10

The Investigators

2008–2009 ... The wrong kind of evidence ... Two guys from Kentucky ... Bailey hits the road ... A disappearing target

By the time bullets were raining down around Moran Oz off the Philippine coast, the DEA investigation into RX Limited and Paul Le Roux was approaching its two-year anniversary with- out a single arrest. “I think the longest I’d ever worked a case, from opening to final takedown, was eighteen months,” said Kent Bailey. It wasn’t that the investigators lacked evidence. If anything, they were drowning in it. By now Kimberly Brill and Steven Hold- ren, working from Minneapolis, had catalogued millions of drug orders attached to RX Limited’s shipping accounts. They’d mapped the full length of the company’s supply chain, from doctors like Prabhakara Tumpati in Pennsylvania and pharmacies like Charles Schultz’s in Wisconsin, to shell companies like Ajax Technology in Hong Kong, and to the domain registrar ABSystems in Manila. Their controlled buys showed exactly how easy it was for Ameri- can customers, without ever seeing a doctor, to order RX Limited’s pills. Through their email search warrants, they had homed in on figures whom they believed to be crucial to Le Roux’s operation, including Moran Oz and Alon Berkman. All told, RX Limited ap-