ROXBOROUGH

Sitting on his Value City mattress, Akhil began most mornings with chocolate, a Coke, and a call to his father.

As the enterprise grew, and as Akhil became schooled in the ways of American business, the tenor of the calls changed. Now the son took charge.

"Papaji," he said in one call. "You must slow down. All your hard work will be gone."

Akhil, cocksure and 26, began to realize that his father was a terrible businessman. Brij trusted people too much, overpaid staff. He let the online pharmacies they supplied go weeks without paying.

This drove Akhil nuts. By January, clients owed the Bansals more than $800,000.

Akhil, an MBA student at a prestigious American university, urged his dad to cut off the deadbeats. Brij hesitated. He had trouble saying no.

While he let Akhil control the finances - $4 million stashed in a dozen U.S. and offshore accounts - he questioned some of his son's moves. In one call, Brij erupted in fury after learning that Akhil was selling customer data to spammers. They were using the information to make follow-up calls to pill customers - some of them addicts - pushing them to buy more.

To Brij, this seemed dishonorable. Akhil insisted it was OK.

"It's America, Papaji. Everything is for sale."

NEWNAN, GA.

DEA agent Shawn Ellerman studied the e-mail that had brought him from New York to this rural ranch home not far from the Alabama border:

To: Interphar

From: Diane Graybeal

Please do not send or charge my credit card for this purchase. My daughter ordered this without my permission and she passed away on the 27th of November from over-medication.

Thank you.

Graybeal's daughter, Sarah, had bought 25 10-milligram tabs of generic Valium for $198. DEA had discovered the order and the mother's message in a stack of e-mails seized from Interphar, the Costa Rican online pharmacy, which the Bansals supplied.

If Ellerman could prove that Bansal pills were killing people, DEA might nail the Indians for murder, not just drug dealing.

In October, Ellerman had flown to Colorado, where another Bansal customer had died. Prosecutors were reviewing Ellerman's report, but that woman's death looked like a suicide.