Ellerman felt sorry for the mother, so he sat with her at the kitchen table looking at family photographs. Mrs. Graybeal, thrilled that someone cared about her daughter, asked why DEA had sent Ellerman all the way from New York.

Ellerman couldn't discuss the case, but he told her, "Watch the news. You're going to see something big soon."

CENTER CITY

Federal grand juries convene in a restricted area on the sixth floor of the Nix Federal Building, a Moderne structure on Market Street. The secret sessions are often formal affairs, with dry testimony about paperwork and financial minutiae.

But as light snow fell outside on this January morning, jurors inside Room No. 2 seemed anything but bored. From a mahogany witness box, DEA agent Eric Russ explained the scope of the Bansal network. Grand jurors were outraged.

"How can they be so brazen about this?" one asked. "I mean, there's no doctor involved."

Said another: "I used to get spam, I'm pretty sure, and I just ignored it because I don't have a prescription. How do they get people to go for it?"

Russ had already testified twice to these grand jurors, laying out preliminaries - how the trail led to Australia and back, and how the case was growing in complexity and scope. Frankly, Russ would have been satisfied to make the arrests by now. But prosecutors wanted more evidence, more bad guys, an airtight case. They always did.

At this appearance, Russ gave grand jurors the big picture, including some of the seedier clients: Rx-mart.com, pillbasket.com, ourprescriptionsforless.com, bigcitymeds.com, myemeds.com, getsomemeds.com, ezfreescripts.com.

"The majority... look like a professional Web site where you would go and order anything," Russ told the grand jurors. "They will have a list of medications they may classify by painkillers, sleep aids, diet aids, things like that... . No requirement to fill out... description of symptoms... . No place to fax or bring your prescription."

When pills arrive, "there is no doctor's note telling you how to take it or anything like that. It's just the Valium in a box."

One customer merited special notice, Russ said: a guy using the e-mail name "Millerlight." He stood apart for two reasons.

One, Millerlight didn't order pills. He ordered ketamine powder, a sedative abused as a club drug, by the kilo.

Two, while the Web site operators paid Akhil by wiring money into his bank accounts, Millerlight paid cash. He bundled big bills like bricks and shipped them by UPS directly to Akhil.

Just like a street dealer.

ROXBOROUGH

As the total owed to the Bansals by online pharmacies climbed toward $1 million, Akhil began to lose his patience. From the computer in his spartan bedroom, he e-mailed a terse note to longtime customers:

In this business we take all the risk right from buying of medicine from India, sending it to USA, storage in USA and then shipping it to your customer's doors. On the other hand you guys sit in an unknown country, with web servers in a different country and merchant account in yet another different country. You have no risk in this business aside from losing future money.

I wrote the above paragraph to convey that we take all the risk for MONEY. If we are not paid on time or not paid in full, we have no incentive to take all the risks and work with a client.