Chapter 32
Lewiston, Michigan, June 30, 2017
One week into his retirement from the DEA, James Rafalski was puttering around the garage of his getaway lake house on the Lower Peninsula of Michigan when his old boss, Jim Geldhof, called his cell.
“I’ve got some good news. The Masters decision is in,” Geldhof said. “I could kiss you.”
In a scathing thirty-eight-page opinion, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that Masters Pharmaceutical had failed to follow federal law when it poured millions of pills into Florida and Nevada and disregarded clear warning signs that its drugs were winding up on the street. Rather than hold the orders for closer examination, Masters shipped them.
“Most strikingly, in lieu of reporting all held orders, Masters’s employees deleted some and edited others so that they appeared to be of a normal size and pattern, and then proceeded to fill them,” the appellate panel wrote.
It was a stinging rebuke to the opioid industry, and thunderous vindication for Rafalski, Geldhof, Joe Rannazzisi, and their other DEA colleagues. Rafalski had spent nearly seven years working the case—investigating pill shipments, interviewing witnesses, filing field reports, testifying in court.
When his call with Geldhof ended, Rafalski stood in the silence of his garage, its walls adorned with award plaques and logos from the DEA and the Romulus Police Department. He was overcome by emotion, an unfamiliar feeling for the just-the-facts DEA man. He wiped away some tears and savored the moment. “It’s not every day you win a case in the Court of Appeals,” he said.
The ruling was unanimous by the three-judge appellate panel, its opinion written by judge Cornelia Pillard. The panel rejected nearly every argument made by Masters, The Alliance, and the rest of the drug industry, which had filed friend-of-the court briefs in the case. The appellate court ruling would become key to future cases against the opioid industry. The judges obliterated Masters’s main line of defense—the company had claimed that the DEA unfairly imposed new regulations on them. Instead, the court declared that existing federal law already required the distributors to maintain “effective controls against diversion” and design systems to “identify suspicious orders of controlled substances.” If the distributors couldn’t obtain a satisfactory answer, they were required to hold back those orders and report them to the DEA.
“Once a distributor has reported a suspicious order, it must make one of two choices: decline to ship the order, or conduct some ‘due diligence,’” Pillard wrote in the opinion.
The judges noted that Masters had repeatedly failed to examine irregular orders and looked the other way in the face of clear warning signs that its narcotics were being diverted to drug users and dealers. Some of those signs, they said, included long lines at pharmacies during odd times, or multiple cars in drugstore parking lots bearing out-of-state license plates.
In Huntington, West Virginia, Paul Farrell’s phone was blowing up. He began to read the decision on his laptop.
“Holy shit,” he said to himself as he scrolled through the opinion. “They nailed it.”
Paul was turning forty-five the next day. It was an early birthday present, but he kept his celebrations in check.
This isn’t the kill, he thought. But the hunt is on.