THE MASTERMIND

ward Snowden to the terrorist group ISIS, TrueCrypt had itself long been a mystery. Its developers were anonymous. Now it ap- peared as if Le Roux, at least indirectly, had a hand in it.

The implications were bewildering. Le Roux wasn't just a thug who'd clawed his way to the top of an organization. Nor was he simply the clever architect of an online pill network. This was a man smart enough to create technology that the U.S. government's elite hackers couldn't crack.

By late 2015, I was awash in information about Paul Le Roux, but ultimately my lists of names and companies didn't cohere into a picture of his organization. Fortunately, there was another legal case connected to Le Roux, targeting his prescription drug net- work. In Minneapolis, a grand jury had indicted eleven RX Lim- ited employees and associates in 2014, and several of them were out on bail, awaiting trial. Why Minneapolis, I had no idea. But at the very least, the case would give me another set of lawyers to call. As expected, the prosecutors from the Department of Justice declined to talk.

That October, one defense attorney finally picked up the phone. His name was Joe Friedberg, and he was perhaps the Twin Cities' best-known defense lawyer. Friedberg and another heavy-hitting attorney, Robert Richman, had taken on the case of an Israeli citi- zen named Moran Oz, one of the eleven defendants in the RX Limited case. According to his indictment, "MORAN OZ a/k/a Ron Oz a/k/a Ron Martin was an RX Limited associate who re- sided in Israel and managed day-to-day operations for, and com- munications with, RX Limited fulfillment pharmacies." Oz was facing eighty-three counts of mail fraud, wire fraud, and unlawful distribution of controlled substances. The indictment described him as a key player in a massive network delivering millions of doses of addictive painkillers to American homes.

"I can't give you very much information that would help you," Friedberg told me at first. "This is a very strange case." He, like