fable as they peppered him with questions, eventually opening up about his love of programming and computers—and a new ven- ture he was just getting off the ground.

Since leaving SecurStar, he'd started to formulate an idea that would take advantage of the technical skills he'd built up over the first decade of his career, and make him rich in the process. Ac- counts would later differ as to how exactly Le Roux had started in the online pharmacy business. The DEA would come to believe it was through partnering up with his biological father, a South Afri- can named Darroll Hornbuckle, with whom he had also made contact after discovering his birth certificate. (Hornbuckle was ar- rested in South Africa that same year for using false prescriptions to sell pills over the Internet.) His cousin Mathew instead recalled that Le Roux had traveled to Costa Rica to open an online casino where a lawyer had turned him on to the online pharmacy business. Moran Oz heard a third account: that Tomer and Boaz Taggart had originally met Le Roux in an online forum, and the three of them started the business together.

Perhaps the truth could be found in a Venn diagram of the three origin stories, but regardless, by early 2003 Le Roux was posting on message boards such as misc.entrepreneurs, looking for help opening a company based in the United States:

WE ARE EUROPEAN BASED PRIVATE INVESTORS LOOK- ING FOR A U.S. CITIZEN OR GREEN CARD HOLDER TO HELP US SETUP A NEW COMPANY BASED OUT OF FLOR- IDA, WE WILL DO ALL THE PAPER WORK WE NEED YOUR HELP TO COMPLY WITH U.S LAW. BUT WE KNOW NOTHING IN THIS WORLD IS FREE, SO WE WILL PAY YOU UP TO $500 TO HELP US. PLEASE ONLY GENUINE PEOPLE. NO TIME WASTERS.

By mid-December, he had registered the domain names RXPayouts.com and BillRx.com under the name George McKen-