At times it seemed almost laughable. Here were Brill and Hold- ren in Minneapolis, equipped with a couple of desktop computers, some notebooks, and a mail drop at FedEx, taking on a global network worth hundreds of millions of dollars, operated by an encryption expert with an unending supply of shell companies, thousands of employees, and impenetrable email servers.

To make any progress, they were going to have to put boots on the ground overseas. For over a year, Bailey had tried to impress upon his higher-ups at the Special Operations Division in Virginia that they were onto more than a typical online pill-mill jockey. Le Roux was selling millions of doses of prescription drugs, yes, but the investigators had a hunch that he was a much more significant international criminal. The response to Bailey's briefings had been the bureaucratic equivalent of a pat on the head. The case was too complicated and too technical, he was told. SOD was built to take down cartels, not programmers. Finally, Bailey approached his boss at SOD, Derek Maltz. "I gotta go to the Philippines on this," he told him. If he could get the Philippine authorities to conduct sur- veillance on Le Roux, he was convinced the DEA could find a way inside the organization.

Maltz agreed, and in the summer of 2009 Bailey flew with his analyst to Hong Kong and Bangkok to brief law enforcement of- ficials, before heading on to Manila. The U.S. embassy liaison warned that it was too risky to meet with the Philippine National Police or the National Bureau of Investigation, and instead ar- ranged a meeting with the commander of the Philippine Drug En- forcement Agency, which they viewed as less corrupt. When Bailey and his analyst arrived bearing gifts from SOD, the commander seemed friendly enough. The United States and the Philippines maintained an important alliance, he said, and the agency would do anything it could to help. Le Roux, however, was not on their radar. Bailey tried to prevail upon PDEA to set up surveillance on Le Roux, laying out the case as an easy win. The U.S. DEA had already pinned down Le Roux's locations, he told his Philippine counterparts: the house in Dasmariñas Village, the fourteenth-floor