his bitterness. The prosecutors had chosen the targets. Everyone else was going to skate.

A trial date for Oz and McConnell was finally set for early 2017, almost three years after Paul Le Roux had lured Oz to Romania for the sting, and nearly ten since Kimberly Brill and Steven Hold- ren had first started poking into RX Limited. They were going to be tried together, alongside the pair of RX Limited doctors from Pennsylvania, Karkalas and Tumpati. Linda Marks's team still re- fused to make information about Le Roux available, despite the fact that he was the world's most knowledgeable person about RX Limited, and already in U.S. custody. But if the government was doing everything in its power to keep Le Roux out of the trial, the defense attorneys were planning to make him the star of it.

On the morning of February 7, I arrived at the courthouse in St. Paul for the opening day of the trial, in the courtroom of Judge Susan Richard Nelson. The gallery was sparsely populated, no more than a half dozen people, and over the weeks of the trial I would become familiar with my fellow attendees: Oz's wife and a rabbi who came along for support, an occasional local reporter, and, most days, Kimberly Brill from the DEA. The real action was at the attorneys' tables, where each of the four defendants was flanked by a pair of lawyers, and where Linda Marks sat with her team of three prosecutors. (The case of Patel, the Detroit pharma- cist, had been severed from the others that morning, and his charges were later dropped.)

“All four of these defendants are charged with conspiring to distribute prescription drugs over the Internet without valid pre- scriptions,” U.S. Attorney Roger Gural said in his opening state- ment to the jury. “Defendants' Internet operation was not designed to provide medical supervision; it was designed to make money. And some of these defendants made a lot of money.” He painted a picture of a conspiracy operating without regard for either the laws of the United States or the safety of customers. “It was quick,