file for their initial court-ordered search warrants. But when of- fered a chance to take on the larger case, the prosecutors balked. The office had recently obtained a conviction in a case against an online pharmacy a fraction of the size of RX Limited, and the case had been a huge resource drain. (The pharmacy's owner had been represented by the prominent Minneapolis defense attorney Jo- seph Friedberg.) "They thought it was too labor intensive, they didn't have the expertise," Bailey said.

Instead, the investigators turned to a relatively obscure section of the Department of Justice in Washington called the Consumer Protection Branch. Largely responsible for ensuring the safety of products purchased by Americans, the branch had a small office dedicated to pharmaceuticals, prosecuting cases of misbranded drugs and pharmaceutical fraud. A senior litigator there named Linda Marks agreed to take on RX Limited.

With a prosecutor on board, the investigators could now file for legal records from foreign governments, requests that had to pass through the Department of Justice. They issued requests for interna- tional financial records through the Treasury Department's Finan- cial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, which has standing arrangements with certain countries to share information. And they sent subpoenas to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which manages the bulk of bank-to-bank wire transfers going to and from the United States, through a program called Fedwire. Their first