I can’t wait to get started.

  * * *

  At the Willard Hotel’s Round Robin Bar, DC bartending legend Jim Hewes serves me one of his gorgeous old-fashioneds. Hewes lives by the motto “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” I’ll drink to that.

  I haven’t been back to the Willard since BLJ threw Gaddafi the “Hooray, Forty Years as a Dictator!” bash. Fifteen minutes later, the rapper Swizz Beatz enters, wearing the type of suit NBA players wear courtside after they’ve torn their Achilles’.

  “You Phil?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I’m excited for the multitude of opportunities presented by this opportunity to grow my personal brand.”

  “Uh-huh,” I say.

  It’s been a busy few weeks. Dotcom settled with Perfect 10. Under Levick’s advisement, he did not box its aging, balding CEO. It would have been cruel. Funny. But cruel. Dotcom has bigger plans for Megaupload.

  “We’re going legit,” he announced on a recent conference call. “Mainstream. We’re going to install someone with music industry credibility as CEO.”

  Enter Swizz Beatz. I’m handling the media rollout for Beatz’s upcoming announcement as Megaupload’s CEO. Swizz Beatz and his nine Grammy nominations are the face of a well-crafted narrative. We’re using him as a shield from music industry criticism, creating the narrative that Dotcom is entering the lawful fold. Mega, Kim, and Swizz aren’t destroying the music industry; they are the well-meaning stewards of its future. Dotcom’s next move is to partner with a record label and major industry figures to release music through his file-sharing platform.

  He’s off to a hot start. A few days ago, on December 17, Dotcom released the “Megaupload Song” music video to YouTube. The video stars Kim Kardashian; musical artists Kanye West, will.i.am, P. Diddy, and Chris Brown; actor Jamie Foxx; boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.; and tennis champ Serena Williams. After the parade of A-listers, Dotcom appears in it dressed in a black hoodie, sporting a neckbeard, and boasting “Four percent of the internet.… It’s a hit, it’s a hit!”

  Once again, Dotcom breaks all the rules of PR. He kicks up at the music labels and literally repeats the (potentially criminal) negative in song: “M-E-G-A! Upload to me today!” Artists who have contracts with major record labels are advertising the very company bending those labels over a barrel. I imagine the horrified faces of the United Talent Agency suits logging on and seeing their biggest clients shilling for a pro-piracy website.

  Once again, Dotcom gets away with it. The music video racks up millions of views on YouTube. The press covers it as a fun oddity. And the song is an earworm, as if an AI program mixed a commercial jingle with a song by the Black Eyed Peas. Yesterday, I caught Lindsay singing it while she cooked breakfast. “Meeegggaaaa,” she hummed. “Me-ga-up-load. Send me a file.”

  “This launch is going to be massive,” Swizz Beatz tells me at the Round Robin.

  “Don’t talk to Page Six,” I tell him. “They’re sniffing. We’ll break the news soon. Thinking of the Wall Street Journal. Only right for a CEO.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  I leave the Willard and head to Rumors, a sticky-floored bar with a patio near Levick’s office. I work late, emailing with a tech reporter named Ernesto who writes for TorrentFreak and with a Forbes writer who wants to put Dotcom on the magazine’s February cover. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be on a plane to New Zealand in a few weeks.

  All does not go according to plan.

  * * *

  Now, a few days later, I get the call that Kim Dotcom has been arrested. When Dotcom hired Levick, I suspected he didn’t need us to deal with just a copyright troll. His lawyers didn’t give us the straight dope. Dotcom knew the FBI was trying to take him down. Now that day has come. The day of his arrest, the press runs photos of Dotcom brandishing a shotgun in front of a black Mercedes with a vanity license plate reading, “GUILTY.” The music newsletter Complex declares it possibly the first case of confession via license plate.

  I doubt antics will save him this time. Dotcom threatens multibillion-dollar entertainment companies with deep connections to the White House. Chris Dodd, the chairman and chief lobbyist for the MPAA, was a senator from Connecticut when President Obama was a senator from Illinois. Vice President Joe Biden has called Dodd one of his best friends. Dotcom’s lawyer will claim that White House logs show Obama and Dodd meeting in the Oval Office on December 9, just a month before Dotcom’s takedown.

  Then, around the time of the raid, Dodd went on Fox News. “Those who count on, quote, Hollywood for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake,” he said. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk, and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

  Is it too far into the weeds of conspiracy to think Dodd threatened to yank financial support for the Democrats unless Obama sanctioned the raid? I call Preston to run my theory by him.

  “Communist Hollywood and leftist politicians coordinating to destroy an armed sovereign citizen? I don’t believe you,” he says dryly. “Are you a cognizant freethinking individual? Is this not obvious to you already?”

  “What’s that noise?” I ask, hearing a pop-pop-pop in the background.

  “I’m on a range in Upstate New York. Marine snipers are teaching me to be more effective with long-range rifles. We shoot with silencers, but you can still hear it.”

  “Sounds accurate.”

  “We’re hitting kill shots at a thousand yards,” Preston says. “Hate to tell you, Phil, but you’re getting beat at your own game. ‘Public relations’ is just the genteel name for propaganda. You went up against Hollywood propagandists. They are as rich as Croesus. And they have a bigger army.”

  “I don’t have an army.”

  “Get one. They’ve got the FBI. You don’t even own a gun, for some reason that I cannot fathom and will not attempt to.”

  “I’ll work on my army. Right now, I’m scrambling. The press keeps harping on the detail that Kim was arrested holding a sawed-off shotgun. He’s like a Bond villain.”

  “A villain?” Preston says. “He’s standing up to the state in an armed fashion. He speaks to me on a deep level. But a sawed-off is a rookie move. It’s too fucking loud. And ninety-five percent of people load with bird shot. Nonlethal at twenty-five yards. A longer barrel is better for putting warheads through foreheads.”

  “For my purposes, it’d be better if Kim didn’t brandish a gun at all.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “I’ve got to run. If you’re ever in New York and feel like shooting shit at great distances, please let me know.”

  I manage the crisis through the weeklong news cycle immediately following Dotcom’s arrest and garner positive news coverage on his behalf. But there is only so much a PR firm can do when its client is an FBI target. The DOJ instructs us to stop working for Dotcom and freezes his assets. I’m frustrated that my hands are tied. I hate that the justice system does the bidding of media conglomerates.

  If I’m being really honest, I’m mostly disappointed that Dotcom and I never had a chance to get started. When I think about the media games we could have played, it’s like pining for a long-lost love. I want revenge for my PR white whale. But it’s a dumb idea to go after the FBI. And Levick’s phone keeps ringing with intake calls from clients in crisis whose assets are not frozen.

  * * *

  Lindsay leads me down a dark linoleum hallway lined with stacks of Plexiglas doors. Scores of desperate-looking cats and tiny kittens look out at us.

  “Our guy doesn’t do the cute and fuzzy thing,” Lindsay says. “He’s more gangly and mangy.”

  “Look at these little guys,” I say, stopping in front of two orange tabby brothers licking each other’s ears.

  “Don’t look in their eyes,” Lindsay says, yanking my arm. “It’s a trap. Besides, they have each other. Our guy doesn’t have anyone left. His siblings and mom have been adopted. He’s been here for months.”

  Lindsay has been volunteering at the Washington Animal Rescue League, on a secret mission to find the best cat to adopt. She watches the cats interact with visitors, eavesdrops on the staff discussing the hard-luck cases, and recaps the details to me, cat by cat, at dinner. This is one of the things I love most about Lindsay: her idea of a conspiracy has her embedded in an animal shelter petting stray cats. If I were a double agent, I’d probably wind up working for an Afghan warlord.

  Lindsay approaches a cage. A pair of yellow eyes open, staring skeptically. Lindsay unlocks the cage and fishes out a scraggly kitten who can’t weigh more than a couple of pounds. He’s jet black, all except those eyes.

  “I saw him make a kid cry earlier today,” Lindsay says, scooping the kitten onto her shoulder and heading to a side room where we can let him loose. “His name is Humerus, like the bone, but I was thinking we’d call him Darth Vader.”

  I lean down and reach out. Darth Vader considers me for a moment, then stabs me in the leg with a razor-sharp claw. A trail of blood runs down my shin. A volunteer rushes to bring me a Band-Aid.

  “You probably want to meet some other cats,” the volunteer says.

  “No, this one is an excellent judge of character,” I say. “We’ll take him.”

  They put Darth Vader inside a box with holes, and Lindsay and I head home with him.

  I moved into Lindsay’s place two weeks ago. My Bloom County posters have finally found frames. Lindsay leaves me and Darth in the back bedroom. “I’m going to Petco. We need supplies,” and she bounds out the door.

  I peek through the holes in the box. A yellow eye stares back. I open the box, and Darth Vader beelines it under the couch, which in Lindsay’s place is stain-free and not concealed by old sheets.

  “I find your lack of faith disturbing,” I tell him.

  I lie on the bed. The pillowcases smell like Lindsay, clean and fresh and of another scent that makes me feel calm and happy. They smell like home. After fifteen minutes, a dark flash creeps into my peripheral vision. Darth Vader studies me. He approaches, one paw at time. I don’t move an eyelash, and he hops onto the bedspread, still keeping his distance. I resist the overwhelming urge to pet.

  “You have emotional problems,” I tell Darth Vader. “That’s cool with me. I do, too.”

  Lindsay busts through the front door carrying bags of kitty litter, a new litter box filled with toys, food, brushes, and treats. “I spent way too much money, Phil,” she shouts, putting things into cabinets. “We now have a Petco credit card.”

  “Come see,” I call out from the bedroom.

  Lindsay appears in the doorway and sees Darth Vader lying at my feet. “I think he likes you,” she says. “So maybe he won’t stab you anymore.”

  * * *

  “You’re going to be fine. It’s going to be fine,” Lindsay says.

  I sit up on the stretcher, anesthesia already coursing through my veins. But I’m ready. I’ve been practicing a joke just for this moment. “Next time you see me, they’ll be double Ds,” I say, grabbing my chest. Lindsay cracks up as orderlies wheel me into the operating room. Then everything goes darker than black.

  When I come to, I am hugging my Opus plush toy. Lindsay leans over the hospital bed and snaps a selfie. She tells me the surgery went well; they shaved down the bone spur jamming into the labrum of my hip. This operation will buy me two years until I need a total hip replacement.

  “In the waiting room, I read four hundred pages of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Lindsay says. “I have so much to tell you. And Preston snuck in a bottle of bourbon.”

  “Bourbon,” I repeat, like an alcoholic infant learning his first word.

  “Later,” she says. “Bourbon later.”

  “Don’t leave,” I say. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  Lindsay pulls up old episodes of Law & Order on her laptop. She stays with me in the recovery unit all night and falls asleep in her chair with her face pressed into a stack of blankets at the foot of my bed.

  * * *

  A pharmacist hands me a bottle of OxyContin. Forty pills. Then a bottle of Percocet. Ninety pills. Each with two refills. Take one or two every six hours for hip pain. Sure.

  I start taking client calls after popping Percocet. I rub the extended-release coating off the Oxys with a wet paper towel and use a spoon to crush the pills into a fine powder that I swallow with water. In this way, the drug rushes into my bloodstream. I grow accustomed to the warm opiate bath running down my spinal cord.

  I’m back at the pharmacy the day my bottles run out. I like Percocet. I like Oxy even more. Too much. When my last refill runs dry, I stop cold turkey. I shake. I sweat. I vomit. Four days into my detox, Richard Levick notices me hunched over my desk, my fists clenched into white balls.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Just going through withdrawal,” I say.

  I don’t realize it at the time, but I am one of millions of Americans who were overprescribed opioids by doctors. I get lucky. My parachute opens before I fall headlong into opioid addiction. Now called the first wave of the opioid crisis, the overprescribing began in the late 1990s. Guess what Purdue Pharma debuted in 1996? If you guessed OxyContin, you’ve won a free Purdue Pharma hat! (Legal disclaimer: Purdue Pharma LP does not sanction the views of Mr. Philip Elwood, nor is the company liable for any headwear-related giveaways Mr. Elwood promises in his memoir.)

  Karl Marx said religion was the opium of the people. You know what’s a lot more like the opium of the people? Opiates. Like every other drug dealer I have ever met, Purdue, and the Sackler family who owned the company, sold a product that people wanted. Turns out the market for legal heroin is huge. But you can’t very well take out an advert in the New York Times to sell heroin, can you? So, Purdue hired McKinsey and Company and a little-known PR firm called Dezenhall Resources. And Dezenhall Resources helped commandeer the credibility of the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. Think tanks are research and advisory nonprofits, and they litter the streets of downtown DC. There is a think tank for most things you can think about or shoot with a tank. Many think tanks are wonderful resources for scholarship and potential legislation. But they can be corrupted. Some take money for “directed research.” In these relationships, there is often a financial stake in the conclusions of the research—a very polite way of saying that a donor is funding the conclusions. Sometimes the donor is a high-net-worth individual with an agenda. Or a corporation with an agenda. Or a foreign nation with an agenda. Nothing is free. Not even for a nonprofit.

  For Purdue, the price tag was $800,000. Remember my saying that you can’t very well take out an ad in the New York Times to sell heroin? Well, not unless that ad is penned by psychiatrist Sally Satel, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Satel’s 2004 New York Times piece was titled, “Doctors Behind Bars: Treating Pain Is Now Risky Business.” How is this for shifting the narrative? “Pain treatment itself is an area ripe for misinterpretation. Many patients who seek doctors’ help have already tried nonsteroid anti-inflammatory drugs, conventional opiates like codeine and even surgery, yet they are still in severe pain from cancer, degenerative arthritis, nerve damage or other conditions,” Satel wrote. “Large doses of medicines like hydrocodone (Vicodin), oxycodone (OxyContin), morphine or methadone may be required.” Satel actually plugged Oxy by name, and quoted a Purdue shill claiming that one in ten Americans in pain could benefit from a long-term, high-dose treatment with the drug. All I can say is well done.

  The overprescribing peaked in 2010. When people ran out of pills, they turned to heroin. Then fentanyl. At least 645,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999 through 2021. In the end, McKinsey and Company had to pay over $640 million for its role in the opioid epidemic. Books, news articles, magazine exposés, and even 60 Minutes have covered the epidemic and the PR machine behind it. I could name more names and shame more people, but I’m a PR guy, so I’d rather look at two press releases: the first one ever written and the one drafted by the Sacklers in 2021.

  On Sunday, October 28, 1906, at 2:20 p.m., a West Jersey and Seashore Railroad train derailed and plunged into the Thoroughfare, the creek separating Atlantic City from the mainland, at nearly forty miles per hour. Fifty-three people drowned.

  This is where Ivy Lee enters the story.

  In the wake of the derailment, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, now regarded as a “father of modern public relations,” drafted the first-ever press release. His client was the Pennsylvania Railroad, which owned the West Jersey and Seashore Railroad. The press praised Lee’s release for being so transparent and straightforward. So much so that the New York Times printed it in its entirety.

  Things have changed since then.

  On December 9, 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Sackler family jointly issued a press release. One might call it the final release of the Sackler era. For fifty years, the Sackler family donated millions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But now the Sacklers’ evils had come to light, and the time had arrived to announce the removal of the Sackler name from the museum’s walls. The Met could have issued a scathing press release, calling the Sacklers drug dealers and murderers. Both accurate statements. Instead, the Sacklers and the Metropolitan Museum of Art apparently negotiated the language of the release. Museum president and CEO Daniel Weiss stated, “The Met has been built by the philanthropy of generations of donors—and the Sacklers have been among our most generous supporters.” Weiss called the Sacklers “gracious.” Mention of the opiate deaths, or any reason for the museum’s stripping the Sackler name from its walls, was conspicuously absent from the text. Compared to the first press release ever drafted, the Met’s release shows just how much my industry has changed. Ivy Lee got it right the first time. Now even museums launder the truth and offer their own spin.