On June 23, 1999, Postal Inspector Dennis Simpson of the Prohibited Mail-Narcotics team in St. Louis, Missouri, noticed that two Express Mail packages in the mail stream at the St. Louis Airport Mail Center bore the same return address in identical handwriting, and were addressed to different companies in Los Angeles with the same phone number listed, and were mailed from different post offices on the same day. Suspicious of the fact that the packages were being sent from a commercial mail receiving agency to two more commercial mail receiving agencies, Simpson obtained a search warrant. Inside each package he found three videotapes, one of which was hollowed out and had cash hidden inside it; $6,500 in one and $6,790 in the other. Surveillance photographs at the St. Louis Post Office caught the mailer: it was Robert Francis, a known drug dealer.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office created an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force to work on the case, and named it Operation Cash Run; along with the Postal Inspection Service, a special agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration and two St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department narcotics detectives were brought in to work on the case. After setting up surveillance on Francis, his brother, and other associates discovered through the operation, investigators determined that Anthony and Robert Francis were buying cocaine in Los Angeles, which was then hidden in cars and driven back to Illinois and St. Louis and sold before the money was sent back to Los Angeles either by mail or in the suitcase of one of the members of the operation.

Satisfied with their investigation, the task force simultaneously executed twenty-three search warrants in three cities on December 11, 2000, and issued arrest warrants for eleven people. In spite of a few acquittals and two hung juries that led to retrials, all of the major players in the drug trafficking ring had been convicted by August, 2002. Six men, including Robert Francis, were sentenced to anywhere from seven years to life in prison.