24

The Investigators

2011-2012 . . . Brazil on the case . . . Informants in from the cold . . . Strange liaisons . . . 960 joins the chase

Le Roux was making moves in Brazil. That much Kimberly Brill and Kent Bailey could tell from the wiretaps. After losing track of Lachlan McConnell in Florida, they’d turned their attention to Detroit, where the local DEA office had a wiretap running on Ba- buhai Patel, the owner of one of RX Limited’s larger pharmacies. Patel, unlike most other pharmacy owners, seemed to have direct contact with the organization’s operators, people with names like “Ron Oz” and “Allen Berkman.” The wiretap captured Patel’s calls with Berkman and another Israeli, Doron Shulman—the for- mer member of the Duvdevan—as the company tried to solve its shipping woes. Patel sounded under pressure, citing the riskiness of the operation now that Soma was a controlled substance and the DEA was paying attention.

The investigators also started catching references to Brazil. Dat- ing back to the beginning of the operation, they’d seen calls back and forth between Le Roux’s phone and South America. Now they gleaned that he might be relocating there. The DEA’s attaché in São Paulo happened to be an old colleague of Bailey’s from Los