Kingpin 2.0?

For a few months, Christopher W. Smith was the Twin Cities’ Britney Spears—our own golden-haired, twenty-five-year-old kid with both a talent prodigious enough to generate an obscene amount of cash and a taste for flouting the social boundaries most decent members of the community feel compelled to observe. Smith didn’t writhe and tease like Britney, but he made the Internet moan to the tune of $24 million by filling dodgy online prescriptions for Vicodin, Xanax, and Cialis before federal agents raided his Lakeville home and Burnsville offices in May 2005.

Like the paparazzi’s perverse relationship to Brit, the local media loved to hate Chris and he seemed to court their resentment. The olds at the Star Tribune tut-tutted this new media punk. They interviewed crotchety neighbors who complained about the fireworks Smith set off every weekend for the neighbor kids outside his $1.1 million home. Of the $18 million in total assets seized by the feds, the paper fixated on the luxury cars worth $1.6 million. On the day Smith was sentenced to thirty years in federal prison, the Strib itemized in a prim sidebar his seventeen exotic rides, including a Ferrari Spider, a Rolls–Royce Phantom, and a Lamborghini Murciélago.

If Minnesotans seethe when co-workers come back from vacation with a tan, some kid who retained a personal bodyguard to drive him around in a Hummer limo was going down. The thing is, a month after the raid, Smith finally seemed to understand that no matter how much fun it was to freak out Lakeville’s bourgeoisie, it might be time to retire the pop star act to a beach somewhere, and that’s where he was, on a Caribbean island off the coast of the Dominican Republic, encamped at a luxury resort with his stripper girlfriend. A judge had released him after the raid, with charges pending, and four days later he dipped.

The U.S. attorneys working the case, Nicole Engisch and Elizabeth Peterson, had fought to include tighter travel restrictions as terms of Judge Michael Davis’s preliminary injunction, issued to halt the operation of Smith’s Internet pharmacy. The U.S. Attorney’s Office intended to make a big media splash by bringing Smith to justice. The feds were trumpeting new statistics showing Vicodin, the soccer dads’ latest buzz of choice, to be a bigger seller than both heroin and cocaine, but they needed their poster boy for the illegal Internet pharmacy to be in the country if they were going to print any posters.

Smith’s wife, Anita, thought he was probably gone for good. For some time, she had believed their marriage was coming apart. Even before the FBI and the IRS began a joint investigation, she knew that Smith, planning to expand into Canada to hedge his bets, had been flying his private jet to Montreal to set up a new call center, adding to an already heavy travel burden. He was constantly away, leaving her to raise her teenage daughter and their three-year-old son by herself. While he used to “act like a little pervert,” always grabbing at her breasts, trying to initiate sex, now, when he was home, he was short-tempered and rarely touched her. There was definitely something going on—and there were rumors around the office (her sister worked for the online pharmacy) that he was seeing another woman.

“I thought he was abandoning us,” Anita says. “I thought he wasn’t coming back.” She had started seeing somebody new herself, a guy she had met through a friend at a softball game. The new guy was more mature than Chris, more grown-up, she says. He didn’t have that baby face or carry the baby fat that Chris did, and he wasn’t constantly talking in his “Cartman voice” the way Chris did. He definitely didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would hide porn from her on the Internet. Or somebody who’d hack into her e-mail and text messages.