Dealing Drugs with Dad
If you're like me, you get bombarded with spam e-mails trying to sell you medicine "cheap, cheap, cheap." Now we have someone to blame for clogging up our inboxes. The Philadelphia Inquirer just completed a masterful crime series by John Shiffman that traces the massive global trade in illegal pills. In "Drugnet: In Pursuit of Cyberspace Drug Dealers," Shiffman tells the story of Akhil Bansal, a Temple University business student, who made at least $8 million in little over a year by conspiring with his father to supply 75,000 illegal pills a day for sales over the Internet. Shiffman does a great job weaving together Bansal's criminal exploits with the efforts of the federal agents trying to catch up to him. To report this story, Shiffman interviewed more than 50 sources in the U.S. and India and examined bank records, grand jury transcripts, wiretap recordings, and DEA and Homeland Security and investigative reports.