Gregg Wood

Gregg Wood was a health fraud investigator in the U.S. attorney’s office in Roanoke whose methodical, relentless gathering of information helped connect local OxyContin complaints to the federal case against Purdue Pharma. He circulated news and overdose data, cultivated a network of people alert to developments, and worked through civil-case records that prosecutors would later assemble into an immense investigative archive. His contribution was less a single discovery than the patient construction of a system for finding, preserving, and organizing evidence.

Position and Early Monitoring

Wood worked in the Roanoke office of the U.S. attorney, where he was tasked with examining the civil cases against Purdue Pharma. Many had been brought by small-town lawyers challenging the company’s promotion of OxyContin and its handling of addiction risks. The work put Wood in a position to gather material from disputes that, considered individually, had often seemed like losing battles for the plaintiffs. Their files could still contain details useful to a wider inquiry.

His monitoring network predated the convenience of Google Alerts. From the early days of the epidemic, Wood emailed regular compilations of OxyContin-related news articles and overdose statistics to law-enforcement agents, prosecutors, and other interested recipients. He asked anyone who spotted local news about OxyContin to let him know. Art Van Zee gave these updates a name: the Wood Reports. The invitation mattered because it made the monitoring reciprocal; Wood did not merely circulate information already collected but encouraged recipients to feed new local leads back into the system.

Van Zee recalled that Wood was very high energy, checking for stories in the middle of the night. That description gives the updates a human rhythm: their reach depended not only on the circulation list but on the investigator’s continuing attention to what might have appeared since the last email. As reporting on Purdue became legally contentious, Wood’s work also offered the prosecutors a route to information beyond newspaper coverage. When Purdue lawyer Howard Udell challenged Barry Meier’s position at The New York Times, Meier was largely kept from writing about the company for four years. The interruption did not prevent John Brownlee from studying the footnotes in Meier’s book, while Wood continued communicating with Van Zee and the parents involved in Relatives Against Purdue Pharma.

Turning Local Cases into Leads

Wood’s assignment took him through civil suits filed by lawyers trying, often without success, to challenge Purdue over the drug’s promotion and addiction risks. Their clients’ circumstances varied: miners and masonry workers became addicted after injuries connected with their work, while one factory worker was so desperate to stop taking OxyContin that he flushed his pills down the toilet. He told his lawyer that explaining dopesickness to someone who had never experienced it was like describing an elephant to a blind man. Wood’s role placed such accounts within a larger inquiry, where individual experiences could be considered alongside the company’s records and promotional claims.

The material reached prosecutors through an informal but consequential exchange among lawyers, families, and advocates. Small-town attorneys, parents, Van Zee, and Sister Beth Davies passed along what they had collected about Purdue: sales-representative call notes, depositions, and even a copy of the nondisclosure agreement Van Zee had received as a Christmas gift from his wife, Sue Ella Kobak. These were not all the same kind of evidence, and Wood’s work was to sift through the civil cases and help bring their records into the federal investigation. The resulting account emphasizes how materials generated in scattered private disputes could acquire a second life when gathered and examined together.

The Investigation’s Archive

The flow of material became a large-scale document operation. By the time a New York Post reporter disclosed in 2005 that a federal grand jury was investigating Purdue, Brownlee’s office was secretly logging millions of records on spreadsheets. The Wood Reports were being issued four or five times a week, and one employee had been assigned solely to catalog documents. The repeated updates and the cataloging work were complementary: one kept new information moving toward investigators, while the other made the accumulating record searchable and usable.

The civil-case files did not remain isolated in lawyers’ offices. After Abingdon lawyer Emmitt Yeary lost his case against Purdue, boxes of sales-representative notes and depositions from Arnold Fayne McCauley’s case were incorporated into the prosecutors’ trove. Prosecutors called Purdue’s internal repository the Shadow Company’s Warehouse; the volume of material collected by the lawyers was so great that Brownlee had to rent additional space in an Abingdon strip mall to store it. Wood’s collection and cataloging helped make that growing body of documents part of a prosecutorial archive rather than a set of disconnected case files.

Public Evidence and Narrative Role

At Brownlee’s press conference, Wood stood among the prosecutors and others who had built the case, beside two thousand cardboard containers filled with documents, depositions, and data. Columns of boxes rose four to five feet high. Their physical presence made visible the scale of the work behind the allegations: the case had been built not only from a few striking claims but from the accumulation of records gathered and organized over time.

The exhibits showed what that accumulation could establish. Brownlee displayed Purdue’s falsified charts claiming smooth, sustained blood levels and fewer peaks and valleys, alongside clinical data from the company’s own studies that showed steep fluctuations instead. The agreed statement of facts covered forty-six assertions, including the suppression of reports about withdrawal symptoms and sales representatives’ false claims about abuse, euphoria, and diversion. The evidence also included a Purdue study showing that a drug abuser could recover 68 percent of the drug from a single pill. Wood’s work is not presented as the sole source of these findings; rather, he helped gather and organize the record from which the prosecutors built their case.

Wood’s significance lies in that connective labor. News reports, overdose statistics, civil litigation, family advocacy, and company documents belonged to different channels of knowledge, often separated by geography and institution. His updates invited those channels to intersect, while his investigative work helped preserve their contents for scrutiny. In the book’s account, the archive is not background scenery to the prosecution: it is the visible consequence of sustained attention, and the means by which scattered allegations could be set beside Purdue’s own data.