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In this episode of American Greed.

Aaron Shammo was the kid next door.

Eagle Scout.

Churchgoer.

Kingpin. He ran a criminal syndicate that had numerous people underneath him.

Millions of dollars.

Aaron Shammo is a clean -cut millennial from Salt Lake City.

A young man with the resources to succeed.

He had very, very good parents, good siblings, and really sort of fashioned

himself a little bit of an entrepreneur.

But despite his daily affirmations and positive thinking, he's breaking bad.

Very bad.

He was down in the basement running a pill press.

And you're able to produce 7 ,000 to 10 ,000 pills an hour, and you're churning

out pills all day. You do the math.

Tonight, the story of an unlikely dark web drug lord whose lifestyle is

documented in social media photos that would come back to haunt him at trial.

A story told by the reporters who chased him.

You have a stereotype of what a drug kingpin is, and I don't think for a lot

people he would necessarily fit that stereotype.

The feds who collared him.

This product went to all 50 states.

And the amount going to each place was just astronomical.

And the families whose lives he'd change forever.

When we found out it was made in someone's basement, we were just like,

to be kidding me.

This was one pill.

They didn't know what they were really buying.

Mr. Shamwell was motivated entirely by greed.

It's 10 a .m. on a quiet residential street in the picturesque suburb of

Cottonwood Heights, Utah.

Inside this home, 26 -year -old Aaron Shammo is in his basement playing the

video game Battlefield 1.

And just outside, a SWAT team is mobilizing to break his door open.

We had to do this all very quickly.

So the officers made a quick and rapid deployment entry into the house, and

everything was just kind of frozen as is until we knew what we were dealing

with.

What they are dealing with is synthetic opioids, including deadly fentanyl, up

to 100 times stronger than morphine, and lots of it.

During that time in 2016, fentanyl was not one of those things we really had an

eye on.

We had heard about it, but didn't have any active investigations and did not

expect to find one of this scope, especially here in relatively quiet Salt

City, Utah.

The investigation will uncover a new kind of drug ring, not Mexican cartels

inner city street gangs, but middle class millennials choosing to create and

sell illegal counterfeit opioids on the so -called dark web for one reason.

Pure greed.

One of the first and most prolific is Utah's Aaron Michael Shammo, a .k .a.

Pharma Master.

Aaron Shammo is born in Salt Lake City, the youngest child and only son to a

family with three daughters.

Mr. Shammo was an average queen cut.

American kid, was raised in the faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter

-day Saints.

He had a fairly normal childhood, had very, very good parents, good siblings,

had some learning issues, was popular, wasn't bullied or particularly troubled

as a child.

But in junior high, Aaron begins to head down a darker path, skipping school and

getting in trouble.

So his parents sent him to a strict Utah boarding school where he seems to

excel, earning his high school diploma and the highest Boy Scout honor, the

Eagle Scout Award for service and valor.

That was one of the things I think that helped his family feel like, okay, he's

really turned this around. He's going to grow up and he's going to be, I mean,

we can really be proud of.

In 2009, Shammo enrolls at Utah Valley University.

Aaron has always been fascinated with making it rich as an entrepreneur.

His siblings were all very successful, and so they kind of set the bar high,

he felt like he wasn't living up to his family's expectations. And I guess to

him, part of that was the money side, to make money and show that you're

successful by the money you bring in.

And really interested in having sort of the million -dollar business idea.

Reading books like Think and Grow Rich and books like The Secret to manifest

your desires and your destiny.

But two years in, he's failing classes and spending most of his time partying

and delving into the fledgling world of Bitcoin mining.

So he drops out and lands an entry -level job at eBay with his best friend,

Crandall. In less than a year, Crandall is fired.

And Aaron Shamu thinks it's unfair that he still has to work, so he quits.

The friends soon come up with a business plan, combining two of their favorite

things, party drugs and Bitcoin.

They start off selling their own prescription Adderall on the dark web.

A part of the Internet reached through a special browser where guns and drugs

are traded and money is exchanged through cryptocurrency.

It was really his ability to use and to manage the cryptocurrency that helps

unlock the door for him to be able to set up shop and become an

e -commerce pioneer, if you will, on the dark web.

Shamo and Crandall learn all they need on the web, searching with simple

like how to ship drugs.

Sales are immediate.

So they decide to expand, ordering drugs in bulk, repackaging and selling at a

markup.

And he found that it was easy to purchase controlled substances through

Internet, illegally, of course, and that there was a huge market for that. At

first, it was drugs like Xanax or erectile dysfunction pills because they

very popular.

A few months into the operation, a local drug dealer gives Aaron Shammo some

intel that changes his life.

The big money is in fake oxycodone.

Opioid abuse in the United States is at epidemic level.

In 2016, opioid abuse, and particularly oxycontin addiction, is blowing up.

And it's getting worse by the day.

With limits on prescription pills, thousands of people are turning to

sources.

Shammo's entrepreneurial mindset finally has a focus, and he decides to go all

in, counterfeiting the pills himself.

Shammo orders bulk supplies, including fentanyl from China, a much cheaper and

more potent synthetic opioid used in counterfeit drugs.

He sets up a pill press in his basement and watches YouTube videos to figure out

how to make fake Oxycontin and Xanax.

These kids were trying to come up with these recipes on their own.

They weren't chemistry majors. They found information online, and they did

through trial and error. The first batch of pills they made were sort of turned

away because they didn't quite look like Oxycodone. They were all splotchy and

speckled. But eventually, they got the formula down, and that means that their

pills became incredibly popular.

Powdered binders and fillers are mixed with fentanyl and shaken by hand.

Dyes are added.

Blue for oxys, for example.

The mixture goes into the pill press hopper, and extruded pills are stamped

illegal counterfeit stamps, also purchased online, to match the original

pharmaceutical markings.

It is not uncommon with any type of even tabletop industrial pill press to be

able to produce in between 7 ,000 to 10 ,000 pills an hour.

So if each pill on the street roughly goes for, say, in between $20 to $40,

you're able to produce 7 ,000 to 10 ,000 pills an hour, and you're churning out

pills all day, you do the math.

You end up coming up with millions in dollars of illegal drug proceeds.

Shammo calls his online storefront PharmaMaster on one of the largest

marketplaces, AlphaBay.

which acts much like the legitimate eBay marketplace.

Within a few months, word of PharmaMaster's reliability and the

pills starts to spread.

Sellers like Mr. Schammel would be rated on things like quality, price, stealth,

and that's their term for how expertly the seller ships the drugs to avoid law

enforcement detection.

And Mr. Schammel's feedback was...

360 pages worth of positive comments.

You know, people saying he's the best dark net vendor, period.

Business is so good that Shammo hires his gym buddy, Luke Cass, to mix and

thousands of OxyPills a week.

He hires two friends full -time for order fulfillment, packaging drugs in

-sealed Mylar bags, and shipping out hundreds of orders coming in by

mail. Shammo also hires his pal Sean Gigi as a runner, picking up the packed

orders five days a week and dropping them off at various mailboxes around the

Salt Lake Valley.

Aaron Shammo was not your sort of bad guy movie image of a drug ringleader.

He had lots of texting, lots of smiley face emojis, LOLs. These were sort of

generally his friends, and the communication reflected a lot of

between them.

No wonder Aaron Shammo is yucking it up with his pals.

He's growing richer by the day.

But defense attorney Greg Skordas insists that for his client, it isn't

about the money, just partly about the money.

I know that people will not believe this, but they really thought they were

filling a niche.

They thought that a lot of people were needing pain medication and couldn't get

it. They were young kids, and they really felt like they were helping

And I know that's naive, but that's really what got them into it. And, of

course, they made a tremendous amount of money.

Even if Shammo tells himself he's only helping people with chronic pain, by the

summer of 2016, PharmaMaster is shipping out up to 50 orders a day to customers

in all 50 states and is in the top 1 % of all distributors on

AlphaBay.

Aaron Schama sees himself as a success story, a budding young entrepreneur

growing his startup.

You both have somebody who's very motivated and very much wants to be this

of this sort of classic American image of a major entrepreneur somehow, but of

course did apply it to this very illegal enterprise and did at the very least,

it appears, not examine the consequences of what this could all bring about.

Next on American Greed, Farmer Master is raking in profits, but not every

customer is coming back for more.

Just didn't care.

Money was too good.

Profit was too steep.

The luxuries were too high.

The problem is, is that willful blindness translated over into death.

In a suburb of Salt Lake City, business is booming, money is flowing in, and

packages are shipping out.

One of them will travel 2 ,200 miles and change the recipient's lives forever.

In the quaint Long Island town of Center Moriches on Main Street's retail row,

Tova Keblisch owns Gavin's Treasures, a gift shop named after her only child.

In 2016, Gavin Keblisch is 23 years old and a recent University of Albany

graduate working as a counselor for children in foster care.

He graduated with a bachelor's, became an incredible counselor.

basically for kids that were a little difficult.

He understood them, he got them, and he did it very well because he knew what it

was like to be misunderstood.

According to his mother, Gavin has worked hard to overcome a severe ADHD

diagnosis, and he's her pride and joy.

We knew he would soar. We knew he would make incredible difference in the world

because that's what he had.

And I knew he would do amazing things.

Gavin is also an avid motocross rider, having picked up the sport as a kid.

But in 2015, he crashes on his bike and suffers a severe leg injury.

After surgery, he is in excruciating pain for months, and the surgical site

not healing.

We went back to an orthopedic, and they said, that's your bone exposed.

And from there, he was placed in the hospital for about three months.

Doctors try several procedures to help Gavin heal, each one more painful than

the last.

This poor kid in his early 20s has to live with a leg that looked like chopped

meat. And he carried on after this. He went back to school. He graduated.

He finished.

He came home, and he was always in a lot of pain. It was difficult for him, and

he always dismissed it.

Tova Keblish says she doesn't know that Gavin is managing his pain with opioids.

And when his doctors pull back on the prescriptions, Keblish turns to the dark

web. He pulls up a site called PharmaMaster and places an order for

20 pills to be shipped to his mother's home in Long Island.

Like every PharmaMaster order, it is sent in an encrypted email to two

of Aaron Shammo.

Alexandria Tong and Catherine Buston, who count out the pills in their

Utah condo, package the shipments and hand them off to Sean Gigi, who drops

in the mail.

The envelope arrives in Long Island three days later.

Gavin Kevlish receives the package and makes plans to spend the weekend in the

Hamptons with his friends.

He goes, Mom, Dad, I'm just going to stay there because he knew he was going

hang out with his friends, he was going to be drinking.

Yeah, we were planning on taking him to go get a new truck the next day. He's

like, I want to get a new truck. He had his own money at the time. So we said,

okay, Saturday when you come home, we'll go for a car.

The next day, Gavin is attending a party in the beach town of Montauk, New York.

At some point in the night, according to investigators, he takes a pharma master

pill.

At 6 a .m. the next morning, a passerby sees what appears to be the body of a

young man lying in a grassy area off the road.

Police respond and identify him as Gavin Keblish.

Later that day, Tova Keblish learns that her only child is gone, dead of a

fentanyl overdose.

We had found your son, and he had died.

roughly around 2 a .m., and that's all I remember. I don't remember anything

else after that.

For a year, the family is left with nothing but questions.

How did this happen, and why?

I will no longer have grandchildren.

I'll no longer have our own wedding for our son.

That's rough.

That's real rough.

Not being able to see the best of what he was.

Going forward, it grows very hard.

Yeah, it's pretty hard.

Next on American Greed.

All over the country, cases like Gavin's are happening every day.

And the fentanyl death toll goes nowhere but up.

Mr. Shamble is putting approximately a milligram of fentanyl in each pill.

Two milligrams is enough to kill someone, even with a tolerance.

Crush up and snort two pills.

You're done.

In May of 2016, 26 -year -old Aaron Shammo is living his dream.

The college dropout has created a startup business, hired his closest

and grown to profitability in less than a year.

He was kind of a young, college -age playboy. He liked to lift weights. He

to be with the girls. He liked to look good, drive the nice cars, wear the

watch and the sporty clothes.

That was him.

He's young, living what he viewed as his best life now.

In his personal journal, he writes affirmations inspired by his self -help

books. I am Shamal. I am awesome.

My friends love me. I created an empire.

People look up to me.

It sort of brings to mind like almost a combination of Breaking Bad and the

social network.

He would write these things and try to manifest them into the world.

By the end of his first year in business, Shamu clears nearly $3

The only catch, his business model is totally illegal.

He's selling thousands of counterfeit opioid pills through his dark website,

PharmaMaster. But in the rush to meet demand, the quality of his product

to slip.

One review says, this is as close to an overdose as I have ever come.

It just kept coming stronger and stronger.

Another says people are getting sick, which means people are overdosing.

But if Aaron Shammo was aware of any problems with his product, it is not

slowing him down.

At this point, PharmaMaster is generating roughly $100 ,000 in revenue

Shammo spends it on a house, a new BMW.

Weekend trips to Vegas and first -class vacations. He had a heavy gambling

addiction. He loved travel. He loved fine wines. He loved cruises,

going to the beach.

He spent money right and left, as fast as he could get it.

By this time, Drew Crandall, who started PharmaMaster with Shammo, is no longer

intimately involved in the business, and Aaron Shammo is calling the shots.

Shammo ups his profits when he starts selling in bulk, up to 20 ,000 pills at

time, to local drug dealers.

This is how authorities believe 23 -year -old Mitch Kupner and his best friend,

23 -year -old Devin Young, come in possession of Shamu's 30 -milligram

called RoxyOxycodone.

Kupner has spent his whole life in Woods Cross, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake

City.

He had a tough guy cell with pretty soft inner self. He loved to

shoot, fish, his Jeep, Boston Red Sox, and his friends and family.

In 2016, he works as a dairy manager at a local grocery store and is helping to

raise his girlfriend's young son.

He had moved into an apartment with his girlfriend and her little boy.

He was looking at a promotion.

He was doing good. He was living life. He had a good future.

His best friend, Devin Young, suffers from depression.

Devin's mother, Kelly, says that Mitch is Devin's biggest supporter.

But on the night of June 8, 2016, the friends make a fateful decision.

They literally bought one oxycodone each.

And the reason for that was my son had been depressed, and Mitch had been

working a lot, and they thought, well, if they each got one, they could go

they could go to sleep at their own beds.

Get rested and maybe Devin would wake up in a better place and, you know, Mitch

a little bit more rested.

They each take a pill and go to their homes.

But only Devin wakes up.

Shayla Knighton is at work when she gets a frantic call and races home.

Pulled up to the house.

I saw my then -husband throwing up on the side of the road.

My... Then 21 -year -old son running down the driveway

just in shock.

Three cop cars.

The officer wouldn't let me in the house.

Shayla learns that her son Mitch has died from a fentanyl overdose.

When they were taking Mitchell's body, I asked to see him.

They wouldn't let me see him.

I remember my son Devin holding me up from falling to the ground.

Mitch's friend Devin Young also took a pill.

His mother finds him in bed.

He was still overdosing when I found him.

You know, I did paramedics and all of that stuff.

But, you know, after the fact he had said that, you know.

That's all we got. We got one oxy each. It never should have happened.

It wasn't much later that he called me to tell me that Mitch had passed away.

This was a one pill.

This wasn't an addiction.

They didn't deserve this. They didn't know what they were really buying.

You don't know what you're getting.

Devin never recovers from his best friend's death.

He was an absolute mess.

It was devastating to watch.

The kid could hardly eat. He was pretty wrecked.

Six months later, out of guilt and feeling as if he was the cause of

death, Devin Young takes his own life.

Yes, he had made some bad choices along the way, but the way I look at it is

they both died two different manners of death.

But it was all for the exact same reason.

It all came down to the fentanyl that they bought that night.

That is ultimately what ended both of our kids' lives.

Mitch and Devin are buried on the same hillside in a peaceful place near the

mountains where their mothers can contemplate what might have been.

Just thinking of what would he be doing.

Today, you know, where would he be? Would he be in a happier place?

You know, what would he be doing?

What would his kids look like?

Would he have married the girlfriend?

It's not fair.

Today, overdose is the leading cause of death of Americans under 50.

Next on American Greed.

Aaron Shammo's attempts to hide his operation are about to fall short when a

customs officer IDs one of the country's first bulk shipments of Chinese

fentanyl into the United States. To be quite honest, it was shocking.

And the first thing on our minds was we have to find it. We have to stop it

because literally lives are at stake.

This is a customs and border protection mail inspection facility near LAX, where

40 million packages coming in from 180 countries pass through every year.

The International Mail Facility seizes illicit drugs on a daily basis. This is

essentially one large seizure factory.

On the day American Greed goes inside, a canine officer is searching for

suspicious packages containing any number of illegal drugs, including

deadly fentanyl.

Here, the dog alerts his canine officer by sitting down in front of a suspicious

package.

Oh, that's a good boy. That's a good dog.

The box is removed and tested on site using an instrument which allows the

officers to identify substances.

without having to fully open the packages.

This is telling me right away that it knows that this is fentanyl.

And here's the scientific name for it.

In July 2016, a package much like this one comes in from Guangdong, China,

heading to a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah.

It is flagged for inspection.

Inside, the officer IDs the synthetic opioid fentanyl.

Now well known, but at the time just starting to hit the U .S. from China.

CBP is concerned.

They refer the case to federal agents in Utah.

Two of my agents came in my office and said, hey, there's a package of fentanyl

that was intercepted and it was addressed to someone in Utah. We want to

search warrant and go see what that person's doing.

That person is an unassuming Salt Lake City resident, 26 -year -old Sean Gigi.

When we started doing a background on Mr. Gigi, again, very unassuming, didn't

fit the typical profile that people view as a drug trafficker or a drug dealer.

We did surveillance on Mr. Gigi, and we ended up approaching him.

Gigi initially tells investigators that he accepts packages for his friend Aaron

Shammo. and he thinks that they are filled with ecstasy pills.

My agent said to him, those packages that you were getting had fentanyl in

and they watched as Mr.

Gigi's countenance changed.

After thinking over his options, Gigi agrees to cooperate.

He tells investigators that he works full -time for Aaron Shamow.

He said, look, not only was I accepting packages for Mr. Shambo in the mail, but

for the last several months, he hired me to be a daily employee.

And most nights of the week, I pick up packages off a doorstep, and I take

packages to blue post office collection boxes throughout the community, and he

pays me a biweekly wage to do it.

And so the agents asked him to do two things. The first was...

put on a wire, and have a conversation with Mr. Shammo. And he did.

They met face -to -face.

Geeky is recording when he arrives at Aaron Shammo's house.

What up, man?

How you doing? Good. How's it going?

Good. We went live yesterday.

Are you able to pick up tonight?

Yeah. I missed last night because I had a bit of an emergency, but I'll do

double duty tonight and get them both out. Awesome.

Turned out it was payday that night, so it worked out real well.

Mr. Shamal paid Mr. Gigi, and then Mr. Shamal and Mr. Gigi talked about their

future plans.

And Shamal related that he wanted to expand his operation, and he wanted Gigi

to move to Colorado and start building a foundational enterprise there.

So March or April, let's aim for that for Colorado.

So start looking for places.

You want to get like a separate room that basically is just dedicated for

That's what I would suggest.

That way you're not bothered. That's what my current shippers do. They

just have one room that they dedicate to.

So if you can, that would be great.

Okay, okay.

Next, Gigi allows Asians to follow as he picks up 79 packages from the shipper's

doorstep. to mail to PharmaMaster customers.

This time, however, he doesn't drop them in the post boxes.

He scooped them up and then drove with the agents immediately to a local police

station where they could set them out on tables and start to go through it. And

as they opened these boxes, you know, they found 10 ,000 fentanyl pills in a

box, 20 ,000 pills in a box.

Aaron Shammo's operation was nothing like I had ever seen.

Mr. Shambo's enterprise was one of the first large -scale dark web storefronts

that we had dealt with.

At one point, I know we were able to identify over 8 ,000 package recipients

across the continental United States.

We had to act quickly.

Our number one goal was to locate where are the tablets being manufactured.

Next on American Greed.

Utah agents find what they're looking for in their own backyard and move in on

the pharma master.

Aaron Schema was at home, apparently in his basement, when authorities literally

came bashing down his front door.

Want more greed?

Follow us on Instagram, connect on Facebook, and listen to the American

podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll be right back.

Two days before Thanksgiving, dozens of agents from the DEA, Homeland Security

Investigations, and the National Guard sued up for a surprise drug bust on an

unlikely residential block.

Cottonwood Heights is kind of a sleepy little upper middle class suburban area

south of Salt Lake. The last neighborhood that I honestly thought I

doing a search warrant in for a counterfeit cabling enterprise.

Those seizing evidence at Aaron Shammo's home don hazmat suits to avoid direct

contact with fentanyl, which is so powerful, a few flakes touching the skin

caused officers to overdose.

They called him out, pulled him out, and placed him under arrest.

Inside, there was a pill press running, just a rotary pill press just pounding

away. They saw powder all over the walls.

The room was full of mason jars.

That's how they were mixing their ingredients to go into the pills. They

in a mason jar, screw the lid on, and shake it.

Agent sees $1 .2 million in cash from a sock drawer and another $429 ,000

stored at Shamo's parents' house.

But it took them a lot longer actually to find one of his biggest sources of

cash, and that was Bitcoin.

They eventually found 500 Bitcoin.

that were linked to his account. At the time, it was worth a couple hundred

thousand dollars.

Eventually, the government sells Shammo's Bitcoin for more than $5

Across town, agents execute a search warrant at the apartment of Alexandria

and Catherine Buston, Shammo's shippers.

He brought them in to help do the packaging.

They would put them in envelopes and then send them to whoever around the

country had ordered them.

They were working so fast, when pills would drop on the ground, they would

vacuum them up. They weren't even worth picking up.

When Shammo's friend and former partner Drew Crandall learns of the arrest from

overseas, he quickly shuts down the Farmer Master store on Alpha Bay.

But investigators have already got what they need. From another one of Shammo's

friends and customer service employees, 24 -year -old Mario Noble.

Mr. Noble, because he did customer service, had access to some of

pages on AlphaBay, and so the agents went in with him and took screenshots,

trying to preserve the evidence that was online so we wouldn't lose it.

Six months later, Drew Crandall is arrested upon arriving in Hawaii, where

planned to get married.

In all, eight of Shamu's other co -conspirators are arrested and all agree

cooperate with the government.

Next on American Greed.

While prosecutors build their case, they begin to compile a list of customers

who purchased pills through PharmaMaster and uncover a pattern unlike any they

had ever seen.

Today, we've identified 90 of his customers who died from drug overdoses.

Two years after his arrest, Aaron Shammo is set to stand trial, accused of 12

drug counts, including leading a continuing criminal enterprise,

referred to as the kingpin charge, which carries a mandatory life sentence, and

one count for the overdose death of 21 -year -old Ruslan Kluyev of California.

Our focus at trial was that...

Two most serious offenses that the grand jury charged Mr. Shammo with. The first

was engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.

And then the second was the distribution of fentanyl that resulted in a man's

death.

Evidence from Shammo's computers has led investigators to at least 90

PharmaMaster customers that died of fentanyl overdose.

We could track Shammo's orders and just through searching obituaries and talking

to law enforcement in different areas, confirm OD deaths from Mr. Shammo's

pills.

Of the 90 cases prosecutors believe are tied to Shammo's pills, they decide to

charge him with the Kluyev case because of the evidence, including a photo from

the death scene showing the victim's body.