Chapter 24
DEA Headquarters, 2015
At the end of August, Joe Rannazzisi received a call from a colleague who asked if he was retiring.
“No,” Joe said. “Why?”
“Well, they just announced a guy who’s going to be taking your job.”
Three months earlier, President Obama had named Chuck Rosenberg as the DEA’s acting administrator, following the retirement of Michele Leonhart, Joe’s longtime boss and ally at the agency. Rosenberg had been a U.S. attorney in Virginia and Texas. As soon as Rosenberg arrived at DEA headquarters that May, Joe had an uneasy feeling. After their first meeting, he thought Rosenberg was standoffish. Soon he heard that Rosenberg was questioning his colleagues about him. “How do you think Joe Rannazzisi runs his division?” he would ask.
One DEA official warned Joe to be careful. “He’s got a thing about you,” the official said.
Shortly after Joe received the call and learned that he was being replaced, he got another, from one of his friends at the DEA, James Soiles, who was running global operations for the agency.
Soiles told Joe that Rosenberg’s number two, Acting Deputy Administrator Jack Riley, wanted to see both of them. Riley, the former special agent in charge of the Chicago field division, was known for his efforts to hunt down Sinaloa Cartel drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was caught on wiretaps offering to pay for Riley’s assassination. When Rosenberg first arrived at the DEA, Riley told him that the most important task the agency faced was repairing its fractured relationship with Congress. Riley advised Rosenberg to meet with lawmakers and ask them for help. Rosenberg took Riley’s advice and began meeting with numerous members of Congress.
Soiles met Joe outside an elevator on the twelfth floor of DEA headquarters near Riley’s office. He urged Joe to stay calm.
“Jimmy, what do you mean don’t get upset?” Joe said. “I just heard that I don’t have a job.”
“Dude, don’t lose it on this guy,” Soiles said.
They walked together into Riley’s office and sat down.
“Joe, there’s going to be some changes,” Riley told him. “They’ve got a guy coming in to replace you.”
Joe couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Jack, I’m not retiring,” he said.
“We’ll figure that out. Just find a place to sit,” Riley told him, ordering him to vacate his office and find a new desk.
“Well, how long do I have?” Joe asked.
“Boss wants you out immediately, so just find a place,” Riley said.
“What is my role?” Joe asked.
“I don’t know, but right now you’ve just got to find a place until we can figure out what we’re going to do,” said Riley.
“So, that’s it?” Joe said.
“That’s what the boss wants,” Riley said. “He’s the administrator.”
“Acting administrator,” Joe said to Riley.
As they walked out, Soiles turned to Joe. “Dude, that was impressive.”
Joe stopped. “Jimmy, do you honestly think for one second that I’m not burning up inside?”
Joe was disgusted that Rosenberg had tasked Riley with sacking a DEA veteran, one of the highest-ranking senior executive service officials at the agency. He didn’t have the guts to do it himself. “The guy sitting in the front office is such a coward, he can’t even look me in the eye and tell me he’s removing me,” Joe told Soiles.
Joe returned to his office. He told Mimi Paredes, John Partridge, and other members of his team what had happened. He was visibly crushed.
It had worked, he told them. The drug industry had finally got what it wanted. When he went home that night, Joe taped his hands with boxing wraps and threw punches at the heavy bag hanging from the rafters in his garage. He pounded the bag for an hour. In the days that followed, his investigators went from room to room to find an empty office for him. They finally found one on the tenth floor in an area nicknamed “The Hinterlands” because it was barren.
After thirty years at the DEA, leading some of the highest-profile nationwide investigations, Joe was being given what was known at the DEA as the “mushroom treatment.” He was stuck in a dark office with no people, the equivalent of bureaucratic exile, in the expectation that he would give up and retire. In late September, he submitted his papers.
During his last weeks, Joe packed up boxes of all of the plaques and awards and the coffee mugs he had been given by police departments across the country. He had one last presentation to make to DEA employees. He also had to introduce the man named to replace him, Louis J. Milione, a lawyer, former theater and film actor, and eighteen-year veteran of the agency. It was a painful moment, but Joe wanted to be professional. He tried to hide his feelings as he turned the stage over to Milione, whom he saw as a sycophant who would do Rosenberg’s bidding. He took a seat in the front, but he really wanted to walk out the door and not look back.
Taking Joe off the board was good news for the companies that manufactured, distributed, and dispensed opioids; the $12.4 billion opioid market was that much more secure. It was also good news for The Alliance and members of Congress urging passage of a new iteration of the Marino-Blackburn bill, now called S.483. Joe’s last line of defense at the Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder, had stepped down and returned to private practice at Covington & Burling. President Obama named Loretta E. Lynch to take his place.
The latest version of the bill went even further in its efforts to undermine the DEA: The agency would now have to show that a drug company’s practice posed an “immediate” threat before issuing a suppression order—a standard that Joe knew the DEA could never meet. The bill also retained the built-in second chance for companies, allowing them to take corrective action when caught and avoid DEA penalties.
Within days of Joe submitting his retirement papers, John Gray, The Alliance’s president, said during a board of directors meeting that the organization’s executive committee had agreed on several priorities.
Item Number 1: “Exhaust all efforts to secure passage of S.483.”