Chapter 12
DEA Headquarters, 2011
Joe Rannazzisi called her the “Puzzle Master.” A diminutive lawyer with a cherubic face and long dark hair, Imelda L. Paredes was a disarming but demanding presence as she walked the halls of the DEA. “Mimi,” as everyone called her, was one of Joe’s secret weapons in his battle to bring the nation’s largest drug companies to account for the opioid epidemic.
At her desk inside DEA headquarters, Paredes pored over spreadsheets of pill numbers and internal drug company documents, finding patterns as she built cases and crafted the legal arguments for Joe’s biggest investigations. Over time, she would become one of Joe’s closest legal advisers—his warrior, he called her—as he went after the rogue internet pharmacies, doctors, pill mills, and drug distributors. Paredes was calm. She was analytical. But she could be brutally honest about what was needed to make a case, snuffing out any investigative shortcuts. She was never wrong, Joe realized. Not once.
Paredes’s route to the DEA had been a circuitous one. She grew up in Virginia Beach, next to the largest U.S. naval base in the world, where her parents settled after immigrating from the Philippines. Her father was a Navy mess chef for the sailors living aboard aircraft carriers. In 1981, Paredes, as a sixth-grade student, was inspired to become a lawyer after watching Sandra Day O’Connor ascend as the first woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In high school, she and her close friend, a handsome star athlete named Alton Grizzard, worked hard and dreamed big. She went west to the University of California at Berkeley, while he entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. He became captain of the Navy’s football team and one of the best quarterbacks in the Academy’s history. They remained close.
In 1993, three years after he graduated, Grizzard was shot to death in a murder-suicide at the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California, where he was a Navy SEAL, a member of the Navy’s elite commando team. He was at the apartment of a friend from the Academy when her twenty-four-year-old estranged fiancé, a Navy officer distraught about their recent breakup, burst into her room and shot both of them before turning the gun on himself. Paredes was devastated when her father called her with the news.
After graduating from George Washington University Law School, Paredes joined the Navy as a lawyer, known as a judge advocate general. As a member of the JAG Corps, she asked to be assigned to San Diego. She found it comforting to be on the base on Coronado near the SEALs. Paredes served as a military lawyer and legal counsel to the commander of the Navy SEAL training center, which included BUD/S, the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school. She advised the commander on courts-martial, and she also taught ethics, rules of engagement, and law-of-war classes to staffers and students.
Eventually, she was ready to move on. After several years in San Diego and a stint at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., she started looking for a new challenge. A professor from law school connected her with a DEA lawyer and she joined the agency in 2002.
Paredes was impressed with the close-knit group of attorneys at DEA headquarters. The esprit de corps reminded her of the camaraderie she had found in the Navy. She felt part of a team dedicated to protecting the public. One colleague stood out—a tall, lean graduate of Notre Dame Law School. With his shaved head and broad smile, he reminded her of the actor Woody Harrelson. His name was D. Linden Barber. Everyone called him Linden.
Barber was cool and outgoing in a way she had never been. He had married his childhood sweetheart, a girl he met in the fourth grade. Both had become creatures of Washington; his wife was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for communications at the Pentagon. Barber, casually stylish and oozing self-confidence, cut a striking figure at DEA headquarters.
Like Paredes, Barber had served as a JAG lawyer. He was an officer in the Army and deployed to Iraq, where he was awarded the Bronze Star and Combat Action Badge in 2004. As serious as he could be in the office, Barber had a playful side. He acted and sang in skits at agency parties. He was a fun-loving fan of Frank Sinatra. In 2006, he was promoted to associate chief counsel of the DEA and for the next four years headed the agency’s diversion litigation division, providing Joe and his team with legal advice. Paredes was assigned to work for him. She saw herself and Barber as the white hats dedicated to the DEA’s mission: the smart, tough, former military JAGs who were going to hold drug companies accountable. They frequently talked of the horror of the opioid epidemic, but they also argued over legal theory. Barber at times seemed uncomfortable with the aggressive tactics of Joe’s team.
Still, it stunned Paredes and her colleagues when Barber announced in October 2011 that he was leaving the DEA. He joined a law firm, Quarles & Brady, in Indianapolis and carved out a “DEA litigation and compliance” practice. He would defend the companies he once pursued with Joe and Paredes.
In a video for his new law practice, Barber promoted himself as someone who could help companies in trouble with the DEA. “If you have a DEA compliance issue or you’re facing a government investigation or you’re having administrative or civil litigation involving the Controlled Substances Act, I’d be happy to hear from you,” he said.
Paredes felt betrayed. But Barber’s path to the other side was well-worn. Dozens of top officials from the DEA and the Justice Department—which oversaw the DEA—left for high-paying posts at the drug companies or the law firms that protected them. It was the way of Washington, even at the DEA, where there was a constant revolving door between the agency and the companies it regulated.
The pattern was a win-win for the government employees and the drug companies. The employees could triple or quadruple their salaries by going to Fortune 500 companies like McKesson or the law firms that represented them. And the companies were hiring high-ranking DEA and Justice officials who had intimate knowledge of how the agency and the department operated, and how they could be short-circuited. The public was the only one sold short.
Joe understood that these former civil servants wanted to make a better living, but he saw the passage of people like Barber to the drug industry as a con on the American people. It was all about money and power, not public service, and it was at the core of everything that he saw as wrong with Washington. He and his staffers at the DEA didn’t have the same influence as those with deep pockets and close connections to Capitol Hill and the Justice Department. He saw too many officials at Justice and the DEA who hungered for the same paychecks, the same perks as their former colleagues who were making high six-figure salaries working for the drug industry. He wondered whether some government employees were pulling punches, not being as aggressive as they could be, because they didn’t want to upset a future employer like McKesson or Cardinal, or a high-powered law firm on K Street. It was a carousel of greed, he thought, one that was oblivious to the country’s full-blown public health crisis and rising death toll.
Joe knew that with a law degree, a pharmacy degree, and all his years with the DEA, he could cash out. But he had joined the agency to be an agent, not a lobbyist or a corporate executive. When he saw people like Barber standing on the other side of his cases, defending what he saw as the indefensible, he wondered how they had lost their way.