فصل 50

Section IX

Total Surrender

50

The Raid

It was Wednesday, September 3, 2003. I remember because on Wednesdays I go into Gainesville in the morning to see Dr. Chance for a health tune-up. After the appointment, I noticed I had a voice mail from Lisa Elliot, the resident attorney at the R&D facility in Alachua. She said it was very important, so I returned her call while still in the parking lot. I got Lisa on her cell phone, and she was very glad to hear from me. Her voice was uncharacteristically tense, and I realized that something was very wrong. She began by telling me that I needed to come to work right away because the FBI was there, and they wanted to see me. My first thought was about a federal marshal who had come to the facility a few years earlier looking for a prior employee. I asked Lisa if they were looking for someone. She said, “No, THE FBI is here—twelve to fifteen agents plus the Sheriff’s Department. They’ve taken over the entire facility. They’ve shut down all the phone lines and the entire computer system. This is a full-blown raid. Helicopters are flying overhead, agents are armed, and there’s a search warrant. You need to come here right away!” I clearly heard the words she was saying, and I understood the sense of urgency with which they were said—but the situation was so absurd that I could not relate to it in any manner. It was like—maybe they have the wrong address. I guess that’s why it didn’t disturb me. In fact, it sounded like it was going to be rather exciting getting to show them they had made a mistake. I asked Lisa what was going on. Why were they there? She said she had no idea, but apparently the same thing was happening at our offices in Tampa and at corporate headquarters in New Jersey. She had been trying to call Charlie Mele, our general counsel, but she couldn’t get through. The phones were down corporatewide. I assured her that I would be there right away.

During the twenty-minute drive back to the office, I tried calling everyone I could think of who might have some information. I still had absolutely no idea what was going on when I pulled up to the R&D facility. The front drive was completely blocked off with Sheriff’s Department vehicles, and the employees showing up for work were being turned away. I pulled up to a deputy and identified myself. He made a call on his radio and immediately signaled to the others to let me through. As I drove up the long and winding drive through the beautiful hayfields, law enforcement vehicles were scattered everywhere. When I approached Building 1, I saw the Sheriff’s Department’s forty-foot Mobile Command Center stretched across our parking lot. We had five buildings by then, and FBI and Sheriff’s Department personnel were positioned around all of them. There were, indeed, two helicopters buzzing overhead. I think they ended up being part of the media coverage.

I parked in my normal spot and made my way into the building. The place was swarming with law enforcement officers. I was met by four or five agents who immediately walked me into the back conference room where I was to spend the day. I requested that our in-house attorney, Lisa, be present, and she was brought into the room. The agents identified themselves as from the FBI and Treasury Department. They were very professional and businesslike. I was presented with a search warrant, which Lisa had already reviewed, and I was informed that the warrant gave them full control of the facility. They had the right to take any and all items that fell within the itemized categories. They asked me to sign a paper acknowledging that I had been served the warrant. I glanced at Lisa, and she nodded that I should sign. I had absolutely no idea what to do; I was completely out of my element. The only frame of reference I had for this sort of thing was the movies, and I doubted that was going to be of much help.

I asked the agents in charge if they could help me understand what was going on. They didn’t say much, but they referred me to a list of about thirty names that they said were persons essential to their investigation. The entire executive management team from the original Medical Manager Corporation was on the list, as were Marty, the attorney Jim Mercer, and some top people from WebMD’s corporate accounting. My mouth must have been agape as I looked at the list. But there were also a few other names that really floored me, like the senior auditor from the highly respected public accounting firm we had used for Medical Manager Corporation. I was taking everything in very calmly, but my mind was spinning trying to find clues about what was behind all of this.

It was actually the presence of one name on the list that first caught my attention. The name was Pat Sedlacek. Unlike everyone else on the list, this person was neither part of our executive team nor part of legal or accounting. Pat worked on the dealer acquisition team, which was run by Bobby Davids, our VP of acquisitions. Bobby had come into the company at the time of the 1997 initial public offering, along with John Sessions, our chief operations officer; and David Ward, our VP of sales. I would hardly have recognized Pat’s name out of our twenty-three hundred division employees, except that we were currently in the process of investigating him for taking kickbacks from some of the dealers. That investigation had begun in late 2002 and by early 2003 had included Bobby Davids and a couple of other employees. WebMD’s corporate attorneys, with the help of outside counsel, were handling the matter. We had already fired the people involved and sued them in a Tampa court in order to obtain subpoena power and freeze Bobby’s and Pat’s assets.

As our investigation went on, we were finding more and more incidents of Bobby and/or Pat arranging kickbacks from the dealers they were acquiring. The subpoenas we obtained of their bank accounts had revealed an intricate network of shell companies Bobby had been using to hide the money. The investigators were able to trace the funds coming in and going out of these accounts to see who was involved in the money trail. Pat had already begun to cooperate, and it was obvious that Bobby Davids was the ringleader. By the time of the raid, we had traced millions of dollars, and it was still an ongoing investigation. With both Pat’s and Bobby’s names on the list, and the search warrant listing more than a hundred of our dealer acquisitions, it was likely that these raids were somehow related to what Bobby had been doing. But his kickback schemes involved only four or five employees, and our investigation of the matter was being dealt with in the open. Why couldn’t the government just talk to the investigating attorneys? Why a sneak-attack raid in Alachua, Tampa, and New Jersey when everything was readily available?

I was finally able to get Charlie, WebMD’s general counsel, on my cell phone. He confirmed that they had been raided by the FBI at WebMD’s headquarters in New Jersey, and he was as much in the dark as I was. He also suspected that this might be associated with the illegal activity Bobby Davids had been involved in. We discussed the possibility that Bobby had tried to strike a deal by telling the government that all the executives were involved in his kickbacks. If so, it didn’t seem likely that his story would hold up given all the hard evidence we had of his bank accounts and cancelled checks. Charlie said that we would get more clarification over the next few days; in the meantime, we were to cooperate fully with the agents.

A sense of total peace came over me and pretty much remained there the entire day. It was so thick it felt like a protective blanket. I was not concerned in the least. I knew I had not done anything wrong, and therefore they were not going to find anything. If this was a case of Bobby lying to try to save his neck, the evidence would clearly reveal the truth. I wanted to make sure I was present enough to fully take in this extraordinary experience. It’s not every day that the FBI shows up and raids your place for absolutely no apparent reason.

My understanding is that nationwide more than fifty government agents were involved in the raid. They took the entire day, and by the time they were done, they left with pretty much everything. My desk was cleared of every single scrap of paper. All my file cabinets were empty, as were all those of my executive assistant, Sandy Plumb. All legal files were removed from Lisa’s office and from the legal filing rooms. My conference room table used to have stacks of file folders piled up that were actively being used to run the business. They were all gone with no way to re-create them. And it was not just the paper documents that were being taken; agents were also making mirror images of all our computer disk drives, both the desktops and the servers.

The day progressed pretty much without my input. I used my time to work on remaining completely comfortable with the radical situation life had stuck me in. There was really no reason to be thinking about why this was happening or how it would turn out. Since I had absolutely no idea what was going on, thinking about it wasn’t going to help. Instead, I enjoyed spending my day letting go of whatever that voice in my head was trying to say and deeply relaxing whenever my heart began to feel anxious. In this situation, surrender was not an option; it was only sane thing to do.

When I left that evening, I sought out the lead agents. I thanked them for being so cordial and told them that I wished we could have met under better circumstances. To me, they were just people doing their jobs to the best of their ability—it certainly wasn’t their fault.

When the sun set on September 3, 2003, nationwide, the government had taken 1.2 million e-mail messages, 1,500 boxes of files containing more than 3 million pages of documents, and 830,000 computer files. This was, indeed, a day that would live in infamy.