The problem was growth, Steve Warshak tells me. First it made him a threat, he says; then it made him a target.

We are alone, except for two distant prison administrators, in the huge sterile visiting room of a medium-security facility in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. I have come to ask Warshak, 43, about what prosecutors call his “diabolical” nature, a nature exhibited—to quote the judge who sentenced him to twenty-five years behind bars—by the “massive fraudulent undertaking” for which he was convicted in August 2008.

Warshak was the founder of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, a Cincinnati company that sold a wide range of supplements but made most of its money on one blockbuster product: Enzyte. Warshak sold countless men on the simple idea that happiness was just a little blue pill away. His pill had a six-letter name, just like the prescription drug it was designed to evoke. But unlike Viagra, Enzyte was “natural” and could be ordered without a prescription in the privacy of one’s home.

At last year’s trial, prosecutors alleged that Warshak had exploited that desire for privacy to bilk his customers out of more than $100 million. The scam was simple, they alleged: Get a customer’s credit card number by offering a free sample (pay only the postage!), then charge the card again for more product than the customer ever ordered. Enzyte was marketed to men who didn’t want to go to the doctor, the government argued, and thus were likely to be ashamed of their sexual inadequacy. Warshak figured he could steal from these customers with minimum risk, prosecutors said; embarrassment would keep them from complaining.

Like most convicts, Warshak maintains his innocence. But his argument is more creative than most. He says he is being unfairly punished for something that as a free man he claimed to know a lot about: getting too big too fast.

“We were a million times more successful than I ever dreamed of being,” he tells me, settling into one of 144 blue plastic chairs that are bolted to the linoleum floor in rows of twelve. His voice is soft, his manner overly polite. He looks athletic, even boyish, despite touches of gray at the temples of his dark hair. Behind wire-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes are alert and, at moments, warm—beseeching, even. But for the prison khakis with warshak printed on a white iron-on label over his heart, he could be your kindly neighborhood dentist.

“You learn as you go, and you make some mistakes,” he says of the company he and four friends and relatives started in his basement in 2001. “We started out like rookies. We weren’t Harvard MBAs. We outgrew our systems almost every six months. We had some growth issues.”

A warning: In Warshak’s world, these kinds of boner-related double entendres seem to pop up all the time. But this one holds a particular irony. Growth—or at least the promise of it—made Warshak a very wealthy man.

His background was in marketing, not physiology. Raised in the suburbs of Cincinnati by a factory worker and a stay-at-home mom, he was an unexceptional student in high school and then at Ohio University—but he was great at selling. His first company sold ads displayed at hockey rinks. But Warshak had grander visions. In 1999 he noticed that every men’s magazine was selling potency in some form or another, so he turned his attention to herbal supplements. “It was never a passion of mine to make sexual-health products,” Warshak says. “If the marketplace had wanted pencils, we would have sold pencils.”

Enzyte wasn’t Warshak’s first supplement, but it quickly became his best seller. He invested heavily in advertising, commissioning the Smilin’ Bob campaign and buying airtime on channels like CNN and ESPN. By 2004, Berkeley had annual revenues of more than $200 million, at least half of it from Enzyte. That was also the year that the FBI, the FDA, the Postal Inspection Service, and the IRS teamed up to investigate the company that had prompted thousands of complaints to the Better Business Bureau. Soon a grand jury would name Warshak, four of his colleagues, and Warshak’s 75-year-old mother, Harriet, in an eighty-four-page indictment that alleged petty theft on a vast scale. (Warshak was charged with 112 counts of mail fraud, bank fraud, credit card fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice.) Several unindicted co-conspirators—among them Warshak’s sister and her husband—would eventually cooperate with the government in hopes of receiving lesser sentences.