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.

Chris had acted like a jackass on the first day she met him, she recalls. First, he lied about his age, telling her he was nineteen, when he was really two years younger. Then, after he installed a CD player in her Grand Prix, she agreed to give him a ride, only to end up scolding him for shooting paint balls out the window.

Chris Smith with Anita and family in happier days.

Still, Anita missed Chris. He brought out her silly side. And even though their marriage was full of drama—she says they had both messed around with other people before—he was a good father to the kids. Plus, she loved the gifts he gave her, including her Mercedes AMG convertible. And he set her up with a limo company to run, though he didn’t understand why she wanted to work when she didn’t have to. And that baby face of his was actually really cute. Most of all, Anita says, she considered Chris a genius—as do most people who have spent any time around him (even the feds working his case). He was weird, possessive, and paranoid, but for as long as she’d known him, he could do things with gadgets and computers that nobody else could do—things nobody else could even understand.

So when he called her cell phone from the resort on Turks and Caicos in June 2005, she picked up, even though the new guy was with her in the room. She was excited to hear Chris’s voice, though she could hear his new girlfriend—the stripper—crying in the background. “I’m coming home, Anita,” Chris said. “I love you.”

When FBI agent George Kyrilis was tipped off that Smith was coming home to save his marriage, he was amused. In the month since Smith’s release, Smith had violated the judge’s order and was found in contempt of court. According to Kyrilis, Smith, while on “vacation,” had withdrawn $2,000 from one of his frozen bank accounts and had set up two new websites to sell pharmaceuticals. Both his wife and his girlfriend (and Smith’s bodyguard and others) separately had flown to Turks and Caicos with thousands in cash in apparent seed money. Kyrilis considered Smith a brazen thug, but every time Chris did something sketchy, it took agents hours of computer research to connect it to the guy—hours of wading through cyberspace, deciphering cryptic instant-message conversations, trying to match Internet service providers and screen names with real people and real addresses.

When agents arrested Smith at the Lindbergh Terminal baggage carousel around midnight on July 1, 2005, Kyrilis smiled when Chris asked, “You don’t like me very much, do you”

“Actually, no,” Kyrilis replied. “Nothing personal, but no.”

“Why” Smith wanted to know.

“Because you’re making me work too hard, Chris. You’re making me work too damn hard.”

Whether you’re Agent Kyrilis and consider Smith a supervillain or Anita and think he’s a superhero, most people who know him agree that when it comes to computers, he possesses a superpower. And as with all superpowers, Smith’s power comes with a freaky origin story.

Smith is a high school dropout who left Holy Angels Academy three weeks before graduation. Though he’d received terrible marks in English and history, when it came to math and computer science, he says he was “way smarter than the teachers.” He built his own servers, networks, and advanced routing systems while still in school and taught himself difficult computer operating-system languages such as C++ and Perl.

As a budding entrepreneur, he modeled himself after his father, Scott, whose most successful business, Diaper Deck, was the first company to make the fold-down changing tables found in public restrooms. In the 1970s, Scott was a cocky ski instructor in the sporting goods business and then jumped into restaurants. In 1975, he refurbished the old Forum cafeteria and opened Scottie’s, Minneapolis’s classiest discotheque. When he was forced to shut it down during construction of City Center in 1980, he sued the construction company for damages and won a lawsuit that required it to rebuild Scottie’s piece by piece in the new mall. While he waited for all 330,000 pieces to be put back together, he bought Schieks, long a fixture (now a strip club) on 4th Street downtown. Then, above Schieks, he created Graffitti’s, a dance club capitalizing on the newfound fascination with the urban art form. Scott was killing it—besides the businesses, he owned two houses and was married to Candace, a smokin’ blond flight attendant for North Central Airlines. After four years of marriage, they started a family—Chris was born in 1980 and Corbin, Chris’s sister, in 1984.

Scott planned to expand Graffitti’s into the nation’s top college markets, beginning with Tempe, Arizona, home of Arizona State, named America’s number-one party school by Playboy. He was flying frequently between the Twin Cities and Tempe and bought a house for Candace and the kids on the ninth hole of a Tempe golf course.

Then, a few weeks before the opening, the guy he hired to manage the new club asked for a ride to the airport. Scott let him drive his new Mercedes. En route, a fully loaded semitrailer truck going sixty-five miles an hour T-boned the car on the passenger side. It took emergency workers three hours to cut Scott out of the wreckage and he lost twenty-six units of blood at the scene. The driver walked away, but Scott’s back was broken, his optic nerve was cut, and a severed carotid artery flooded his brain with blood. He spent three months in a Tempe hospital, in and out of consciousness, his head swollen to twice its normal size.

Chris Smith with his father and son last year.

Scott says the family was never the same after the accident. Returning home after experimental surgery at UCLA during which doctors plugged the damaged artery with a tiny balloon, Scott and his wife slept in separate bedrooms. “Candace never touched me again,” he says. “And when I’d have seizures, she would hiss, ‘Not in front of the kids’ ”

A year later, the couple separated, and they eventually divorced. It was a nasty, costly settlement—Candace sued Scott, he says, for half of his insurance money from the accident—and, though both of them went on to remarry, to this day the former spouses badmouth each other to anybody who will listen.

Scott’s seizures were eventually controlled with medication, but the accident left him blind in his right eye and with some memory loss. He lost both Graffitti’s and Schieks, spending hundreds of thousands on legal fees, and he says his accountant betrayed him, failing to pay back taxes, which left him owing $190,000 to the IRS. Through it all, he remained an entrepreneur with a chip on his shoulder—and the primary example for his precocious son. In spite of the problems, Scott recaptured some of his former success with Diaper Deck, which he founded in 1987 in a Cannon Falls warehouse and had grown in value to $3 million. He bought two homes on Lake Minnetonka and a vacation home in Vail and indulged his children, buying Corbin an American saddle-bred show horse and Chris whatever new video game console or computer model he wanted.

During that period, Corbin and her gigantic horse, CH L.A. Times, were the stars of the Chanhassen horse scene. Corbin was the golden girl, a national champion, often going home with trophies bigger than she was. Chris, meanwhile, took on the role of a loner. During his sister’s shows, he could be found in the parking lot, blasting Tupac in the flashy white Land Rover Discovery his daddy gave him for his sixteenth birthday. Still, Chris wasn’t your typical spoiled rich kid. Sure, he spent hours in front of a computer screen playing Doom, but from the age of eleven he worked hard though he never had to. He loved making money.

His first “real jobs” were mowing the neighbors’ lawns in the summer and running a snow-blowing service come winter. Money, he will tell you to this day, has always been the most important motivator in his life. “Growing up,” he says, “I saw that my dad always had businesses and was always successful. And I thought that was my job as the son—to earn money.”

He found ways to make more and more money, bringing home $150 to $200 a gig as a magician at kids’ birthday parties. “Dude, these were just rinky-dink magic shows,” he recalls with a laugh. “This wasn’t, like, Cardini the Great.” Then he bought a cart (“My dad gave me a loan”) and sold minidoughnuts and cotton candy at Burnsville’s RiverDays and other festivals and parades. When he turned sixteen, his dad helped him open a car radio warehouse, Ultimate Audio, next to one of the Diaper Deck warehouses in Cannon Falls. “At first it was just to trick out my own ride,” he explains. “I had an extra alternator installed I was running so much juice—I was basically running the equivalent of a second air conditioning system the entire time. So I figured if I bought in bulk, I could actually make money on this by beating stereo shop prices in the city.”

Finding a lower price online became a competitive strategy. By the time he was seventeen, Chris was selling radar detectors online—“But I never sold them in Minnesota, because I knew that was illegal,” he says—and then parts for cable television pirate boxes.

In 1997, at the age of seventeen, Smith started his first online marketing company, Rivernet Internet Services, also based in Cannon Falls. Later that year, he met Anita, twenty-one, at the town Dairy Queen, then, despite the protests of both of his parents, moved her and her daughter into his condo. They had a son of their own in 2001 and were married in August 2003.

Chris supported his instant family by becoming one of cyberspace’s most notorious spammers. He was proud of his online handle, which had a supervillain ring to it: “The Rizler.”

At this point in the Information Age, somebody who sends spam is regarded with only slightly more esteem than the dudes entrapped on that late-night TV show trying to “meet” thirteen-year-old girls online. But back in 1998, when Chris Smith was an eighteen-year-old computer genius running a business out of his bedroom, spamming wasn’t illegal or even widely despised. It was regarded as merely the cyberspace version of annoying but effective direct mail and telephone marketing. The results were better back then too, because people’s inboxes weren’t inundated with the crap.

But crap it was. Smith admits to selling “naturally extracted pheromones” that made you smell like rotten fish and “herbal penile enlargement pills” that, uh, probably didn’t work. But he made the business work for him—at one point writing a program that trolled so effectively for e-mail addresses that a company would pay him $60,000 for an afternoon of work.

In 2004, the federal government passed an antispamming law, and Smith swears he stopped immediately (AOL Time Warner disagrees, settling for $1.7 million, according to the Star Tribune, in a 2006 suit that Smith, concentrating on his criminal defense at the time, didn’t contest). Regardless, after repeatedly listening to his father, who had lost everything more than once, make the point that the only person looking out for you is you, Chris had adopted his own peculiar but effective business ethos. “I learned at a very young age that you have to be on the line between good and bad,” he says. “There’s innovation there. I mean, maybe not between good and bad, but you want to be closer to the line between legal and illegal, but you always stay on the side of legality.” In fact, whether it was radar detectors, cable boxes, penis enlargers, or Vicodin, Smith embraced his inner gray area. After he stopped spamming, he wrote software for an online casino based in Costa Rica, traveling to San Jose during the week and spending weekends with Anita and the kids. But another one of his father’s lessons was never far from his mind: “Never work for the man.”

In the fall of 2004, Smith was freelancing for the online casino and running a carpet-cleaning business in the Twin Cities, but he wasn’t getting the returns he had as a teenage spammer. Some virtual buddies from his spamming days—IM pals scattered around the country—had moved into the online pharmacy business, and they were telling him how successful they were. Here, it seemed, was the ultimate lucrative gray area—the pharmacy 2.0. Hot-selling brand-name pharmaceuticals such as Vicodin were easy to get if you could find a doctor willing to buy the “Jeez, doc, my wrist really hurts when it rains” routine. So why not make it even easier, Smith thought, using the Internet to connect the consumer to the right doctor and charging a premium for the convenience of FedEx delivery?

Following his friends’ advice, Smith created a model for his new business, which he called Xpress Pharmacy Direct. He rented office space in Burnsville from the landlord of his carpet-cleaning-company warehouse. He used a New Jersey “broker,” John “Johnny G” Guerriero, to find a doctor who would write the prescriptions, and he selected a New Brunswick physician named Phillip Mach, who would eventually write hundreds of prescriptions a day at $7 a pop without ever seeing a patient. He hired a New York accountant, Bruce Liebermann, to facilitate the credit card payments and Scott Poe, a friend from his spamming days, and Darrell Griepp, a local business executive with sales experience, to line up pharmacies and identify customers. Residents of a local halfway house, 180 Degrees, were enlisted to work a call center to support his seventeen websites selling drugs. His legal team, headed by Dan Adkins and John Nelson, assured him that everything was run according to Hoyle. That most of the hires were almost twice his age didn’t seem to faze him in the least.

Supply was the initial problem. Smith was buying the pills in India, but the quality was consistently terrible—generic ibuprofen sold as Vicodin, et cetera—and often the shipments were destroyed by customs officials. Then, in June 2004, Smith began buying the drugs from five small-town pharmacies scattered around the country—in Fallbrook, California; East St. Louis, Illinois; Rutherford College, North Carolina; Astoria, Oregon; and Seymour, Wisconsin—struggling mom-and-pop drug stores squeezed by Wal-Mart and CVS. The orders came in by phone or the Internet and were relayed to the pharmacies, which FedExed the medications directly to Xpress Pharmacy customers. To expedite matters, Smith and his team swooped in on his private jet and set up computers and a mobile call center on a pharmacy’s premises.

Xpress Pharmacy’s growth was explosive. With clients willing to pay exorbitant prices—eighty Vicodin could cost as much as $599, including jacked-up shipping costs—and with no insurance company bureaucracy to clog the process or split revenue, the cash flow was ridiculous. According to the FBI’s Kyrilis, within the first year monthly sales were in the millions and Brinks trucks were beating a path between Wells Fargo and Smith’s office. Xpress Pharmacy soon had a staff of eighty-five, and Smith was renting more and more space at the Burnsville office park. Other renters watched with growing curiosity as the pudgy twentysomething kid wearing an untucked button-down and dirty khakis arrived at the office in a late-model Maybach, then shuffled into the building.

Kyrilis was first tipped off by one of Smith’s office park neighbors. The agent had spent twenty-nine years investigating white-collar crime—he put away a former mayor of Edina, Glenn Smith, on embezzlement charges back in 1999—and was a highly skilled tracker of assets and excavator of financial gray areas. But in 2003, he was forty-eight, working for the local office’s cybercrime task force, and planning to retire. “I ran one Google search on Chris Smith and found out he was a prolific spammer,” he says. “And shortly after I opened my investigation, the IRS contacted me and said they were also investigating Chris.” In a matter of weeks, Kyrilis believed he had a “major drug case.”

“You could have charged him on every prescription that he made, because every prescription was illegal,” Kyrilis says. “And the wires were used and the mail was used—each prescription was sent through FedEx.” He sighs. “This guy was nothing more than an online drug dealer. He was selling his prescriptions—primarily painkillers—targeting addicts. Knowing that addicts wouldn’t complain, knowing that addicts would be repeat customers. Eighty-five percent of his sales were for hydrocodone-based products. I mean, has your pharmacist ever called you to solicit a refill? It was clearly a slam-dunk drug case.”

Except, as anybody who’s ever found a Viagra ad in his inbox should understand, there isn’t a single drug law that specifically addresses online pharmaceutical sales, making enforcement a selective effort at best. The U.S. Attorney’s Office was in new legal territory with online drug sales and prosecutors wanted to set a precedent: They charged Smith with a “continuing criminal enterprise.” Otherwise known as the “kingpin law,” the CCE concept grew out of the 1972 federal Controlled Substances Act. Smith’s prosecutors had made a dramatic decision—to invoke a law used to prosecute Colombian drug lords to put away a twenty-six-year-old computer geek who once sold penis-popping pills.

“I remember—it must’ve been in March 2006 when we were a few weeks before the trial—I was talking to someone at [the Justice Department] in D.C.,” former assistant U.S. attorney Elizabeth Peterson recalls. “I told him we had ultimately charged [Smith] under the kingpin statute. He said, ‘Wait, what drugs are you dealing with?’ I said, ‘Well, Vicodin was his bestseller.’ The individual said, ‘He wasn’t even selling Oxycontin? You guys are crazy to think you’re gonna get a kingpin charge on someone who wasn’t dealing with Oxycontin.’ ” Her colleague’s skepticism only strengthened Peterson’s resolve—she believed Vicodin to be a dangerous drug, regardless of its inferior legal status. “I became all the more convinced we were doing the right thing and that we would ultimately prevail,” she says.

Smith’s parents hired Joe Friedberg, one of the best local defense lawyers money could buy, but the government’s mountain of evidence against Chris and codefendants Liebermann, Adkins, and Griepp would prove insurmountable, although the fed’s case had its challenges—not the least of which was explaining to the jury the meaning of common cyberspeak such as LOL (“laugh out loud”) and ROFLMFAO (“rolling on the floor, laughing my fucking ass off”). The company e-mails and instant messages were written in the snarky, blithely derisive tone endemic to the medium: “These $599 packages are popular,” Smith wrote. “Fucking addicts. LOL.” Beyond that, it was a matter of showing slides of Smith’s fabulous cars, showcasing testimony about how he cheated on his wife, and interviewing customers who had ordered Vicodin via his online operation.

Smith’s only chance lay in the language of the law. In order to convict him under the kingpin statute, the jury had to believe he was “acting as a drug dealer and trafficker as conventionally understood.” Friedberg forbade Smith from wearing a suit and tie to court, having him show up in the same tech-geek ensemble he wore to work. And he argued that the online model—with only virtual contact connecting doctor, “patient,” and pharmacy—was quite different from the model you would find, say, on a North Minneapolis street corner. But the prosecution portrayed Smith as a kid swimming in cash, who was paranoid to the point of training cameras on his employees and making them walk through metal detectors, who had a sexy wife and a stripper girlfriend who was shuttled around by a bodyguard whose fingerless gloves were wrapped around the wheel of a $300,000 automobile.

After a six-week trial, the jury awarded the state its unprecedented conviction—the first of its kind against a nondoctor and nonpharmacist in an online pharmacy case, according to Peterson—and Judge Davis sentenced Smith to thirty years in prison.

“I failed him,” says Friedberg, who rarely loses. “We needed a plain reading of the law, and we didn’t get the jury instruction I needed.” But the lawyer says he’s most disappointed that he couldn’t persuade his client to cooperate with the government. He shakes his head. “If I could have controlled this kid’s conduct and if he really would have worked with me as I thought he was going to in negotiating with the government, he’d probably be getting ready to get out.” Instead, says Friedberg, Smith refused to cooperate, obfuscating and lying outright in a proffer hearing with the FBI. “The idea that he didn’t do anything wrong is ridiculous,” says Friedberg.

When I ask him what he said to talk some sense into Smith, he stares at me. “What I told him is privileged, but what do you think?” he says. “No rules apply to Chris. That’s how he was brought up. And Chris Smith is just not as smart as he thinks he is. He’s clever, but he thinks he understands the legal subtleties and he really doesn’t.”

At one point, the government agreed to a five-year prison deal, according to Friedberg, but Smith’s conduct between his arrest and his conviction doomed him to the thirty-year term. From his arrest in June 2005 to his sentencing in 2007, Smith tormented the staffs of three separate holding facilities—attempting everything from sneaking a computer into a halfway house to sneaking Xanax into the Sherburne County jail.

Perhaps the most egregious example of Smith’s self-destructiveness and a reminder of his computer genius is the way Smith used a new Internet technology to bypass the security systems at Sherburne County and send data over the phone to do business. According to Kyrilis, Smith had another inmate go through the yellow pages to find a disconnected law office number. “By the time he found one that would work,” Kyrilis says, “he got all the way to the Ks.” Smith then used his lawyers to get the number to a contact in the Philippines, Roanna Cleofe, who registered the 612 number with Integra, an Internet company that specializes in voiceover Internet protocol, which allows voice and data to travel over the same network. “She would just answer, ‘Law office,’ and then forward his calls anywhere he wanted.”

According to Kyrilis, no one monitored the first forty or so calls, but when someone at the Sherburne County jail finally did, Smith was recorded talking to Cleofe about plans to murder a federal witness. One of the recordings was introduced at Smith’s trial; it begins with Chris complaining about Anita’s attitude, then crescendos into talk about violent action against the family of Bernadette Hollis, the so-called “Spam Queen” of Kansas City and one of the government’s key witnesses.

Chris Smith: When we get a little closer to trial, you know, I think we’re gonna have to hire a private detective to get pictures of Berni’s kids. And we can do a little bit of e-mailing and electronic influence about a week before trial.

Roanna Cleofe: About what?

CS: Just let her know that, you know, if she wants to talk on the stand, that’s perfectly fine, but we’re also going to give her the option of picking which one of her kids she’s going to sacrifice for doing so.

RC: Are you sure?

CS: What, you think I’m joking?

RC: That’s scary.

CS: So is going to prison for twenty years.

RC: [Sighs.]

CS: This is a kill-or-be-killed world. One of my lawyers wanted to have her taken out altogether. [Laughs.] I mean you know what kind of services I’m looking for, right?

RC: Yes, yes.

CS: Alright.

RC: ’Cause I know [my uncle] knows someone from China and I’m not sure if—and Russia—I’m not sure if, you know—

CS: I mean I’m looking for like a full service.

RC: Yeah.

CS: There was a famous comment by Joseph Stalin, the most powerful man of the whole world. You want to know what it was?

RC: What?

CS: “No man, no problem.”

RC: [Laughs.] OK.

CS: I’m really not joking. I got to get out of here.

RC: I know.

CS: I got to get out of here. That’s the only way I can do it.

In the end, two of Chris Smith’s codefendants, Bruce Liebermann and Dan Adkins, were acquitted. Darrell Griepp pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to two years probation. Phillip Mach, the New Jersey doctor who wrote the prescriptions, was convicted, but is currently serving only eighteen months in exchange for his cooperation. Smith’s bodyguard, Ronald Miller, was convicted of bulk cash smuggling and is serving a thirteen-month sentence. Former spammer Scott Poe is still at large. No one at any of the small-town pharmacies was charged.

Since Smith’s sentencing last August, I’ve spoken with him several times by phone. (The warden of the Big Sandy supermax facility in Inez, Kentucky, has refused to permit in-person interviews because of “security issues” associated with “raising the profile of the prisoner.”) Even at a distance, Smith is a naive charmer—he seems to truly believe that he has done nothing wrong. He says the alleged conspiracy to kill a federal witness was completely blown out of proportion during the trial. He was just “blowing off steam over Anita,” he says, and he was never indicted on that charge anyway. Ironically, he blames his erratic behavior during the trial on the feds’ cutting off his medication. “I have severe ADHD, man,” he says. “And when they took me off Xanax, I would have panic attacks. I’m on lithium now, and look at my file—not one problem since they started medicating me.”

Since his incarceration, Anita has divorced him and is raising their son, who’s now seven, by herself in the Lakeville house the government is threatening to confiscate. Smith is concentrating on his forthcoming appeal, but with his assets frozen or seized, he’s been forced to let his high-priced counsel go and to retain a public defender. Smith’s parents and sister are devastated, and his mother refuses to talk to the media. Chris, who has attempted to kill himself, according to Kyrilis, remains defiant and angry about being made an example.

“There are still plenty of Internet pharmacies,” Smith says, alluding to more permissive cultures where a twenty-five-year-old behind the wheel of a Ferrari doesn’t raise eyebrows. “If I would’ve been in Florida, I would’ve been fine,” he says. Like a good jailhouse lawyer, he’s spent months parsing the “Was this standard medical practice?” question directed to the jury and cites a litany of cases he says will exonerate him.

He says, “They think we all got together and sat in a room and said we’re going to do this big illegal drug enterprise and we all know it’s wrong, and we’re going to do it right in the middle of Burnsville instead of some other country, and we’re just gonna break all these laws and do it knowingly and willingly—that’s what they want to believe happened. It’s ridiculous.”

He denies Friedberg’s account of turning down a five-year deal.

He disputes, moreover, the idea that his conduct during the trial brought him down. “If I had been an angel and never done anything on pretrial release, the least the judge could’ve given me is thirty years,” he insists. “I’m not guilty! They wanted me to lie and say that what the doctor was doing was illegal, what the pharmacy was doing was illegal, what my employees were doing was illegal, and Joe wanted me to lie for them, and when I wouldn’t, then all of sudden I’m lying because I didn’t go with the story they wanted.

“Any time you’re innovating and being a pioneer in something, you’re going to be on the line. Look at the guy who sold the Girls Gone Wild videotapes, Joe Francis. He’s sitting in a Las Vegas jail right now—for what? You know what I’m saying? People don’t like the fact that he makes $100 million on eighteen-year-old girls. They have daughters, you know what I mean, and they just don’t like it. Is it illegal? No, it’s not. Is he going to have his day in court? Probably, you know what I mean? The issue is nobody’s going to like it, and they’re going to rub that shit in the face of the jury, the whole Girls Gone Wild thing, and he’s lucky to live in Las Vegas instead of Minneapolis. If he’s in Minneapolis, he might as well just pack up and move away.”

When you ask Smith why he didn’t leave the Twin Cities for good—to find someplace more permissive, where he could operate without all that upright Midwestern scrutiny on the part of his neighbors—he doesn’t hesitate before responding.

“I had family here, man,” he says. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I think I did something wrong when I was unfaithful to my wife. And I ignored my kid a lot for the business. But as far as the business goes, I think it was completely legal, and I think when the appeals court rules, they are going to exonerate me completely.”