Photo by Susana Gonzalez/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Criminal Law

A Knack for Narcotics Work

Andrea Goldbarg (’01) has made a name for herself prosecuting the leaders of some of the world’s most notorious drug trafficking organizations.

Early in her career as a federal prosecutor, while taking a bathroom break in some prison or another during an interview with a witness in some international narcotics case or another, Andrea Goldbarg (’01) realized: she had never imagined that backdrop for her life.

But the moment must have been brief because, as Goldbarg explains, even if she never imagined that life, it is exactly the life she was meant to live.

“I spend a lot of time talking to assassins, or sicarios; most of them are in jail,” Goldbarg says. “There’s not a lot of glamour to getting pat downs. There’s a lack of glory in the work we’re doing. But it’s an amazing job.”

In fact, even though she didn’t enter law school with the goal of becoming a federal prosecutor focused on narcotics, Goldbarg describes her career as a “calling.” Whatever the descriptor, it has been a success. One of the first narcotics cases Goldbarg worked on after joining the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York in 2005 was against Juan Carlos Ramirez-Abadia, a drug trafficker estimated to have led the export of more than $10 billion in cocaine from Colombia into the United States; last year, Goldbarg served as one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the notorious escape artist and leader of the Sinaloa cartel, who was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years (Ramirez-Abadia testified for the prosecution in Guzman’s trial). In between those cases, she was recruited to Washington, DC, to head up a unit focused on Mexican cartels.

“Once I got to this job, I knew: This is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing,” she says in an interview about her work.

Goldbarg, whose parents both came to the US from Argentina, grew up in that South American country and in Chicago. She says the years she spent living under the military dictatorship in Argentina as a child forever changed her world view, giving her a “strong pull toward public interest.”

“I was shocked that a place I loved could be host to something so atrocious,” she says.

When she was doing anti-corruption work with a nonprofit in that region after grad school, she told the Proud to BU podcast in January, an official from the Dominican Republic asked her if the country should change its Constitution. That’s when she realized she needed to go to law school before she could even consider weighing in on such a topic. She came to Boston University School of Law with the intention of returning to nonprofit work after earning her JD.

“I had a very specific idea of why I wanted to go to law school,” Goldbarg says. “BU Law helped expand my vision of what the legal profession is.”

Goldbarg took a variety of international law classes and served on the staff of the International Law Journal. Immediately after law school, she joined Clifford Chance’s New York office to work on international arbitration and litigation matters.

In 2005, after a friend introduced her to someone at the Eastern District, she realized she wanted to be a prosecutor. Looking back, she explains, that made sense—she was happiest in law school during a summer internship at a State’s Attorney office in Chicago where she assisted on juvenile neglect and abuse cases. She had also loved her criminal law classes with Professor Tracey Maclin and her time in the Defender Clinic under Clinical Professor Wendy Kaplan.

“I always found the stories fascinating,” she says. “IPOs are not something I find very relatable, but people’s rights and every-day safety and security issues are something everyone can relate to.”

Maclin says Goldbarg often came into his office to talk about cases or politics and that he always believed she would end up in some kind of public-interest role.

“She was an extremely hard worker,” he says. “Her work ethic was impeccable, and she was very committed to the rule of law.”

In the Defender Clinic, where Goldbarg represented youth in the Boston Juvenile Court, Kaplan says Goldbarg was “clearly somebody who was interested in trial advocacy.”

“She was thorough in her research and writing, and she was also good on her feet,” she says. “She could distill an argument very well.”

Goldbarg’s first exposure to narcotics work came when she was assigned to a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) murder case in New York. Part of her responsibility was to marshal evidence in support of an ecstasy distribution count, and, while she was preparing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent for trial, she learned about his work on international narcotics cases.

“We spent 20 or 30 minutes prepping for trial and an hour and a half with me asking all about the cases he was doing,” she recalls. “I was fascinated.”

As soon as she could, Goldbarg switched to the office’s narcotics unit, and she hasn’t looked back since. In her time in New York, DC, and now the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, she has prosecuted cases against cartels including North Valle, Sinaloa, Los Zetas, and CJNG.

Her work on the Guzman case began in the Eastern District, which unsealed an indictment against the cartel leader in 2009. In 2014, one of the wiretaps Goldbarg worked on in DC helped locate Guzman, who had been on the run for more than a decade after breaking out of a Mexican prison, reportedly in a laundry cart. After his capture, Guzman managed to escape again in 2015 through a tunnel under the shower in his cell. He was caught once more in 2016 and extradited to the US.

Goldbarg went back to New York to help lead the 12-week trial, delivering closing statements in a case that included 14 cooperating witnesses, more than 130,000 kilograms of cocaine and heroin, weapons, ledgers, text messages, videos, photographs, and recordings. Guzman was convicted on all 10 counts against him. Again, wiretaps Goldbarg worked on were instrumental.

“Once you have the ability to listen to someone describing in their own words how everything is done, that’s tremendously powerful,” she says.

Goldbarg attributes a lot of her success to listening—to the DEA agents she works with and the witnesses whose cooperation she needs to move forward in a case. She says she’s learned most of what she knows about the illicit drug business from the people who made their living in it, people, whom, in some cases, she has put behind bars.

“They’re experts,” she says. “Some people say, ‘Oh, they’re just a gang banger or a drug dealer or a hit man.’ But you have to respect the person. They may have done some horrible things in their life, but, if they are trying to do the right thing now, you have to treat them like human beings.”

Despite the high-profile nature of the Guzman trial, which became something of a tourist attraction, much of what Goldbarg does to dismantle drug cartels is secret. It can take years to build a case, and the work is intense.

“This is not a 9–5 job,” she says. “Criminals don’t work 9–5, so neither do we.”

That’s why it helps to love what she does.

“In the aftermath of the [Guzman] trial, I’m back doing my job, doing what I feel like I do best,” she told the podcast, “looking for new targets, looking for new challenges.”

Related News

• Criminal Law Clinical Program Confronts the Opioid Crisis
• Taking the Next Step: Three Alumni at the ACLU
• A Broken System: Faculty Consider the FIRST STEP Act
• Bringing Light to the Inside: Claire Shubik-Richards (’01) Advocates for Humane Prison Conditions