In 1998, a few months after Chris Smith dropped out of Lakeville High School, his concerned father talked to him about the benefits of college - and was startled by his son's reply.

"Dad, I made $69,000 online by 11 a.m. Why go to college?"

Over the next seven years, Christopher William Smith became known as a notorious Internet spammer nicknamed "Rizler," who, the FBI says, graduated to selling addictive drugs online and over the phone.

The golden-haired entrepreneur with a knack for computers was taking in $2 million a month by the time he was 25, enough to buy a string of luxury cars, including a Ferrari, a BMW and four Mercedes-Benzes, and to move into a $1.1 million house in Burnsville, court papers say.

For him, the Internet bubble of the late 1990s just kept expanding. At first he used the Internet to find leads for insurance companies, then filled e-mail boxes with billions of spam pitches for penis-enhancement products, cable television decoders and other products, the documents say.

Smith also leaped into the lucrative prescription drug market, selling addictive drugs such as Vicodin through his online pharmacy and a staff of 85 telemarketers, court papers say.

The bubble may finally have burst in May when federal agents raided his Burnsville company, Xpress Pharmacy Direct, shutting it down and seizing $4.2 million in assets. Court documents accuse Smith of fraud and money laundering, but no one has been charged with a crime.

From his start at age 10 selling popcorn and cotton candy at church fairs, Chris Smith has done well in business.

"I remember Chris sitting on my lap when he was one year old, trying to feed a floppy disk into my old Apple computer," said Scott Smith, 55, of Lakeville.

He described his son as "brilliant but bored" by school. "Chris was raised knowing he could figure things out, knowing he could accomplish a lot with hard work," his father said.

"Chris is kind of like me, only smarter," said Smith, who has made and lost several million dollars himself.

In the 1970s and `80s, Scott Smith was a part owner of Minneapolis night clubs Scotties on Seventh, Graffitti's and Schiek's Cafe. He lost it all after he was critically injured in a car accident in 1985. Smith was divorced soon after that. He now owns Diaper Deck, a Lakeville company that is mainly responsible for introducing diaper-changing stations in public bathrooms.

Chris grew up splitting his time between his father's house on Lake Minnetonka and his mother's house on Crystal Lake in Burnsville, his father said. Chris Smith attended the Academy of Holy Angels, a Catholic high school in Richfield, but began skipping school, his father said.

Father and son then moved to Lakeville, where Chris switched to public school in January 1998 for his senior year. He didn't graduate. He soon moved to Cannon Falls, Minn., where his dad had a Diaper Deck plant. Chris started a small business installing radios and other electronic equipment in cars, and soon discovered a new business, using Internet ads to seek out potential customers for insurance companies, his father said.

"He found he could do pretty well ... finding people who were looking for insurance and selling their names to insurance companies," his father said. "I was amazed. The insurers paid him $35 for a potential customer."

Chris Smith then turned to other Internet ventures - and trouble was not far behind. .

Web-based enemies

By March 2001, private investigators were staking out Chris' business in Cannon Falls. They worked for Time Warner, the cable television giant, which alleged that Chris Smith's new venture, Blast Marketing, sold cable TV decoders on the Internet to customers in New York City. The devices allow people to pirate cable TV signals without paying for them.