A man who worked for a freight shipper pleaded guilty this week for his role in illegally selling prescription drugs over the Internet through a network the government says included a Bowdoin Street drugstore.

Steven Immergluck, of Aurora, Ill., made his plea Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston. Immergluck, who worked for a DHL reseller in Chicago, handled shipping for Global Access, SA, a Dominican company that operated Web sites through which people could order prescription drugs without ever actually meeting the doctors who authorized the prescriptions, according to an affidavit by DEA Special Agent Anthony Roberto.

The government says that many of the prescriptions between 2006 and 2008 were filled at Meetinghouse Community Pharmacy, 248 Bowdoin St. Owners Baldwin and Gladys Ihenacho were originally scheduled to stand trial in April on drug and conspiracy charges related to the operation, but their trial was postponed after Gladys Ihenacho's attorney, Robert George, was himself indicted on unrelated money-laundering charges.

According to his indictment, Immergluck helped the Ihenachos process as many as 4,000 online prescriptions a month between 2006 and 2008, all digitally signed by doctors who had never seen the patients the drugs - mostly phentermine and alprazolam - were going to. A 2009 DEA order that stripped the pharmacy of its right to sell controlled substances says: "Mr. Ihenacho stated that at one point he was receiving approximately 100 prescriptions a day from [Global Access president Palasy 'Jack' Hernandez Hernandez] and had to tell him that he could not fill that many scripts because it was interfering with his local business."

The DEA order, based in part in a confession Boston Police says Ihenacho gave after his arrest (which Ihenacho is now contesting, claiming he was not properly read his Miranda rights): "According to Mr. Ihenacho, he received approximately $100,000 for filling the prescriptions from Jack and was owed an additional $145,000.

"Mr. Ihenacho further stated that he had visited run by Jack at his office in the Dominican Republic, and had been introduced to Jack's cousin. The cousin told Mr. Ihenacho that he wanted to start his own Internet pharmacy business; Mr. Ihenacho started filling prescriptions for the cousin as well. According to Mr. Ihenacho, the cousin had paid him approximately $100,000 for a one-year period and owed him another $40,000. Mr. Ihenacho also told investigators that he had filled prescriptions for the owners of several other Internet schemes, two of whom paid him a fee of $10,000 a week. Moreover, at the time of his arrest, Mr. Ihenacho stated that he was currently filling approximately 150 Internet prescriptions per day."

Immergluck's sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 20.