Episode Summary

In part 2 of my conversation with retired FBI Special Agent Aaron Weeter, we learn more about life as an FBI agent. Aaron explains how he got started, what it was like to work on high-profile cases like 9/11, the DC Sniper, and January 6th, and how he ultimately specialized in drug-related crimes for most of his career. It was fascinating to learn about how Aaron and his colleagues used informants and undercover officers to take down doctors in the opioid epidemic.

Be sure to listen to the previous episode with Aaron to learn how the opioid epidemic of the 90s spread to become the fentanyl epidemic we have today: Retired FBI Agent Reflects On Opioid Crisis

For the visually-minded who prefer to listen and read or for those who need closed captioning, watch the transcript video here: https://youtu.be/sDVbaz9FHbM

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Retired FBI Agent Reflects On Opioid Crisis

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[00:00:00] Carole Blueweiss: Welcome to Wisdom Shared, where parents, kids, and people on the front lines are the experts and where connection inspires change. I am your host, Carole Blueweiss. And today we have as my special guest retired Special Agent Aaron Weeter on the show for a second time. On the last episode, Aaron explained from his perspective how the fentanyl epidemic today was born out of the prescription opioid crisis in the 90s. He will share with us what motivated him to become an FBI special agent, along with some inside stories that you won’t want to miss. Let’s get right to it.
How does it work in the FBI that you’re getting the people that become double agents to spy for you?
[00:00:47] Aaron Weeter: We refer to them as informants or cooperating witnesses. The way that worked is if we heard about a particular doctor because local law enforcement had arrested somebody on a deal and figured out that they were a patient of that doctor, then the local law enforcement officers would be in touch with us.
And we would approach that person. If it was somebody that was passed out in a car or if it was a smaller quantity drug deal, they weren’t held. They would be arrested and released. And then we would approach them and basically talk to them to understand from them what was their actual relationship with that physician?
Did they fall off of scaffolding and have spinal fusion surgery and have excruciating pain? Did they have cancer? And that’s an important distinction to make. Palliative care, where you’re talking about caring for people, you know, have terminal type illnesses, but whatever medications they need to make them comfortable as best they can, they should have full access to.
These were folks that were otherwise healthy that we were interested in. If they were a significant dealer right off the bat, I would tell them, look, history is history. You can’t undo what is already done. And we are aware that you have sold huge quantities of these pills over the last few years. But there’s always a reason for that, and we want to give you the opportunity to help yourself as best you can, but you’re going to have to be truthful. You’re going to have to be reliable when we call and you’re going to have to certainly stop selling the pills because we’re going to be taking the pills at this point from you.
[00:02:26] Carole Blueweiss: You were trained as a CPA, a certified public accountant. How did you end up becoming an FBI agent?
[00:02:32] Aaron Weeter: Well, for me, it started up, you know, at a young age. I grew up just one exit north of Quantico, Virginia, which is a big Marine Corps base. But on that Marine Corps base is the FBI training academy. And I grew up with a lot of kids in school who were sons or daughters of FBI agents stationed either at Quantico or at FBI headquarters in D.C. So I got a window into it there, and then I also had a very close family friend, and he was an FBI agent up in New York, and I remembered the stories that he told. One of my favorites that probably made the light go on in my head that that’s something I wanted to do in the future was we went on a ski trip and stayed overnight with them in New Jersey before we took off the next morning for New Hampshire.
And how he wasn’t home. He was working, of course, so I was asleep on the couch in the living room and about 2 o’clock in the morning, I saw the door open and I saw a man coming through the door with a briefcase in one hand and a shotgun in the other. And I thought, wow. Well, after the initial shock and concern wore off in my 12-year-old mind, I thought, you know, this would be a great job to have, to apply your schooling and upbringing to a noble cause and something that would be exciting and invigorating to work.
[00:03:53] Carole Blueweiss: Do all FBI agents carry guns?
[00:03:56] Aaron Weeter: Yes.
[00:03:57] Carole Blueweiss: They do?
[00:03:58] Aaron Weeter: They do.
[00:03:59] Carole Blueweiss: How do you become certified to become an agent?
[00:04:02] Aaron Weeter: I went through college and got a degree in business accounting and specifically with a focus to try to, you know, get myself into the FBI as quickly as possible. So the FBI recruits in a wide variety of fields and backgrounds. And accounting, I knew, was one that was a very quick route in.
I also knew that it would be a great degree to have if I needed a job otherwise, and so got my accounting degree, got my CPA. And applied to the FBI in 1997. It was about a one-year process to get through all of the background investigation, the polygraph, the interviews, the testing. In 1998, I was offered an appointment as a special agent with the FBI, and I showed up at the academy, or I was told to show up at the academy. And it was a 23-and-a-half-year career thereafter. And I retired at the age of 50, having accomplished just what I had wanted to do in those two decades.
[00:05:03] Carole Blueweiss: What did your parents think when you told them you wanted to be an FBI agent?
[00:05:08] Aaron Weeter: Oh, I think my parents were very supportive of it. They knew a number of FBI agents growing up, when I grew up. Again, living in that community surrounded by agents who are coming and going from different assignments. Public service was important and my mom certainly supported it very much as well. Though they worried.
[00:05:29] Carole Blueweiss: They worried. Yeah, that was my wonder. And when you say special agent, are all FBI agents special?
[00:05:36] Aaron Weeter: Oh, that’s a great question. I think they are, but that is just a name. And often I would get the question, what makes you special? And I said, it’s just, that’s just the title. I couldn’t choose to just be an agent. That’s a title. There are no agents, there are only special agents.
[00:05:53] Carole Blueweiss: I like that. They should be also special employees, you know?
[00:05:57] Aaron Weeter: Absolutely.
[00:05:58] Carole Blueweiss: How was it for you to manage such an intense career and then come home to your family?
[00:06:06] Aaron Weeter: Well, certainly there were times where it was extremely challenging. My wife not knowing when I was going to be home or what I was doing. She knew back in college when we started dating that that’s something that I wanted to do. But, you know, at 26, when I came in, you’re still pretty young. We didn’t have any children and life was still fluid enough to adapt, but it was certainly a sacrifice. We had to move from Atlanta to Washington. D.C., which was not our choice. That was where I was assigned.
[00:06:35] Carole Blueweiss: And you could tell her I’ll be home late or not.
[00:06:37] Aaron Weeter: I could.
[00:06:39] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah, no, I just mean about like the worry factor.
[00:06:41] Aaron Weeter: Sure. Sure, yeah. There were times I think where she was concerned. Are you okay? Where are you? But they were more, you know, major events in the area like the DC sniper or, you know, September 11th type things, or even on January 6th. You know, being at the Capitol on that day and, you know, what’s going on down there is just, you know, watching the news, right? You know, it can make you worry.
[00:07:08] Carole Blueweiss: Clearly, you didn’t choose what you were put on, but it just seems such a variety of cases. How does that work? Do you, they just assign you?
[00:07:17] Aaron Weeter: Yeah, so coming out of the academy, you are assigned to an office and within that office, you’re assigned to a squad. So within the FBI, there are 56 field offices. So you rank your field offices, you know, 1 to 56 in order of where you’d like to go. And I believe it was in week seven that we were informed of our office assignment. So in week seven, I opened up an envelope and found out I was going to Washington D.C. That was my first choice because I knew probability wise, I would likely get it. It was a big office.
My roommate, on the other hand, got his 48th choice. And he was at the bottom of the class as far as choices. He went to Newark. No offense to the northeast there. A, I was a CPA and I was assigned to a white collar crime squad. That didn’t necessarily apply to the other accountants or CPAs in my class, and they were assigned to a variety of different squads, drug squads, fugitive squads, counterintelligence squads, counterterrorism, there are a multitude of places to work within the FBI, and that’s why I think it’s the most interesting, opportunity filled law enforcement career that you can have because you can really, I stayed in the same area for my time in the FBI, but I could have moved to within each of those areas if I had wanted to.
[00:08:40] Carole Blueweiss: So you were assigned to the white collar, what do you say, white collar?
[00:08:44] Aaron Weeter: White collar crime squad or the financial crimes area.
[00:08:48] Carole Blueweiss: But yet you worked for 9/11 and you worked in the D.C. sniper case and then January 6th. So how does that fit in?
[00:08:56] Aaron Weeter: Well, my office, which is the Washington Field Office of the FBI, is a large office. When major events like 9/11, the DC sniper or January 6 take place, it’s pretty much all all hands on deck situation and everyone responds and is assigned.
So, basically a squad, which I was part of a squad, my squad was one of about seven in the white collar crime section that focused on different areas of white collar crime. And within my squad, I typically had 10 to 12 agents. After September 11th, we were almost immediately assigned to Dulles Airport, which is where one of the planes took off that morning.
And we were running all sorts of leads to try to figure out who the hijackers were. Reviewing video, seeing if there were folks that were on the inside that helped them get in or get onto the planes, etc. So DC sniper, we were fanned out over, you know, the entire northern Virginia area, DC, Maryland. Looking for, you know, particular vehicles and following up on leads. And, you know, January 6th, we responded as a squad to, you know, the Capitol in the early evening, late afternoon. So basically, whenever anything, you know, large scale happens, everyone kind of is pulled in to respond and assist and that can go on for weeks and months and, you know, it could go on for just a period of days if it’s a smaller event that resolves.
[00:10:36] Carole Blueweiss: So there’s certain events that take over whatever you were doing before, like any of the investigation of stuff that could wait, you were pulled.
[00:10:45] Aaron Weeter: September 11th, 2001 was kind of right at the height of when we were doing these pill investigations, the initial pill investigations, and we had to put all of that on the shelf. We couldn’t operate our informants. We couldn’t meet with the prosecutors. We couldn’t prepare for indictments. We couldn’t do anything. And that went on for several months, at least probably two to three.
[00:11:09] Carole Blueweiss: Of all of these cases, you witnessed live, January 6th episode, or what do you say? January 6th…?
[00:11:18] Aaron Weeter: Yeah, January 6th event, whatever. It was a response to help to secure the building at that point, which, you know, by the time we got there, it was mostly well in hand. It was, you know, going back to your point on, you know, the dangers of the job, what I would say is, the fellow law enforcement officers that I work with, the state and locals. Primarily the locals, as we call them, as they call themselves within the counties and the cities and areas that we worked, are the ones that are really on the front line all the time.
An FBI operation is typically planned out well in advance. So as far as the dangers of the job, I certainly want to highlight that being a local law enforcement officer was far more dangerous than what I did. My job certainly had its share of potential, but we kind of, for the most part, knew when it was coming and could prepare for it.
[00:12:13] Carole Blueweiss: So what case was your favorite or the most intriguing for you or that sticks out in your mind?
[00:12:20] Aaron Weeter: Sure, probably the biggest case that I worked on is in that prescription drug area, the pill world. It was a case that I opened and worked with the DEA, Fairfax County Police, Prince William County Police, the Virginia State Police. It was a task force case.
So we had a couple of doctors in Northern Virginia and a pharmacist in Northern Virginia, a couple of pharmacies, who were supplying, providing prescriptions for, and filling prescriptions for absolutely enormous quantities of opioid medications. Oxycodone primarily and at the time it was OxyContin and those doctors were prescribing the medications to hundreds of patients and in volumes that allowed the patients not only to use, and when I say patients, there were different types of patients within each practice, there were the folks that were there for the right reasons, trying to get help to treat chronic pain, which I’m sure I know from what they have told me over the years, is absolutely agonizing and life changing when you have it.
So there were folks that were there for the right reasons, but there were also folks that were there because they had either become addicted and couldn’t control their intake of these medications any longer to the point they began abusing them. Typically, those folks evolved into, many of them evolved into selling the drugs, which is what brought us.
So as far as, you know, the most intriguing case, I would say it was kind of the combination of those three subjects who were related, but unrelated as physicians and pharmacists and the distribution networks that they fuel. We had about 40 subjects total in that case who pled guilty in US District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia with sentences ranging from 20 plus years to months of incarceration or probation. But it kind of ran the gamut.
[00:14:25] Carole Blueweiss: Do you remember that feeling of like, I can’t believe this? Or what did you feel when you were doing that case?
[00:14:34] Aaron Weeter: Well, I opened my first pill case in 1999. I had just started with the FBI in the Washington field office after my training in October of 1998. I want to say it was January of ’99 I opened my first pill case and I didn’t have any background in opioids before that.
I didn’t really frankly know what they were, but I began working with the locals, the local law enforcement officers, and began hearing about this issue that they were having with prescription drugs and the issue with prescription drugs for the local law enforcement officers is typically, you know, many of these folks, if they were a patient, they had a prescription bottle, had a doctor’s name on it, had a pharmacy label on it, and they were legally allowed to have it.
The only difference is, you know, it was very unlike cocaine or methamphetamine or any other type of illicit drug, heroin. If you have quantities of that on you, there is no doctor behind that. Right? So the local law enforcement officers were and the local courts were having difficulties prosecuting these cases. And in typical drug cases, often you work your way up from the bottom.
And so with a cocaine case, for example, if they arrested somebody with cocaine on them, they could take that person on up to their dealer and they could then arrest that person and take that person up to the next dealer. At every step of that way, there’s, you know, blatantly illegal conduct. These are illicit drugs. They’re not allowed to exist. But with the pills, the local law enforcement officers didn’t really know how to effectively address that. Not that they hadn’t done it on certain occasions in the past, but these doctors could have hundreds of patients and trying to put together a case that made that prescription illegal was the challenge.
[00:16:28] Carole Blueweiss: And how did it become apparent that there’s a problem here?
[00:16:32] Aaron Weeter: I would say it came from a variety of sources. Like I said, the medical board investigators might mention it to us on one day. A local law enforcement officer who’s on a drug task force who we worked with would mention it the next. We worked with insurance companies. Insurance companies would note that certain providers or physicians would be prescribing medications that were larger in quantity or stronger in dosage than they typically saw.
So really it came from a variety of different sources. Pharmacists were also a great source of information. And we developed actual informant type sources within pharmacies who would provide information to us. You know, within the parameters of what they were allowed to do, but they’d say hey, this looks really sketchy. I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’ve got a van load of people from Maryville, Tennessee, you know, which is outside of Knoxville. And they just pulled up in front of the pharmacy and they’re seeing a doctor in Maryland. And they’re all in their early twenties when they’re all filling virtually the same types of prescriptions for oxycodone, Xanax, morphine and other medications. So pharmacists were also a great source of information for us. And then the question, how do we figure out whether this is a criminal conspiracy or conduct or whether this is just the practice of medicine?
[00:18:03] Carole Blueweiss: I watched Chasing the Dragon. That was a great documentary that showed what can happen and from the point of view of people that, people think of drug addicts as a certain kind of type, but in actuality, especially with this opioid epidemic, it wasn’t that at all. It was regular people having regular lives, being brought up in a very comfortable situation, getting well educated.
[00:18:30] Aaron Weeter: Right, right. The demographic, there is no, you know, bias or prejudice toward who you are, what demographic you come from. It affects everyone from the young teenager to, you know, the 60 and 80 year old grandmother who’s financing her trips to, you know, on cruises with the pills that she gets because she doesn’t use them. She passed them on to her family members who are running a pill operation and she gets to enjoy, you know, trips out of it.
[00:19:02] Carole Blueweiss: Woah, woah, woah, that was a case?
[00:19:05] Aaron Weeter: Yeah, that was a case. Yeah.
[00:19:06] Carole Blueweiss: Tell me more.
[00:19:07] Aaron Weeter: So, that was a case. It started with some doctors and then we started to look at some of the patients as well to see if we could identify some folks who were dealers, patient dealers who we might be able to, you know, motivate. And I say motivate, when you’re addicted to these medications and you’re selling them and you get arrested, the last thing you want to do is stay in jail. Because, you know, if you stay in jail, you’re going to go through withdrawals and withdrawals are terrible.
In that case, we had two brothers and at least one neph, one of their sons, that were involved in distributing these pills. And they had doctors, some doctors that they were getting them from, and they were also getting them off the street in DC at lower prices and reselling them in Virginia at higher prices.
The mother was literally, I think she was certainly in her late seventies, but probably in her early eighties, she was taking cruises and she would get her pills every month and she would pass them on to the kids and they would sell them. These, when I say kids, these guys were in their fifties. But yeah, that’s how she was kind of enjoying her lifestyle.
[00:20:12] Carole Blueweiss: It’s just mind boggling of a grandmother selling drugs to the family members to make money to go on trips. Just like my brain can’t even compute that.
[00:20:23] Aaron Weeter: Yeah, yeah. Well, she was a tough nut to crack too. Because we talked to her a number of times and everybody, you know, in the family kind of told us that she was a supplier of some of the pills, but she would never, she would never give it up. She’s like, oh, no, I take my pills. You know, I said, well, would you mind if I counted them? You have them here? Oh, well, you know, I’m running a little short. I took a few extra, you know, so, you know, what are you gonna do?
There’s a certain type of person that probably doesn’t meet the description of somebody who’s going to be, you know, punished for these activities. And even if they’re, you know, if they’re 80 years old, they have to face the judge, but we also have to face the judge and bring in the right cases. And in this case, it wasn’t huge quantities every month, but she was definitely giving her pills.
[00:21:11] Carole Blueweiss: Was she arrested?
[00:21:13] Aaron Weeter: No. Our witnesses would have been looked at as not the most credible folks. And she would have been looked at as a very pitiful subject. So she was not arrested. We didn’t have any hand to hands with her. We did try. We did try to send some folks in to get pills off of her, but I think maybe she was out at that time or something.
[00:21:36] Carole Blueweiss: So I assume she wasn’t using them?
[00:21:39] Aaron Weeter: She wasn’t. Now, she might have been using a few, but yeah, to your point, I mean, it spans a wide demographic as far as the folks that become addicted to prescription drugs and other drugs.
[00:21:52] Carole Blueweiss: And who sell them, too.
[00:21:53] Aaron Weeter: Correct.
[00:21:54] Carole Blueweiss: Now, these people that you had described that you would wire them, and they’d speak to the doctors, what was the arrangement? Did they, were they paid by the FBI? Was it volunteer? Was it in exchange for less of a sentence? But they sound like they’ve already been over, they’ve already served their sentence from what you said. Am I wrong?
[00:22:17] Aaron Weeter: Well, yeah, so the way it works is, you know, there’s the initial arrest and then there’s, you have a charge and then you’re basically either going to plead guilty or not guilty. Most people plead not guilty initially. And then they are, you know, set for trial. So it’s somewhere in between that stage of being charged, arrested and charged. And when they’re set for trial, basically, they would, in a lot of cases, they would have an attorney and the attorney would say, hey, go work with the FBI. Go work with the DEA, work with the locals. Try to work these charges off, per se. You don’t work the charges off completely, but it goes to their benefit if they cooperate reliably. And I guess, you know, effectively with an investigation. So it’s more on their anticipating benefit on the back end of their charges. So they weren’t paid.
Now, typically my informants, I had informants that I paid for other reasons. But if you were facing charges, you wouldn’t be paid because that would be, you kind of don’t do both.
[00:23:24] Carole Blueweiss: Yeah, conflict of interest. So I guess I misunderstood because it sounded like when you were first talking about it, that these were criminals that served their time. And then they left. And then you then interviewed them to see if they would be good informants. So am I missing something?
[00:23:40] Aaron Weeter: Yeah, no, maybe I misspoke or it was a misunderstanding there. But, no, these would be folks that would, they would get arrested by the locals on a, let’s say a Thursday night. And I get a call from a detective say, hey, we just arrested so and so. He’s a patient of this doctor. He said he wants to cooperate. I run out the next morning and talk to the guy. Usually at that point, he’s probably still in jail. But soon thereafter, he bails out. The police talk to his attorney. Say, hey, look, if this guy wants to cooperate, we can work with him and that gets relayed to the judge ,that the government has no opposition to release in this case, because if they’re incarcerated, there’s really no cooperation they can have as far as recording anything.
So they need to be out. So, yeah, so that would be worked out sometime in that span between when they’re arrested and when they eventually adjudicated on their charges. Which could be months, many months, half a year, easy. So it gives you a good long window to work with them.
[00:24:39] Carole Blueweiss: And is that how you caught most of, is that, was that the strategy used? To get your evidence?
[00:24:45] Aaron Weeter: Yes. For the most part. We did send patients in. Well, we typically wouldn’t try to send somebody that was an informant or a cooperating witness in cold if they weren’t an existing patient. The majority of folks that we use to record their interactions with the physicians were existing patients.
We did, however, use undercover officers as well, and these would be just cold initial appointment. They would walk in and say, this is my issue. This is what I’m looking for. She went in there. It was Adderall, basically controlled substance speed. Basically, she went in there and said, hey, look, I’m a fitness model. I use this stuff. I got it from a friend. It helps me keep my weight off. And I also, you know, sometimes share it with my some of my clients. They think it works really well. And we did that over a period of like a couple visits. But we had three or four visits with it. The doctor had no issue. He would get, he would give extra prescriptions to her for her clients, you know, or increase.
He wouldn’t say, well, I’m not going to give you an extra prescription. And then we would have the undercover say, well, can you just bump mine up by like 50 and then I’d have more to give to her? Yeah, I can do that. So yeah, there were different scenarios where we would use undercovers, but undercovers were more difficult to get in than an existing patient for obvious reasons.
[00:26:01] Carole Blueweiss: Do you laugh when you watch FBI shows like how they show everything like this?
[00:26:06] Aaron Weeter: You know, what I would say is, you know, don’t believe everything you read or hear on the news or in the papers about what’s going on, you know, within the FBI or within our cases. And also certainly don’t believe everything that you see on TV shows. Some of the work is absolutely amazing and incredible, and probably not far from what you see on TV. But much of it is made to seem much more either glamorous or exciting, or perhaps have more infighting and conflict than it often does.
[00:26:40] Carole Blueweiss: Do you have a favorite?
[00:26:42] Aaron Weeter: As far as a show?
[00:26:43] Carole Blueweiss: Or a movie, or a TV show?
[00:26:46] Aaron Weeter: For me, I think Silence of the Lambs was the movie, right? That was in the 90s. They actually had actual instructors at Quantico that cameoed in that and who were there when I later went through the academy. And so the ropes that they climbed, the trails that they ran, the mats that they were thrown down on as they worked on their defensive tactics were all the same mats and ropes and trails that I was on, you know, just a few years later. So, who could not love Clarice Starling, right?
[00:27:16] Carole Blueweiss: Mm hmm. So they did their research, too.
[00:27:19] Aaron Weeter: They did, and I think it probably inspired a lot of people to join the FBI. It was a movie that, you know, people still talk about today.
[00:27:28] Hannibal Lecter: I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner. Bye.
[00:27:43] Carole Blueweiss: Thank you so much for listening to Wisdom Shared. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out all the other episodes. Go to caroleblueweiss.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you’re hearing on Wisdom Shared, please spread the word and share this podcast with your friends. Leave a review and subscribe so you can receive wisdom every month. Thanks for listening.