Akhil Bansal, the Temple MBA student who in his off time managed a multimillion-dollar drug importing business with his father. The 26-year-old Bansal, seen here in a self-portrait in his Roxborough apartment, ran a U.S. operation that shipped about 75,000 pills a day for Internet pharmacies.
HENRY ON THE PARK APARTMENTS, ROXBOROUGH
Fighting a fever with pepper cardamom tea, the graduate student raced through his homework and e-mailed a PowerPoint presentation to classmates. American business school seemed so easy. Group homework assignments. Exam review sessions. Online classes. Open-book tests!
And now, on April 18, 2005, Akhil Bansal stood on the cusp of earning an MBA and a master's in health-care finance from Temple University, golden American degrees that would catapult his career back home in India.
He smirked at the irony of that evening's twin assignments, health-care marketing and generic-drug risk management, subjects in which he had more than a passing interest.
If they only knew...
Since his arrival in Philadelphia in 2003, this studious foreigner, with his rumpled flannel shirts and cocksure demeanor, had at age 26 blossomed into a global businessman.
While classmates studied case histories and created mock businesses, Akhil made real money. He controlled offshore accounts worth $6 million. He bought four cars and a sleek five-bedroom condo in a swank suburb of New Delhi. He could fly his fiancée to London on a whim. The balance in his free student checking account stood at $401,881.
How This Series Was Produced
|
His family's business was simple. From its base in India, the company supplied Internet pharmacies on four continents. The Bansals were the guys who supplied the guys who sent that relentless spam, luring American consumers with cheap Viagra, no-prescription Ambien, next-day codeine.
Akhil oversaw the family's North American operations, shipping roughly 75,000 pills a day via UPS. In a little more than a year, the network had smuggled 11 million prescription tablets to more than 60,000 American addresses, an operation that grossed at least $8 million. These numbers did not include the steroids or the kilo shipments of the tranquilizer ketamine, a club drug called "Special K."
The family's Internet business represented a dark slice of the global economy so new, and so widespread, that national governments were still struggling to understand it, let alone police it.
Laws were vague, outdated, inconsistent. Technology - new medicines and ways to deliver them - was outpacing regulation.
Demand grew monthly. On this moonlit evening in April 2005, for example, the Bansal business had an additional six million tablets and 108 kilos of ketamine stockpiled in a cluttered garage and a warehouse in suburban Queens, N.Y.
There were risks, yes. Some clients paid slowly; some employees stole. More ominously, a valued client, one Web operator Akhil supplied, had been arrested on drug charges just days before.
Indeed, in an overseas phone call that very morning Akhil and his father, Brij Bansal, had discussed this arrest, spooked but reminding themselves again that what they were doing was legal: Both were doctors, after all, and in India most of the medicines they sold did not require a prescription.
Even so, the father sensed something wrong.
"Close all your bank accounts and transfer online," Brij told Akhil. "Keep an open ticket ready, and as soon as you smell trouble you can leave by the time they reach you."
"Yeah... . OK, Papaji."
ANJUMAN HOTEL, AGRA, INDIA
Seven thousand miles away, a thin Indian drug agent with a rust-colored goatee perched over a laptop in a sweaty hotel room not far from the Taj Mahal.
