carry real and serious consequences when they involve the im- mense prosecutorial might of the United States," she wrote. "Here, Oz was uprooted from his native country, incarcerated for several months, forced to live in the United States for more than two years while subject to intrusive monitoring, and spent hundreds of thou- sands of dollars on his legal defense."

The trial's results, examined from one direction, flipped the en- tire story of Le Roux on its head. The not-guilty verdicts arguably proved that Le Roux had been right all along when he told his employees that the pharmaceutical business was legal. They sug- gested an alternate history, in which Le Roux had been a legiti- mate businessman, an Internet billionaire who earned his fortune through cleverness and persistence. He could have been lauded on the covers of business magazines, not hounded across the world by the DEA. If his ambitions hadn't outstripped RX Limited— if he hadn't chosen to leverage his success into a truly criminal empire—he might never have been worth chasing in the first place.

A few months later, I went to see Prabhakara Tumpati, who I'd discovered owned a clinic in southern Brooklyn. He'd expanded his business from sleep medicine into obesity treatment, and his basement office in Bensonhurst was bustling with activity. It was the end of a long workday that for Tumpati had started with a drive from Pennsylvania, and I sat in the waiting area as he walked out his last patient of the day. "It's not easy, right?" he said, gently, of the weight-loss regimen he'd prescribed her. "It takes a little bit of convincing."

Although I'd never spoken to Tumpati during the trial in Min- nesota, he'd always struck me as preternaturally cheerful, given the amount of prison time he was facing. Now exonerated and sitting across from me in his office, he was eager to tell me why. He and his family were deeply Christian, he explained, and God had sent prophesies that Tumpati would come out "pure as gold" on the other end of the trial. "This in fact has been the best time of