MICHAEL BRYANT / Inquirer
DEA agent Carlos Aquino with prescription drugs seized in the Bansal investigation. A former Philadelphia cop, he valued interagency cooperation but thought the case looked small-time.
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DrugNet, Chapter 2: Origins
Suspicious packages at the airport lead a DEA agent to Chester. A son leaves India - but not his family's pill business.
Under the improved scheme, bulk quantities - pills by the tens of thousands - would be shipped from India to a Queens rowhouse. In the basement, newly arrived Indian immigrants would earn $6 an hour repackaging and labeling pills. Already, the Armstrongs were filling 400 orders a day.
Contact staff writer John Shiffman at 215-854-2658 or jshiffman@phillynews.com.
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From: Akhil Bansal
To: David Armstrong
Please send the following order and let me know the tracking number. Alprax, 2,000 tabs. Thanks. Success is a journey not a destination!
To further shield the operation, the Armstrongs had UPS pick up the packages from their home, a few miles away. The Armstrongs lived on a busy thoroughfare in Queens called Utopia Parkway.
PAGOSA SPRINGS, COLO.
On a lonely canyon road in southwestern Colorado, a deputy sheriff discovered a middle-age woman facedown outside her Chevy Tahoe, dead.
Inside her SUV, the deputy found packets of the blood-pressure medicine Catapres, pills often abused as a sedative.
The woman's husband knew she had been suicidal. But until he began to go through her things, he did not know that she had been ordering Catapres, Valium and other sedatives online.
The husband gave the receipts and envelopes to police. Some of them bore a return address in Queens - 5028 Utopia Parkway.
Contact staff writer John Shiffman at 215-854-2658 or jshiffman@phillynews.com.
THE REST OF THE STORY
Click here to read the other chapters in the serial.
