The mastermind, p.3
The Mastermind, page 3
Rivera introduced the DEA agents to the witnesses he had interviewed about Lee’s last days. The agents showed them photos of the two Americans, Rivera told me, “mingled with seven or eight different photos of seven or eight different individuals.” Some of the witnesses identified the two Americans as having met with Lee. Others didn’t. But after those sessions, one of the DEA agents faxed a report back to the States. The next day, the two men were arrested in Roxboro.
Rivera was pleased with the arrests, but he also expressed frustration about his own continuing investigation, which he resumed after the DEA meeting. A local accomplice had allegedly helped supply the murder weapon and vehicle to the suspects, but Rivera still didn’t have enough information to track him down. He pointed out to me that the NBI hadn’t gotten any credit for the arrests, while at the same time suggesting that such credit was unnecessary. “We were not included. We were happy about that, it’s no problem with us. We have nothing to gain with being famous.”
But something else was bothering him: There was someone, or something, much bigger behind the crime that remained shrouded in mystery. Why would the U.S. government send agents across the world to gather evidence against two Americans for the murder of a Filipino woman? Overseas murders, no matter how tragic, typically don’t fall under American jurisdiction. Why not just extradite the pair to the Philippines, where the crime occurred, and hand them off to the NBI?
I had the same questions. Perhaps it was related to something more fundamental about the case that I still didn’t understand: Why was Catherine Lee important enough for two men from North Carolina to fly across the world to kill her?
Rivera had an answer, although at first he was reluctant to tell me. The crime, he said, was the work of “the Mastermind.” At first, Rivera would only identify this Mastermind as the head of a powerful crime organization based in Manila. But he did tell me the motive behind the murder: The Mastermind had once enlisted Catherine Lee to purchase vacation property for him in Batangas, a coastal region south of Manila. He had given her money, at least 50 million pesos, or around a million dollars. “But the deal never materialized,” Rivera said, “because the person who Catherine Lee instructed to do the verification of the land, to arrange the deeds and everything, went off with the money.”
That person had also been killed, Rivera said. “The body was never found.”
And then the Mastermind had ordered Lee’s murder, too. Catherine Lee, it seemed, had stepped across the invisible divide between her world and the underworld, oblivious to the chain of events she had set in motion that would end in her own death.
I asked Rivera if he would tell me the name of the Mastermind, and at first he refused. He had a name but he didn’t want to say it. The DEA, he told me, would “neither confirm nor deny it.”
But I already knew who it had to be. “If I tell you the name that I think it is, will you tell me if that’s the person?” I asked.
“I will confirm,” he said.
“Paul Le Roux.”
Rivera slammed his fist down on the table, then held my gaze for several seconds in silence. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “This Paul Le Roux,” he said, “is a very badass guy.”
1
The Investigators
2007–2008…Two rookie investigators start pulling on strings…The vastness of RX Limited emerges…Going undercover online…Kent Bailey gets drafted…A phone call to Somalia
The whole thing started with a spreadsheet. DEA investigator Kimberly Brill was sitting in her government-issue cubicle in downtown Minneapolis one afternoon in October 2007 when a package arrived from FedEx. Not just via FedEx, but from the FedEx corporation itself. On a hunch, Brill and another investigator, Steven Holdren, had sent a subpoena to the shipping company weeks before, asking for all records on an account used by a pharmacy called Altgeld Garden Drug, on the South Side of Chicago. Brill and Holdren were what the DEA calls “diversion investigators,” who focus on the ways prescription drugs are diverted into illegal markets. Unlike DEA “agents,” diversion investigators don’t carry guns and have no power to arrest anyone. The glamour busts of cartel bosses and meth distribution rings were typically as distant from Brill and Holdren’s work as a murder case is from a traffic cop’s. Most of their time was spent taking down shady doctors and pharmacy “pill mills,” for overprescribing and overdispensing addictive or dangerous medications.
Altgeld appeared to be just such a target. Brill and Holdren had come across it by searching the Internet for websites selling a drug called phentermine, a type of amphetamine. Phentermine is a “controlled substance” under U.S. law: illegal to sell without a prescription and heavily regulated because of its potential for abuse, making it a classic candidate for diversion. Brill and Holdren had little problem finding online sellers willing to ship it without a prescription. So they’d bought some using undercover names and credit cards, in what the DEA calls a “controlled buy.” When the drugs arrived via FedEx, they had the evidence they needed to go after the pharmacy for illegal distribution. All of this was routine, the kind of low-level buy-and-bust operation that diversion investigators carry out all the time. But Brill and Holdren decided to look one layer deeper: They sent out the subpoena to FedEx requesting data on the shipping account used by Altgeld.
Looking back later, it would seem almost preposterous that such a small decision could lead them into a maze of complexity and criminality, one that connected a small pharmacy in Chicago to a murdered real estate agent in the Philippines. But every chess match has to start with an opening move.
Holdren wasn’t at his cubicle when the FedEx package arrived—he had just stepped out for a walk—so Brill opened it at her desk, extracted a small thumb drive, and popped it into her computer. She opened up the spreadsheet file on it and began scrolling through. Then she picked up the phone and called Holdren on his cell.
“Oh my God, Steve,” she said. “You’ve got to see this.”
* * *
—
Brill and Holdren were, by most measures, still rookies at the DEA—not necessarily the investigators first on the list for big cases. They had met three years before at the DEA Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and were both assigned to the Minnesota office by chance. Brill, a native Minnesotan, had joined the DEA at the age of thirty-three. She’d graduated from the University of North Dakota law school and worked for half a decade as an attorney before deciding to join the government. She was the portrait of a hardworking Midwesterner—friendly and understated, but relentlessly disciplined. “I was a first child, a rule follower,” she said. She was attracted to the DEA by the idea of catching doctors and pharmacists who had betrayed their oaths.
Holdren had spent his whole career in law enforcement, also entering the DEA at thirty-three after stints as a Border Patrol agent and an investigator in the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where he conducted national security background checks. Both investigators were familiar with the basics of tracking Web pharmacies, having undergone an online investigation course as part of their thirteen-week training at Quantico. Called Basic Telecommunications Exploitation, it covered how to use the Internet to build a case using controlled buys.
Long before the national opioid epidemic began making headlines, the DEA had become concerned with the proliferation of prescription drug sales online, and the potential for Web pharmacies to funnel dangerous medication onto American streets. But in their first few years at the DEA, Brill and Holdren both found themselves attacking what they felt was the outer edge of the problem. They would bust one online pharmacy, only to find that another had sprung up in its place. Like a pair of city cops who only picked up corner dealers, they weren’t making a dent in the criminal organization supplying the drugs to the street.
Brill and Holdren had been talking for a while about finding a case to work together, fifty-fifty, something that would go beyond local pharmacy raids. “We were trying to get to the head of the beast,” as Brill put it. “Somebody had to be paying, and somebody had to be profiting greatly. And they needed help running such a large operation. I don’t think we knew. It could be anybody.”
Now, buried in the lines of the spreadsheet on Brill’s screen were the outlines of a case unlike any that they had ever seen.
There were hundreds of thousands of entries, and they weren’t just shipments from one mom-and-pop pharmacy in Chicago. Instead, a single national shipping account, #22328, was being used by more than forty other drugstores. Collectively these pharmacies were shipping thousands of drug orders a week. “You could see that there were these pharmacies all over the country, shipping to customers all over the country,” Brill said.
The account had been registered and paid for by a company called RX Limited. There were several emails and two phone numbers attached to the account, along with Florida and Texas addresses that both turned out to be “mail drops,” a kind of virtual mailbox bought over the Internet. RX Limited itself was registered as a corporation in Delaware. The organization clearly was trying to act like a legitimate American business, but from what Brill and Holdren could tell, it wasn’t any type of pharmaceutical company or wholesale distributor. Other than the mail drops, it seemed to have no real American presence at all.
Whatever RX Limited was, it was engaged in the distribution of a staggering amount of pharmaceuticals. Additional subpoenas produced still more spreadsheets, showing that account #22328 and others connected to it had been used by more than a hundred pharmacies since late 2006. “They were located in different parts of the United States,” Brill later testified. “They were smaller, independent pharmacies, so not things like CVS or Walgreens.” The investigators discovered that in one three-week period in 2007, these pharmacies had collectively shipped more than 57,000 drug orders. The math was mind-boggling: RX Limited was, at a minimum, responsible for shipping millions of orders of prescription drugs a year through FedEx.
The spreadsheets showed that the customers receiving the pills, like the pharmacies sending them, were scattered around the country. Those customers’ orders rarely originated at their local pharmacies. An order placed online in Illinois was just as likely to be shipped from an RX Limited–connected pharmacy in Tennessee as from one down the street.
To understand how all this was possible, Brill and Holdren needed to get inside the pharmacies themselves. Over the next few months, working from opposite ends of the diversion group’s small cluster of cubicles in the DEA’s concrete tower in Minneapolis, they pulled the names of three RX Limited drugstores off the FedEx account, one each in Minnesota, Texas, and Illinois. With the help of the states’ pharmacy boards, they then conducted what looked like routine inspections. On one of the visits, to La Joya Drugs in Chicago, they hit the jackpot: A pharmacy technician happily walked the investigators through the steps they took to fill RX Limited’s online orders. RX Limited had provided La Joya Drugs with a free computer, printer, and FedEx supplies, together with a step-by-step manual. The technician would log on to a website, download a document containing drug orders, then open a custom program called PCMS. Inside PCMS, which seemed to be software created by RX Limited solely for this purpose, the technician could check off each order as it was filled, then generate the FedEx label and send out the drugs.
That explained how these small pharmacies were able to ship such a huge volume: RX Limited was supplying both the orders and the technology to fill them. But where were the orders coming from in the first place?
Holdren typed the name “RX Limited,” together with the Texas mail-drop address, into a search engine and turned up a site called Acmemeds.com. The site looked like a legitimate online drugstore. Calling itself a “trusted online pharmacy since 2004,” it featured a stock photograph of a doctor and a note offering “U.S.-LICENSED PHARMACIES, U.S. LICENSED PHYSICIANS, FEDEX OVERNIGHT SHIPPING.” Visitors to the site could search among dozens of drugs and place an order using a credit card. If they ran into any trouble, they could call a 24/7 toll-free customer service line, or access a live help chat.
By searching the Web using blocks of text and phone numbers they found on Acmemeds.com, Holdren and Brill would eventually discover hundreds of similar websites, with names like Cheaprxmeds.net, Allpharmmeds.com, Buymedscheap.com, Your-pills.com, Speedyrxdrugs.com, All-the-best-rx.com, Ibuymedscheap.com, my-online-drugstore.com, Preapprovedrx.com, Matrixmeds.com, and 123onlinepharmacy.com. Not all of the sites were necessarily owned by RX Limited directly. Many of them appeared to be what are called “affiliates”: a kind of marketing front that independent contractors on the Internet could set up and use to attract drug-buying customers, who were then funneled into the RX Limited network.
To attract affiliates, RX Limited offered a premade website and the promise of a 60 percent commission on every sale. Those commissions were coordinated through sites like RXPayouts.com, Netbizbucks.com, and Pillengine.com. “Open your own online pharmacy,” the banner atop RxPayouts.com proclaimed. “The RxPayouts.com Affiliate Program is the premier pharmacy opportunity on the Internet.” The affiliates’ marketing strategy seemed largely to involve sending spam email to massive mailing lists, and gaming search engines so that a site like Your-pills.com would appear atop the results when someone searched for a particular drug name on Google.
The websites appeared to offer a wide range of drugs, everything from Propecia, the antibaldness pill, to generic forms of Viagra. But when Brill and Holdren started digging into the pharmacies’ records, they discovered that the vast bulk of RX Limited’s business derived from three specific drugs. The first, Ultram, was the brand name for a synthetic opioid called tramadol, which—like the better-known opioids OxyContin and fentanyl—was developing a reputation for abuse, although largely outside of the United States. Soma, generic name carisoprodol, was a muscle relaxant often prescribed for back problems. And the third, Fioricet, was also often prescribed to treat tension headaches and migraines. In addition to being powerful painkillers, the three drugs shared another property Brill and Holdren realized was crucial to RX Limited’s scope: None were considered “controlled substances” by the U.S. government.
Dictated by an ever-evolving law known as the Controlled Substances Act, drugs that the government views as dangerous are classified according to five “schedules,” ranked roughly from most dangerous to least using Roman numerals I through V. Schedule I includes drugs that the U.S. government has deemed lack any medical application and have a high potential for abuse, including heroin and LSD. Schedule II drugs such as OxyContin and fentanyl, by contrast, have medical applications but retain a high potential for abuse and harm. Schedule III drugs are considered slightly less dangerous, and so on.
The RX Limited network of websites did not appear to traffic in scheduled drugs. Indeed, the websites themselves demonstrated a sharp awareness of the lines around U.S. drug law, with prominent disclaimers stating that they did not offer controlled substances. But evidence was growing that Ultram, Soma, and Fioricet weren’t, as commonly portrayed, “safe” alternatives to OxyContin. As far as Brill and Holdren were concerned, the drugs were “habit forming” at a minimum. RX Limited’s focus on these three painkillers, the investigators concluded, was a deliberate effort to avoid legal scrutiny.
If RX Limited was potentially skirting the law in one way, Brill and Holdren suspected it might be breaking it in others. For starters, Fioricet contained an ingredient that was controlled, a schedule III drug called butalbital. In Fioricet, it was mixed with caffeine and acetaminophen, the medication in Tylenol. Whether the combination met the criteria for a controlled substance wasn’t entirely clear, but it hardly mattered: As a technical, legal matter, even noncontrolled drugs required a valid prescription to distribute. RX Limited sites like Acmemeds.com seemed to acknowledge this reality as well, with prominent disclaimers: “Our company is committed to meeting and exceeding all Government regulations covering this new form of healthcare provision. Acmemeds.com will only refer your order to certified physicians that are fully licensed.”
Even if that were true—though the investigators strongly doubted it was—the volume of prescriptions flowing through the FedEx account didn’t make sense. Over the previous sixteen months, Brill and Holdren estimated, RX Limited had delivered seventy-two million doses of painkillers to Americans. Something about RX Limited smelled illegal, and dangerous. They just weren’t exactly sure what it was yet.
The best way to figure it out, they decided, was to start making undercover buys. Brill concocted an identity, “Sarah Johnson,” arranged for a fake Minnesota ID, and bought prepaid credit cards at the nearby Mall of America. Then, on Acmemeds.com and other sites, she signed up as a customer. For an address, she used a mail drop at a FedEx store near the office. Her first order was for thirty tablets of Soma, the muscle relaxant. On the order page, she was taken to a “medical questionnaire” that the site claimed would be reviewed by a doctor. There she was asked to answer yes or no to questions like, “Is your personal healthcare practitioner aware that you are requesting this medication?” and “Have you had a physical exam in the last 12 months?” The questionnaire had a blank space for symptoms. Brill typed in “back spasms” and submitted her order. A customer service representative from the site followed up with an email, reporting that the order had been “queued” for review.
