money laundering organizations" by the DEA, like the Sinaloa cartel head Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. With the Ufuk arms case in hand, the team working RX Limited finally had enough to make a case that Le Roux deserved to be among them. He wasn't just a guy peddling pills online, they could now show. He was a new kind of drug kingpin, traveling seamlessly from the world of online pharmacies to that of major arms trafficking. "That was an aha moment," Bailey said. "That was the first time I could put stuff in that frickin' PowerPoint that said, 'What I've been saying? This is the proof.'"

In May 2010, Brill and Holdren flew to Washington, D.C., to present before a Department of Justice review board that votes on CPOT designations. When they finished, the board handed down its decision: Le Roux would be placed on the list. After years of Brill and Holdren trying to explain the power of Le Roux's convo- luted, highly technical network, the powers that be finally ac- knowledged that their hunches about his significance had been right all along.

That night, Holdren told Brill he was leaving the DEA for a job as a criminal investigator at the federal Housing and Urban Devel- opment Agency. They'd been working the Le Roux case for nearly three years, and Holdren was looking for a new challenge. In Min- neapolis, Brill would have to go it alone.

In her hotel room, Brill allowed herself a few minutes of despair. "It was purely out of exhaustion," she said. "We had gotten this extra focus on the case and raised it to a higher level, and I already knew what that was going to mean. Now there were some addi- tional expectations. And it was kind of an overwhelming feeling that I was going to have to figure these things out, and I wasn't sure I could do it on my own." And then, she said, "I got over it."

The CPOT designation was a calling card that would open doors in other departments and agencies, and bring additional re- sources. But they still needed that one missing piece to make the case against Le Roux: someone from the inside.

Two months later, Bailey got another call from the Australian