Dabney tried again. He'd met the Indian driving a cab.

Carlos gave a cold stare. "Dude, don't lie to me."

Dabney insisted the story was true.

Fine, Carlos said. Help us catch this guy. Wear a wire.

Dabney agreed.

As Carlos drove back to his Chinatown office, he called a federal prosecutor.

"Hey, it's Carlos. I've got a new one, a quick-hit indictment. A no-brainer. Interested?"

ROXBOROUGH

Akhil confronted his roommate, fellow Temple student Atul Patil.

Where was Dabney? Patil was the one who had met him in the cab and had his cell-phone number.

Akhil didn't trust Dabney. He seemed like a hustler. And his English was terrible. Akhil liked to joke that Dabney, who was African American, spoke "Ebonics."

Still, mailing pills for Brij was beginning to interfere with Akhil's studies. He needed a shipper, one who did the job and didn't ask questions.

The Bansals did not operate Web sites. They were bigger than that. They were wholesalers who fulfilled the orders American consumers sent to online pharmacies.

To circumvent U.S. customs, Brij shipped large packages of generic pills from India to Akhil in Philadelphia. Here, Akhil and Patil took up the mindless task of reshipping; while listening to B-101's soft rock, they wrote labels and stuffed packages with generic Ambien, Xanax, Viagra, Valium, codeine, morphine, steroids.

Father and son told themselves what they were doing was legal because both were doctors in India and because Brij had an Indian license to ship pharmaceuticals.

Besides, they told associates, if the authorities concluded that shipping the medicines was illegal, someone would send a warning notice. Which the Bansals would, of course, honor.

In the beginning, two or three dozen packages from India were no trouble. But by exam time, Akhil and Patil were receiving 100 packages at once. A day's shipment could contain 5,000 or 10,000 pills.

So they had found Dabney and paid him $3 a package. For fun, they tipped him with surplus Viagra.

Now Dabney had vanished. Akhil pressed Patil. What had Dabney done with their drugs?