Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,32

out. But there was definitely this feeling by Purdue that this was a little bit of a backwoods, small-town outfit. I think they underestimated them to some degree,” Hammack said.

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The four-year run-up to what would eventually result in the company’s plea agreement involved Purdue Pharma struggling to understand that the backwoods lawyers had in fact sussed out a crime inside their mound of documents. The company put a full-court press on Brownlee, first with multiple phone calls from Rudy Giuliani, who attempted to unnerve the much younger man during settlement negotiations on Purdue’s behalf.

Brownlee had read Giuliani’s book, Leadership, to get ready for his first meeting with him. “I wanted to be prepared,” he said. “Look, my view of the case was, it didn’t matter where we were or how small we were. To me, it demonstrated that a couple of good, smart prosecutors, working out of a strip mall in Abingdon, Virginia, if they work hard and they’re tenacious, they can win one of the biggest cases in Virginia,” he told me.

An assistant prosecutor in the case recalled that Giuliani put on a folksy front but was not intimately involved in the negotiation’s details, possibly because he was pursuing what would prove to be a failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination. “His role was that his star power alone was supposed to intimidate us,” said an assistant federal prosecutor involved in the negotiations who was not authorized to speak publicly about the case. “People say ‘the government and all its resources,’ but when you’re in the middle of a case like this, you don’t feel that sense because they always have way more people working on the case than you have.”

*

In the fall of 2006, Purdue’s lawyers began to sense that this case against them was different; that a full-court press meant nothing when the opposing counsel was the United States of America. Was it really possible the small-town lawyers had compiled enough evidence to indict both the company and its top executives on a host of felony charges, not just for misbranding the drug but also for mail fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering? It seemed so, according to a memo written by the federal prosecutors to Brownlee at the time.

“But it got watered down, as it went through the Department of Justice headquarters, and the folks working for Purdue, including Giuliani, lobbied hard for the executives not to be indicted on felony charges,” said an observer connected to the case. The fines would get batted around, too, with Purdue initially offering to pay $10 million compared with the government’s initial proposal of $1 billion.

The winnowing down of a settlement is a common part of plea agreements. Prosecutors typically threaten more serious charges while defense lawyers counter that they’ll go to trial to prove their client’s innocence. Meanwhile, Giuliani’s lobbying efforts arrived with the timing and authority of a flagrant foul. In 2005, Purdue lawyers called then–deputy attorney general James Comey to question Brownlee’s investigatory tactics, and Comey called Brownlee with concerns. The young attorney responded by personally driving to Washington to lay out his strategies.

“Brownlee, you are fine. Go back to Virginia and do your case,” Comey told him.

But Purdue’s boldest move came later, in October 2006, the night before the plea agreement was set to expire—after which the company would face charges—when a senior Justice Department officer phoned Brownlee at home (at a Purdue lawyer’s request), urging him to extend the deadline to give Purdue more time. Brownlee was through being pressured. The lobbying and negotiations had gone on long enough. The clock had all but run out.

Rather than risk more serious charges or a jury trial in western Virginia, where the drug’s problems were by now legend, the company accepted the plea agreement later that night. But Purdue wasn’t quite finished negotiating. Eight days after it accepted the deal, Brownlee was stunned to see his name on a firing list, along with four other U.S. attorneys. Though he wasn’t ultimately fired, the incident provided fresh criticism of then–attorney general Alberto Gonzales, accused of trying to sway the work of U.S. attorneys’ offices.

And it only underscored the long reach of Purdue: Udell’s defense lawyer Mary Jo White, a former Manhattan U.S. attorney, had been the one to press for more time in a call to a Department of Justice official. (Brownlee would break down how Purdue’s attempted influence peddling worked—or didn’t—in a later Senate hearing about the case.)

Brownlee weathered the heat. By the time the