Chapter 28
Washington, D.C., 2017
There was a reason Joe Rannazzisi didn’t call Paul Farrell in February. Three months earlier, he was walking to dinner at P.F. Chang’s off the Las Vegas Strip when he felt a throbbing ache in his stomach. Probably indigestion, he thought. It was December 2016, a little over a year after Joe had been pushed out of the DEA.
When Joe first left the agency, a former colleague, Jimmy Craig, often called to check on him. “What are you going to do? Sit around and mope all day? Why don’t you get a job?”
Joe said he wasn’t ready. Craig persisted. “We’ve got to talk,” he said. “Dude, I’m worried about you sitting there all day. You and that stupid dog of yours.”
Joe laughed. Craig worked at a software company that contracted with government agencies and was developing a system that identified anomalies in drug ordering patterns. They were looking for someone with Joe’s skills.
“Why don’t you apply?” Craig asked him.
Joe was hired.
One day, after he began his new job in 2016, Joe received an unexpected call from Richard W. Fields, a lawyer who was representing the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, the largest federally recognized tribe in the country. The Cherokee were going to file the first tribal lawsuit against the opioid industry. Fields had read about Joe and the DEA cases he brought against the drug distributors. He also had a personal experience with opioids: Fields’s own brother became addicted to opioids after suffering back injuries as a sheet metal worker. Fields found Joe through a mutual acquaintance at the DEA. Would he be interested in helping? Fields asked.
Joe agreed to meet. Prescription pain pills had ravaged the Cherokee Nation, Fields told Joe. The social services, medical, law enforcement, and foster care systems were overwhelmed by families struggling with addiction. He needed Joe’s expertise. Joe was moved by the plight of the Cherokees and said he would like to help. But he had just started his new job and needed to concentrate on his work. He told Fields to stay in touch.
That December, Joe, along with Craig’s son, Dustin, who also worked for the software company, flew to Las Vegas to staff the company’s booth at the American Society of Hospital Pharmacists at the Mandalay Bay Resort. The convention drew twenty thousand people, and Joe was so busy, he didn’t have time to leave the resort. He grabbed lunch and dinner at the hotel’s overflowing buffet tables. Too many questionable buffet items were probably causing his indigestion, he thought. On his last night, he and his colleagues met at P.F. Chang’s for dinner. Joe felt worse after dinner. As he left the restaurant, the pain in his stomach became so unbearable he had to stop walking.
“You okay?” Craig asked.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Joe flew home early the next day, still feeling ill. When he landed, he called his doctor, who told him to come to his office immediately.
“You don’t have indigestion,” he told him. “You might be having a slow-onset heart attack.”
Joe couldn’t believe it. “I’m not showing any symptoms of a heart attack,” he said. “I don’t have shooting pain. There’s no chest pressure.”
Joe’s skepticism—and stubbornness—kept him from going to a cardiologist for several days. When he finally saw the specialists, one doctor performed a heart catheterization; Joe had blockages in three arteries.
“I’ll see you in recovery,” the doctor said.
Just before surgery, a nurse asked Joe if he needed anything. He asked for a priest. As he was wheeled into the operating room, a priest came by and blessed him.
While recovering in the hospital following seven-hour open-heart triple bypass surgery, Joe thought back on everything that had happened over the previous year. How could he be jogging forty miles a week and end up under the knife? It was the damned DEA, he concluded. Leaving the agency hadn’t ended the seething resentments, and he was affronted by new slights that he felt just as keenly from afar. The new officials running the DEA had exiled his top supervisors. His senior deputy, John Partridge, was transferred to Colorado. His executive assistant, John Scherbenske, was told he was going to be transferred to Dallas. He retired instead. His most trusted legal counsel, Mimi Paredes, was demoted into irrelevancy. At forty-eight, her career was now in jeopardy. She had taken a six-month maternity leave around the time Joe left. Upon returning, DEA officials gave Paredes the same “mushroom treatment” they gave to Joe. They stripped her of her drug diversion work and assigned her to an office with nothing to do. At night, she would come home to her baby daughter, put her to bed, and cry.
Paredes reached out to Joe for support. He felt that he was to blame. His team had become collateral damage.
On March 17, 2016, four and a half months after Joe left the agency, Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, brought the latest version of the Marino-Blackburn bill to the Senate floor. By then, the DEA had dropped its opposition. Behind-the-scenes lobbying had weakened the ability of the agency to resist. A senior DEA official said that the agency had battled the bill for years in the face of growing pressure from key members of Congress and the industry. He said the agency was forced to accept a deal it didn’t want, one that made it nearly impossible to issue Immediate Suspension Orders. “They would have passed this with us or without us,” he said. The final bill defined “imminent danger” as “a substantial likelihood of an immediate threat that death, serious bodily harm, or abuse of a controlled substance will occur in the absence of an immediate suspension of the registration.” The second chance “corrective action” provision remained intact.
It passed by unanimous consent, a parliamentary procedure reserved for bills considered to be noncontroversial. Because no senator objected, a recorded vote was unnecessary. On April 12, 2016, the House passed the bill using the same procedure. It was the crowning achievement of a two-year-long campaign by the drug industry to weaken the DEA’s aggressive enforcement efforts. Joe was livid. He also felt a kind of despair at how much of his work had been undone.
The drug industry had spent $60 million lobbying Congress on the bill and other legislation between 2014 and 2016. Political action committees representing the industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the campaigns of the twenty-three lawmakers who sponsored or cosponsored various versions of the bill. Tom Marino collected $93,500, Marsha Blackburn $128,850, and Republican senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a longtime friend of the drug industry, received $197,700. Hatch was one of the key sponsors of the bill in the Senate, along with Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, home to CVS. Hatch’s office handled negotiations with the DEA and the Justice Department over its final language.
Hatch had also worked on the final language with representatives of the drug industry, including lobbyists for Purdue Pharma. The night the House approved the bill, Burt Rosen, Purdue Pharma’s vice president for government affairs, applauded its passage in an email to colleagues. In another sign of how closely the industry was collaborating, Rosen noted that for two years he had been working to pass the bill with members of The Alliance and the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.
“Purdue was very active in influencing the ultimate definition of an ‘imminent danger to the public health or safety,’” Rosen boasted in the email.
With Joe, most members of his team, Attorney General Eric Holder, and DEA administrator Michele Leonhart all gone from government service, there were no high-level officials left to oppose the bill. Neither Chuck Rosenberg, the new acting DEA chief, nor anyone in power at the Justice Department pushed back. With no objections, President Obama signed it into law on April 19, 2016.
On June 22, Rosenberg testified on Capitol Hill before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hatch praised him from the dais. “I’ve been told the DEA’s relationship with supply chain stakeholders has improved since you’ve taken the helm at DEA,” Hatch said. “I want to just say I applaud your efforts on this front.” The senator asked Rosenberg how he saw the “partnership” between the agency and the drug industry “evolving.”
“Thank you for that,” Rosenberg replied. He noted that there were 1.6 million health care professionals and drug companies with DEA registrations, allowing them to manufacture, prescribe, sell, or distribute controlled substances.
“The overwhelming majority, 99-plus percent, are our allies in this thing. Historically, we’ve done a very good job of alienating them. I’m being sarcastic. What we need is them as partners,” Rosenberg said. “I think we’ve been slow. I think we’ve been opaque. I think we haven’t responded to them.”
He promised to repair the relationship between the DEA and the drug companies. Rosenberg told Hatch that he had hired a new chief of the division Joe once supervised. “I have a new head of diversion, and actually he is a star,” Rosenberg said.
Joe was watching the hearing on C-SPAN. Joe’s name hadn’t been mentioned. But Rosenberg’s diss was obvious. Several of his former colleagues called.
“Rosenberg just bitch-slapped you,” one said.
“Are you watching this?” another asked.
“No,” Joe lied. “What hearing?”
Months later, while recovering in the hospital, Joe would wake up to find a friend from the DEA sitting by his side. DEA administrative law judge John Mulrooney had dropped by to cheer him up. Joe opened his eyes and saw Mulrooney sitting in a chair, looking at his phone.
“It’s about time you got up,” Mulrooney said. “I was about to leave. It’s kind of rude that I came all this way to see you and you’re asleep.”
Joe smiled. He looked up at the day board next to Mulrooney. A nurse had written her name and listed Joe’s goal for the day: Walk three loops around the ward. But next to it, someone had added more goals in different handwriting: “Run a 10K. Invent a better mousetrap. Write a novel.”
Joe started laughing so hard his chest hurt.
A nurse walked in. “Stop!” she told Mulrooney. “You have to stop making him laugh.” She looked at Joe with alarm. “You’re going to split your sternum!”
When Joe returned home in the first week of January 2017, there was a message on his answering machine from the man who had sidelined him. “Joe, this is Chuck Rosenberg. I heard you got heart surgery. And I was just worried about you. I wanted to check up on you.”
That was another call Joe didn’t return.