Corporate defense lawyers have learned not to underestimate Randy Ramseyer and his team of federal prosecutors investigating out of a strip mall in rural southwest Virginia.
First came Ramseyer’s successful prosecution of Purdue Pharma and three top executives for deceptive OxyContin marketing two decades ago. More recently, the Abingdon, Va.-based assistant US attorney sent a Big Pharma CEO to prison. His office now is pursuing McKinsey & Co. and Facebook parent Meta Platforms over opioid-related claims.
Ramseyer, 61, doesn’t much care if he incenses the white-collar defense bar by employing aggressive legal theories, treating witnesses less deferentially, or making big city lawyers trek to what they once considered a legal backwoods.
Unlike many federal prosecutors or political appointees at Justice Department headquarters, Ramseyer isn’t angling for a lucrative job in Big Law. He’s happy exactly where he is, working a block from his home in the Blue Ridge Mountain town that’s been dealing with the aftereffects of Hurricane Helene.
“Randy loves Abingdon. I say this jokingly, he has his own little kingdom there,” said Rick Mountcastle, his former longtime collaborator at the US attorney’s office. “We didn’t have any ambitions about going anywhere or worrying about rocking the boat or making somebody who might hire us in the private sector mad.”
Ramseyer, who enjoys refereeing college soccer and football more than being in the spotlight, credits his partners across the Roanoke-based Western District of Virginia and elsewhere.
They include a state Medicaid fraud agency that’s grown from 12 to 102 employees due to Ramseyer’s insistence on using proceeds from Purdue and other criminal settlements to fund it. His office also benefits from a sympathetic jury pool in a surrounding coal mining community reeling from the opioid epidemic.
Some corporate lawyers who’ve opposed Ramseyer are more apt to recognize him for the district’s success.
Ramseyer is the “force of nature there that makes that office do things that other small offices don’t do,” said Jim Wooley, a retired Jones Day partner who negotiated opposite him on DOJ’s largest-ever $2 billion opioid plea on behalf of his client, Indivior Solutions.
Yet Wooley is still disappointed by Ramseyer’s sentencing hearing comments, which he felt were unfair to a new cooperating executive team uninvolved in the company’s fraudulent statements to a state Medicaid program.
“They tell their lawyers, ‘resolve this, get this behind us.’ And then you still take an ass-chewing in the press from the prosecutors,” Wooley said. “If he ever carried a briefcase on my side, he might rethink that.”
Abingdon Origins
Asked in a recent interview if he regrets never representing companies, Ramseyer deadpanned, “The only thing I’d be missing out on is money.”
The Ohio native much prefers public service in the town he stumbled upon after a Fourth Circuit judge took Ramseyer on when the Alabama federal judge he was set to clerk for was assassinated. When the clerkship ended in 1992, Ramseyer walked down the street to the US attorney’s office for employment. He’s never left.
He took on pill mills and doctors as theft and violent crime rose in the Abingdon area from OxyContin addiction in the mid-1990s.
Convictions piled up. During one case, Ramseyer was so frustrated with the lenient sentencing of a physician that he apologized to the courtroom gallery for the insufficient punishment, upsetting the judge, said two people in attendance.
He and Mountcastle determined bolder action was necessary, so they opened a probe of Purdue in 2002. It was an underdog tale chronicled in “Dopesick,” a bestselling book adapted into the 2021 Hulu miniseries.
Their goal was prosecuting the most senior executives possible, designing a strategy of shaking up the white collar investigation playbook to ensure CEOs no longer get a pass. Outraging defense lawyers was part of the point, Mountcastle said.
Ramseyer “loves the David versus Goliath thing,” said Tim Heaphy, his boss as the Obama-era US attorney in Charlottesville. “He has no fear whatsoever of going up against Kirkland and Paul Weiss and Sidley and all the big firms that send people down to Abingdon.”
Companies lobbied DOJ political leadership to intervene. Overruled on charging Purdue brass with felonies, he found a rarely used drug safety misdemeanor that doesn’t require proof of criminal intent. The CEO, general counsel, and medical director all pleaded guilty.
While the trio avoided prison, Ramseyer invoked the statute again for Indivior’s former CEO in 2020. He got six-months.
Meta, McKinsey
Ramseyer will be further tested in the criminal investigations of McKinsey over the consultancy’s opioid marketing advice to Purdue and others, and Meta, involving the social media platform’s role facilitating drug sales. Those developments were first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to Bloomberg Law by a source familiar with the matter.
Another Abingdon case involves Indivior competitor Orexo US. Ramseyer has subpoenaed the Swedish pharmaceutical subsidiary, according to court filings that haven’t been previously reported. Orexo disclosed in July that it’s seeking to settle.
In a possible road map for the ongoing cases, lawyers say Ramseyer has a reputation for depriving witnesses of temporary immunity, calling defendants to testify at their own sentencing, and testing other unconventional strategies without fear of failure.
He’s hauled in law partners initially taken aback by the maverick style of Abingdon prosecutors, compared to their chummier interactions in New York and Washington.
When the office set about probing Abbott Labs for misbranding an anti-seizure medicine to dementia patients, the multinational drugmaker’s outside counsel, Jim Brochin, said other lawyers told him Ramseyer was “a jerk, although they used stronger, less polite language.”
“I don’t agree with any of that,” said Brochin, a New York white collar defense attorney. “He’s a smart guy who us northeasterners may underestimate.”
He settled with Ramseyer in Abbott’s $1.6 billion 2012 plea.
Mountcastle said Abbott executives escaped charges only after political intervention at DOJ. But more often than not, escalating a case to headquarters won’t work, Heaphy said.
“I’ve seen lawyers almost look at Randy as a way station on their way to the DAG or the AG,” he said. “‘We’re just going to appeal you. You guys out here in the country don’t know what you’re doing.’ That really backfires.”
Ramseyer said he’s not persuaded by the argument that this isn’t how things are done elsewhere.
“My response is just, ‘that’s how we’re going to do it,’” he said. “I hope we have a reputation for being fair, and we just want the right result.”
More Clout
Litigating adversaries and Justice Department superiors give Ramseyer more respect now.
He’s been aided by a Biden-appointed US attorney in Chris Kavanaugh who’s plugged into leadership in Washington, giving the Western District a greater claim to high-profile matters where venue could be established anywhere a drug is prescribed, several attorneys said.
Arun Rao, who until August was a Justice Department deputy overseeing consumer protection, said Ramseyer’s district is now established within DOJ as being “aggressive and innovative,” giving it “natural synergy” with the Main Justice trial attorneys.
In an industry in which DOJ attorneys frequently jump to Big Law partnerships mid-case, Ramseyer said he and other veteran colleagues have stuck around to reap the dividends of hard work. “We do have that advantage that I’m old, and have been here for a while.”
The same defense attorneys who once presumed they were dealing with Barney Fife, as one past colleague put it, recognize he can’t be steamrolled.
Among the lessons they’ve learned was that Ramseyer is quite guarded. He shies away from small talk, and can’t be moved off his position over a beer. That’s partly because he doesn’t drink alcohol. He’s a vegetarian who never curses or yells.
During meetings with opposing counsel, “he doesn’t show his cards” and “his demeanor never changes,” Mountcastle said.
He’ll give an almost “passive-aggressive response if somebody says something very combative,” Mountcastle added. For instance, he’ll say, “‘That’s fine, but I disagree with everything you’ve said,’ in a very flat tone.”
State Partners
Ramseyer has also tackled hurdles from ballooning digital evidence that stymies many DOJ offices. He’s infused his state Medicaid fraud office with millions from criminal recoveries to build a rapidly processing electronic discovery system managed by five staffers, while giving access to federal prosecutors.
Randy Clouse, who recently retired as director of Virginia’s Medicaid fraud unit, notes a snowball effect. “Each case gets bigger and bigger,” he said, pointing to the $20 million his agency received out of the Purdue resolution, followed by $60 million from Indivior.
The data processing innovation gives Ramseyer’s team an upper hand when companies contemplate whether to cut a deal or go to trial. Another factor is Ramseyer’s decided home-court advantage in a region where many residents have seen loved ones overdose on opioids.
US District Judge James Jones, who presided over Ramseyer’s largest pharmaceutical cases, acknowledged he’s sympathetic to defense lawyers who prefer settling. Jones said he’d try to screen jurors for biases, but opioids’ profound impact make it a continuing problem.
He still praises Ramseyer’s audacity for bringing Wall Street titans into town. “I don’t think he was afraid of any case,” he said.
If any of Ramseyer’s ongoing corporate cases make it to court, Jones won’t be the judge. He no longer hears criminal matters while on senior status. But Ramseyer’s sending signals he’s not going anywhere.
“This is a harsh punishment” and “we hope it deters both Indivior and other pharmaceutical companies,” Ramseyer told the court at the company’s sentencing. “But if it doesn’t, the next punishment will have to be more severe.”
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