Chapter 33
Charleston, West Virginia, July 2017
The dining room was in the secluded Italianate mansion that housed the Charleston law firm of Hill, Peterson, Carper, Bee & Deitzler. Dinner, prepared by Jim Peterson, a partner in the firm, was ossobuco with a veal demi-glace. The wine was from Falcor, a vineyard in California’s Napa Valley owned by Peterson, who on this hot August evening was pouring one of his finest cabernet sauvignons into James Rafalski’s glass.
Damn, Rafalski thought. This ain’t like the DEA where you get a warm bottle of water.
Rafalski, along with Jim Geldhof and Kathy Chaney, the DEA investigator who had been with Geldhof in the Portsmouth, Ohio, gymnasium filled with grieving parents six years earlier, had been invited by Paul Farrell to discuss the possibility of acting as expert witnesses in the developing civil litigation against the opioid industry.
Rafalski was reluctant to travel from Northville, Michigan, to Charleston. He retired six weeks earlier and was exhausted after years of trench warfare with the drug companies. He was sickened that the government had not done more to stop the flood of pain pills but felt he had done everything he could. He won the Masters case. His case against Mallinckrodt settled for $35 million, an unsatisfactory finale. The federal prosecutor Leslie Wizner had once threatened the company that it could face as much as $2.3 billion in fines. He had had enough. He wanted to relax, travel, maybe go to Europe with his wife. He also was leery of lawyers, unsure of their motives and skeptical that lawsuits would alter the trajectory of the opioid epidemic.
But Paul pressed him to make the trip. “Why don’t you come down,” Paul said during a phone call with Rafalski. “It’s just a get-together and you don’t have to commit to anything.”
Rafalski figured he could combine his trip south with a visit to his grandson in Maryland, where his stepson worked as a police officer in Montgomery County. He set out on the morning of July 18 on the six-hour drive from his Michigan home. He pulled off the highway as he crossed into West Virginia from southern Ohio. He was hungry and had spotted a Golden Arches. Inside, he saw disheveled customers stumbling around. They were rail-thin, with vacant, bloodshot eyes. Some were shaking. He knew the look of addiction, but it was unsettling to witness it so plainly inside a rural McDonald’s. These forgotten parts of the country were blighted.
The scene stuck with Rafalski as he listened during the lavish dinner to the lawyers laugh and talk about their big cases. Joining Paul and the partners from Hill Peterson were Mike Fuller and Amy Quezon from Mississippi, and Mike Papantonio and Peter J. Mougey from Florida. Rafalski knew they were trying to charm him. Still, he felt his hesitancy slipping away. He was enjoying himself.
After dessert, the group gathered on a broad veranda shaded by trees. It was a perfect summer evening. The wine flowed as they sat around a big round patio table. Their stomachs and glasses were full.
It was time for Paul to make his pitch. Suing the opioid manufacturers like Purdue was not their priority, he told Rafalski, Geldhof, and Chaney. They were focused on the distributors, such as McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health. They were also considering cases against the nation’s largest pharmacy chains such as CVS and Walgreens. Most Americans, he said, didn’t know about the companies that had flooded the country with opioids and fueled the worst drug epidemic in its history.
“This is a chance to make them pay,” Paul said.
He recounted his Sunday family breakfast story and told his prospective witnesses that his mother and brother had challenged him to do something for the people of West Virginia. Paul said the drug companies would never change their behavior without people like Rafalski, Geldhof, and Chaney taking a stand. They would continue to send pills into poor communities like his. They would continue to pay whatever paltry fines the DEA and the Justice Department negotiated with drug company lawyers. No one would ever be held to account. Paul told them they could make a difference in the lives of tens of thousands of people from places like Huntington.
Paul appealed to their sense of duty, their lingering regrets. He knew they could have cashed in by taking high-paying jobs with the industry but had rejected the revolving door of Washington. He knew they still seethed over the disposition of their most important cases.
“I want to pick up your cause,” he told them. “I promise that I will put the resources into finishing the fight.”
Before the evening ended, Rafalski knew how he’d answer. They’d talked him into it. And he realized that, all along, he’d been hoping they would. His colleagues were sold, too. Now, he just needed to make sure his wife, Linda, would be okay with him going back to war so soon after leaving the battlefield.
He called her on his way home.
She didn’t hesitate.
“Do it,” she told him.