THE MASTERMIND 299

used Le Roux to get to him and not the other way around. He told them about how Le Roux had ordered him thrown off the boat and shot at. He would have helped them, he said, if they’d asked.

Finally, on the last day he could be legally held in Romania, a judge overruled Oz’s opposition to extradition, and he was put on a plane to the United States. He landed in Minneapolis and was transported to the Sherburne County Jail, outside the city.

In early 2014, Prabhakara Tumpati was hustling again to keep his head above water. He’d opened three sleep clinics, and two of them were losing money. To help make ends meet, he was picking up call shifts at a hospital near his home in suburban Philadelphia. It had been two years since he had given up prescribing for RX Limited. More recently, his referral fees had stopped coming as well, and his physician contacts still prescribing for it told him it had essentially disappeared.

So Tumpati was doubly surprised to receive a letter from Linda Marks’s office at the Consumer Protection Branch of the U.S. De- partment of Justice, suggesting that his work for the network had been illegal. He engaged a lawyer to respond, but wasn’t overly concerned. “I was under the impression that it was more like, ‘Help us, we are investigating this guy that has these other things going on,’” he said. After all, he had been the one trying to con- vince RX Limited that they needed to add video technology so that doctors could see patients virtually. Tumpati’s lawyer responded that the doctor didn’t believe he had done anything illegal, and that he was willing to come to Washington and sit down with the attorneys.

For a while, that seemed like the end of it. Then, on the morning of March 27, Tumpati had just completed a 7-P.M.-to-6-A.M. shift at the hospital, and was planning to head home and grab a few hours of sleep before heading off to one of his clinics. As he pulled his car into the driveway, he failed to notice a pair of sedans parked near the end of it. He went upstairs to change clothes, and was