For a drug operation, this one appears to have been a poorly kept secret.
There were the steady traffic to the two-story, white-paneled house in the New Dorp neighborhood of Staten Island and the prescription bottles that littered the well-kept block. Then there was the small matter of someone — a relative of a patient who had overdosed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation would say later — who attacked the house’s front door with an ax.
That rather unneighborly display prompted the homeowner and person suspected of providing the drugs, Dr. Felix Lanting, to hire “goons” to guard outside, the F.B.I. said.