PART 1
DEA Headquarters, Arlington, Virginia, October 2015
Late on his last day as a DEA agent, Joe Rannazzisi grabbed a mailroom cart and wheeled a few boxes with personal belongings to his midnight blue Ford Excursion in the parking lot outside. He had turned in his badge earlier—a day without a formal goodbye lunch that was now an evening without farewell drinks. Almost everyone had already cleared out of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s sleek office complex in Arlington, Virginia, and the silent corridor was a numbing coda to a career that for all its accolades seemed to have ended in defeat.
It was an unusual feeling for the muscled, tough-talking New Yorker who had spent a storied thirty years bringing down bad guys. Most recently, as head of the DEA’s division responsible for policing the drug industry, Joe and his agents had pursued corrupt doctors, pharmacies, and the nation’s largest drug manufacturers and distribution companies, who were pouring powerful and highly addictive opioids into communities across the country. Righteous investigations, Joe believed. But he and his team had been crushed, their struggle to stop the destructive flow of pain pills snuffed out by a secret, well-financed campaign. It was led by a coalition of drug company executives and lobbyists with close ties to members of Congress and high-ranking officials inside the Department of Justice, including some who had jumped from the DEA to the fat payrolls of the drug companies and the law firms that represented them.
Washington at its worst.
Joe’s friends had known for months that he was being ostracized at the DEA—no longer a welcome crusader—and that he had finally been forced from the job that gave him a daily jolt of purpose. His buddies called him at home, gently probing to see if he was safe. Could someone as obsessive and wounded as Joe transition to retirement? “Don’t worry, I’m not going to off myself,” he told them. Still, some wondered whether they should take his Walther PPK .380, just to be sure. Joe was just a little bemused by the concern. He may have lost his job, but he was no quitter. He had two daughters at home to take care of and, he noted with a smile, a new coonhound mutt from the pound named Banjo.
The fight, he hoped, would go on in some form. Addiction to opioids was an epidemic. People were dying from overdoses by the hundreds of thousands. The companies would eventually choke on their greed. Citizens would eventually demand that their government stop it all. There had to be a reckoning. The shape of that reckoning, however, was not visible to Joe Rannazzisi on the dreary Friday he was finally cut loose from the DEA.
But other forces, just a state away, in the deadlands of the overdose epidemic, were beginning to stir. A few short years, and tens of thousands of deaths later, they would combine to expose the inner workings of the opioid industry and bring the drug companies to account.
In Huntington, West Virginia, Paul T. Farrell Jr., a small-town lawyer, sat at the kitchen table in his parents’ home. A local news story in the Charleston Gazette-Mail was the talk of the town. It reported that several drug companies, including some of the largest in the nation, had sent 780 million prescription pain pills to West Virginia within six years, while 1,728 people in the state overdosed. The shipments were enough to supply 433 pain pills to every man, woman, and child in the state.
Paul’s family had lived in Huntington for generations, Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen during the nineteenth century and made their way to West Virginia. Huntington once prospered from the coal mines. But those boom years were long gone, and Paul’s town had descended into something resembling a zombie movie—shells of human beings wandering downtown, empty syringes and needles in public parks, parentless children, an entire generation raised in foster homes or by grandparents.
The 2016 newspaper story led to the shocking realization that the blame didn’t lie with Mexican drug cartels or any of the usual suspects, but instead with American companies, some of them household names, others obscure distribution outfits, all of them profiting from the misery on the streets outside.
These corporations were earning unprecedented profits in the billions of dollars while, to Paul’s mind, his neighbors were being exterminated by opioids such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin. The disclosures in the story infuriated Paul’s mother, Charlene. She and her family had seen too many deaths, gone to too many funerals. “Someone should do something,” she said as her husband stood over the stove, frying up bacon for the Sunday morning family breakfast.
Paul’s younger brother, Patrick, a fighter pilot during the Iraq War, chimed in. “Isn’t that what you do for a living?” he asked Paul.
Paul’s journey into the corrupt labyrinth of America’s opioid industry began with that Sunday morning challenge. Soon he would collaborate with some of the most colorful and high-profile plaintiffs’ lawyers in the nation. Along the way they would call as a star witness a former DEA agent named Joe Rannazzisi.
By 2018, this sprawling coalition of lawyers and investigators had launched the largest and most complex civil litigation in American history on behalf of thousands of counties, cities, and Native American tribes. The coalition won access to a confidential pill-tracking database and millions of internal corporate emails and memos during courtroom combat with legions of white-shoe law firms defending the opioid industry.
One breathtaking disclosure after another—from emails that mocked addicts to sales reports chronicling the rise of pill mills—showed the indifference of big business to the epidemic’s toll. The revelations open a horrifying panorama on corporate greed and political cowardice. They also highlight the efforts of community activists, DEA agents, and a coalition of lawyers to stop the human carnage.
The records include once-confidential communications inside corporate boardrooms, DEA headquarters, and the marbled corridors of Capitol Hill. The documents would eventually find their way into thousands of lawsuits filed in federal courthouses across the country and form the basis of a legal battle without precedent in American jurisprudence—a bruising, complex, and unfinished quest for justice.
A modern-day opium war has been fought on American soil over the last twenty years and it has claimed five hundred thousand lives—more than the U.S. military lost during World War II. The death toll from overdoses continues to rise as the opioid epidemic takes new forms.
Over time, it became apparent to Paul that the companies that comprised the opioid industry were not behaving like any corporations he had ever seen.
They aren’t, Joe would say one day. They are an American cartel.