Chapter 14
Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., 2011
On November 22, 2011, two days before Thanksgiving, Joe Rannazzisi was racing to leave work when his office line lit up. It was late, the end of another long day. His daughter had just called, asking him to hurry home. Joe’s father had fallen ill and might not be able to make the trip down from Long Island for the holiday. With so much going on, Joe almost passed on picking up the call, but he glanced at the incoming number. It was from Main Justice, as insiders call the department’s headquarters in D.C.
“Hi, Joe. It’s Jim Dinan.”
Joe sensed trouble. James H. Dinan headed the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force program at the Justice Department. More important, he served as a top aide to the second-ranking law enforcement officer in the country, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole, known at the department as the “DAG.”
“Joe, what are your guys doing in Florida?” Dinan asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you executing warrants in Florida?”
“We did already,” Joe said.
When the call came in from Dinan, the DEA was preparing orders to immediately suspend the ability of the Cardinal warehouse, the two CVS stores, and the two independent pharmacies to sell narcotics. The agency determined that their conduct was so egregious, they posed an “imminent danger” to the public’s health and safety.
Dinan cautioned Joe. “Former Justice Department people are calling the DAG’s office,” he said.
“So?” Joe said.
“So, the DAG told me to tell you, ‘Don’t do anything that can’t be undone,’” Dinan said.
“Well, Jim, we’re in the process of gathering evidence. What do you expect me to do?” Joe asked.
“What are your plans?”
“My plans are, we’re investigating crimes. We’re investigating drug crimes here.”
“Don’t do anything,” Dinan ordered. “The DAG wants to be briefed.”
The call angered Joe. It was highly unusual. He had never been called over to Main Justice to brief top department officials about an ongoing investigation. He knew the industry was ranging its forces against him. Clearly, powerful people were putting pressure on the Justice Department to slow him down. He already knew that a high-powered Cardinal executive, Craig S. Morford, who served as the deputy attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, had sent a three-page memo three weeks earlier to Joe’s boss, DEA administrator Michele Leonhart. After leaving government, Morford had taken a senior position at Cardinal as its chief of legal affairs. In the memo, he told Leonhart that his company wanted to cooperate with the DEA and had stopped shipping pills to dozens of disreputable pharmacies. He copied Joe and attached a handwritten note to Leonhart that began with first-name-basis familiarity: “Michele: We are committed to working with DEA to address the challenging problem of diversion and welcome the opportunity to meet with you and your team to address these issues in a non-adversarial way. Craig.”
The implication was clear: Joe was not working this out as old pals and lawyers should.
Joe called Leonhart. How should we handle this? he asked her.
“Figure out how to deal with it,” she replied. Leonhart trusted Joe and said she would back him up. “Just be careful.”
Joe was at heart a cop. Why should he talk to the lawyer representing the target of his investigation? If he was investigating a drug operation in Detroit or D.C., would the DEA or the Justice Department give them the same consideration?
“Michele, I don’t think we deal with it at all,” Joe told her. “We have an ongoing case on this company and we just issued warrants. So, we’re in the throes of our investigation at this point in time and anything you say to him will be problematic because you can’t confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.”
Leonhart seemed to agree. Joe thought he had managed the Morford problem. But he wondered what else was headed his way. He had handled hundreds of these enforcement cases and never received a call like this. What else was going on?
Several hours earlier, Jamie Gorelick, one of the most influential attorneys in Washington, had privately reached out to Cole. It was reminiscent of how former U.S. attorney Mary Jo White and Rudy Giuliani had intervened at the Justice Department on behalf of Purdue in 2007. Gorelick was one of the city’s star lawyers for the rich and powerful. During the Clinton administration, she had held the same job at the Justice Department as Cole and Morford. Now she was a partner at WilmerHale, a powerhouse firm located two blocks from the White House, with a thousand lawyers in cities around the globe. It represented Cardinal, and Gorelick was able to get a memo outlining her client’s concerns into the hands of the deputy attorney general.
Gorelick told Cole she had received a tip that the DEA was about to prevent Cardinal’s Lakeland warehouse from distributing narcotics. She denied that the company’s behavior constituted an “imminent danger” to the public. Instead, she insisted that any DEA action against Cardinal would “cause significant harm to the public health and to our client.” Cardinal had already halted the shipment of pills to certain pharmacies, she wrote, and it pledged to stop filling dubious orders. The company was adhering to the 2008 agreement it had signed with the DEA to settle allegations that it was fueling the black market in opioids, she argued. “Immediate suspension is a drastic and punitive enforcement tool that is not appropriate for these circumstances,” Gorelick wrote to Cole. “We would appreciate the opportunity to discuss this urgent matter with you prior to the initiation of any action by DEA.”
Apart from that first phone call from Dinan, Main Justice was silent. Thanksgiving and Christmas passed without further comment from Cole. Joe thought the outside pressure might have ended with Morford’s memo. But he didn’t know about Gorelick’s letter.
Joe’s team had sifted through the evidence it obtained from the warrants and was preparing to move against Cardinal when he received another call from Dinan on February 1, 2012, but he didn’t answer it. Early the next morning, at 1:36 a.m., Dinan sent Joe an email: “Please call me in the morning,” he wrote. “I want to make double sure nothing happens that can’t be reversed before the DAG is briefed as we talked about at Thanksgiving.”
Dinan said that Cole wanted a briefing on the Cardinal case and told Joe to be at the deputy attorney general’s office that afternoon.
Joe was being sandbagged. The previous night, Gorelick had privately reached out to Cole’s chief of staff, Stuart M. Goldberg, to discuss the issue and let him know that Randolph D. Moss, a lead WilmerHale lawyer for Cardinal, also was available to discuss the issue with Cole’s staff.
Like Gorelick, Moss had served at the Justice Department during the Clinton administration, holding a series of senior posts in the Office of Legal Counsel, which acts as the legal adviser to the president and the executive branch.
Moss sent an email to Dinan the following afternoon, about an hour before Joe’s arrival at Main Justice. He too struck the tone of old colleagues who could get things resolved. “Following up on Jamie’s call with Stu last night,” Moss wrote. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m back in DC and available to talk whenever you are.”
Moss gave Dinan his direct dial at WilmerHale. “Many thanks,” Moss signed off.
Shortly before 2 p.m., Joe arrived at the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, an imposing seven-story art deco structure with Greek columns that takes up an entire city block along Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues in downtown Washington. Hundreds of lawyers and staffers occupy its nearly one million square feet of office space. Joe rode the elevator up to Cole’s fourth-floor office and stepped into his personal conference room, a formal space framed by large windows, the walls lined with portraits of former Justice Department officials, a fireplace at one end of the room.
Joe took a seat at the long conference table. Cole sat at the head and Dinan and Goldberg and several other Justice Department and DEA officials seated themselves around the table.
Joe enjoyed giving presentations about his investigations. He had briefed several attorneys general and their deputies, and he felt particularly confident about the case against Cardinal. He had just begun describing Cardinal’s past conduct, the problem of the pill mills and the scale of overdoses nationally, when he was interrupted.
“What is your endgame?” the chief of staff, Goldberg, asked.
The question rankled Joe. “Before I answer that, I’ve got to ask you: I’ve done hundreds of these cases, and I’ve never been called over to the Justice Department to explain myself. I’m just curious why this case is so important,” he said.
Cole jumped in. “Because I’m the deputy attorney general of the United States, and I want to know about it,” he said.
“Well, that doesn’t really answer the question,” Rannazzisi said.
“Joe, we’re just trying to help you with your case,” Goldberg said.
Joe glared at him. He considering saying, “Dude, I’m the Babe Ruth of these cases. I never lose.” But he caught himself.
“I think we’re doing pretty well,” he said.
The room went quiet.
Joe continued his presentation in the awkward silence. As he showed his charts and graphs documenting pill distribution numbers and overdose deaths, he thought to himself, I know I’m going to get disciplined for this.
When he wrapped up his presentation, Joe asked if anyone had questions. No one did. Cole rose from his seat and walked out without saying a word.
On his drive back to DEA headquarters on the other side of the Potomac River, Joe called Mimi Paredes. “Someone has gotten to DOJ and Cole,” he said.
“Come on, Joe,” Paredes said. “That’s not happening.”
“No one has ever been interested in what we do in this division. Why are they so interested now?”
“I don’t know, Joe. You sound like a conspiracy theorist.”
The companies were going over his head; they were trying to go through the Justice Department to shut him down. He was convinced of that, regardless of what Paredes said. But he wasn’t going to figure out how to deal. He wouldn’t stop until the companies stopped.
Joe summoned his staff to his office and shut the door. “Now this is war,” he told them. “We’re going after these people, and we’re not going to stop. And I don’t really give a damn what the department wants.”