In contrast with Flagler Tiger Bay President Jay Scherr’s irradiating exuberance, U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg’s lunch talk to the club today–including a rare, full complement of the county’s circuit and county benches–was decidedly downbeat, like the Deuteronomy of heroin, opioids and fentanyl and the concurrent hockey-stick-shaped graph of overdose deaths since 2000 in Florida.
“I know this is in some ways a very depressing topic,” he said, not without an understated dose of black humor. “First of all, I’m a federal prosecutor. So I don’t have a lot of pick-me up-sort of topics.” And the 35 counties and 13 million people his middle district serves–by population the second-largest of the nation’s 94 federal districts–have kept him and his 150 prosecutors busy with drug crimes since President Biden appointed him U.S. Attorney in 2022: 250 people prosecuted for violent crimes last year, 400 guns seized in drug cases, drug seizures valued at $1 billion, and recovered restitution totaling $200 million largely achieved through asset forfeiture, though Handberg didn’t get into that.
He wanted to project a more congenial image of the federal prosecutor. All those movie and TV scenes of FBI agents taking over a local crime scene and shoving everyone else aside isn’t how it’s done. “What we do is we work very collaboratively together at all levels, local, state and federal, and what our goal is, because we all live and work in these communities that we serve, is to try to find a way to use the resources we have to make our community a better place,” Handberg said. “At the end of the day it’s not really about who’s going to get credit for something. It’s just about doing what’s right. And there’s always another case, you know. There’s always going to be another case.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis thinks otherwise. Handberg’s colleagues in the Southern District are handling the prosecution of Ryan Routh, the man suspected of attempting to ambush or assassinate Donald Trump at a golf course in West Palm Beach last Sunday. DeSantis ordered a state investigation and wants the state to prosecute–and “surge resources to [former] President Trump’s security detail needs,” according to an executive order. Asked in an interview about the state’s role, Handberg demurred, saying it was a Southern District matter. He did not address the issue during his talk, nor did the club membership ask him about it.
Drug crimes, overdoses and the making and distribution of fentanyl were clearly safer territory. He referred to fentanyl as “the deadliest drug threat that our country has ever faced,” though only as the current culmination of a grim evolution that started with Oxycontin and a culture of “pain management” that led to a run of pill mills all over Florida.
“The pill mill was that doctor’s office that shared office space wherever you were located, where there were all these out of state license plates of people who were just waiting hours and hours in the parking lot to get their prescription, usually for Oxycontin,” he said. “What was happening was not the practice of medicine, and we know that because law enforcement would go in and do undercover operations where they would pretend to be a patient to see what the doctor–air quotes around that–would do, and what they would find was there was not the typical sort of doctor-patient sort of interaction where they were trying to figure out what a patient needed and whether they needed some sort of pain medication. What was going on was really just a drug transaction, often in cash, for a certain number of pills for no real reason other than the person was going to pay. And so what happened was Florida got to be known as the oxycontin Express.”
Opioid deaths started to increase, from just 152 in the state from Oxycodone in 2000 to 2,000 by 2010. Lawmakers cracked down. One of the measures was a prescription monitoring system that sharply cut down on pill mills. But the unintended consequence (a pair of words Handberg did not use but implied) was the migration of former Oxy addicts to fentanyl.
Unlike heroin, which is naturally grown, fentanyl is a synthetic. It can easily be manufactured. The chemicals and how-tos are on the internet, though China specializes in producing and disseminating the chemicals, and two Mexican cartels specialize in producing and packaging the drug, while drug dealers specialize in “cutting” drugs like cocaine or heroin with fentanyl to cheaply bulk up the product and produce a more intense high for “customers,” ensuring repeat business–or death. “We’re seeing it mixed with cocaine, methamphetamine and counterfeit pharmaceutical pills,” Handberg said. “It’s a cheap way to keep the potency up as you’re cutting drugs.”
Overdose deaths shot up further, especially as drug addicts often did not–do not–know what they’re buying.
“What I want people to know is,” the prosecutor said, “if someone hands somebody a pill, and it’s not a doctor or pharmacist that’s handing that person tat, you’re taking a 70 percent chance in the choice you’re about to make. It is a death of choice. It’s very few times where I’m not in a group like this, where I don’t have somebody who tells me at some point: I had a family member, a friend, I had someone I knew who was a result of this. Fentanyl is unforgiving in a way that I’ve never seen with drugs.”
Fentanyl deaths in Florida in 2022: 5,622. It is the leading cause of death for people in the 18 to 44 age group, Handberg said. He detected a 10 percent decline in fentanyl deaths in the state in the first six months of 2023, compared with the previous year.
As attorney and Tiger Bay member Marc Dwyer prepared to field a few questions from the audience (two questions on school security, one on the way seized drugs are destroyed and one on drub-abuse prevention), he opened his remarks by telling Handberg how “your department has been under attack lately.” He did no elaborate. But he explained what he meant in an interview afterward: “There’s been allegations that you hear in the news, it’s pretty popular that the Department of Justice is being weaponized for one purpose or another, to suit agendas,” Dwyer said. “It bothers me when they get attacked for doing their job. As a lawyer and someone who cares about the rule of law, that’s disturbing. So I’m proud that he’s able to stand up here, inform and educate that really what they do is good for us, and we ought to honor that.”
The audience included several students from the Matanzas High School Law and Justice program, led by Chris Sepe, a teacher at Matanzas since his retirement from a 25-year law enforcement career at the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office. It also included Circuit Judges Chris France and Joan Anthony, and County Judges Andrea Totten and Melissa Distler, as well as Circuit Judge Terence Perkins, in his last Tiger Bay lunch before his retirement at the end of the month.
Dwyer led a standing ovation for Perkins before club member Ed Fuller gave him the traditional Tiger Bay gift of wine and his own tribute: “From the bottom of my heart in Flagler County, thank you for being one of the best judges, mentors, jurists, and overall, I call you my friend,” Fuller told the judge.
