On the morning of September 17, 2009, Darren Sewell left his office at Freedom Health, the Tampa health-insurance company where he was a vice-president, and climbed into his Chevy Tahoe. He drove to Sonny’s BBQ, a restaurant nearby, where he picked up barbecue sauce for the sandwich he had brought for lunch. Then he continued on until he reached a drab stretch of road lined with gas stations and scraggly palm trees, where he pulled into a parking lot and waited, as discreetly as possible, to meet his F.B.I. handler.

Sewell, a physician, was thirty-four years old, six feet four inches tall, and broad-shouldered, with an earnest smile and barely perceptible dimples. He was born with one eye slightly crossed, and it still drifted when he was tired or feeling stressed; strangers sometimes found it disconcerting, but his quick wit and easy sense of humor usually dispelled any tension. In the parking lot, Sewell looked around nervously. He noticed that there was a large puddle in the parking space next to his car, where the F.B.I. agent would pull in, so he moved to another space, only to find himself boxed in by other cars. He moved again, but then decided that there were too many people milling around, and drove to a smaller parking annex. There, he found that he could no longer pick up the radio station he’d been listening to, so he pulled out, turned around, and backed his car into the same space, thinking that might help. Later, in audio notes that Sewell recorded about the day, he made fun of his clumsy attempt to be inconspicuous. “I realized I had changed my parking spot about seventeen times,” he said. “And had everyone that was sitting there for lunch probably wondering whether to call the F.B.I. to find out whether I was a terrorist or not.”

Sewell had joined Freedom, which made most of its money administering Medicare plans, in 2007. The financial crisis was beginning, and employment opportunities were drying up across the country, but the sector of the health-care industry that drew its revenue from Medicare was booming. During his time at Freedom, Sewell had become convinced that the company was defrauding the government of hundreds of millions of dollars by carrying out a sophisticated set of scams targeted at a new program called Medicare Advantage. Sewell, an avid reader of John Grisham novels, had been so appalled by what he observed, and so intrigued by the romanticism of going undercover, that he had decided to become a whistle-blower.

When Ed Ortega, the F.B.I. agent, arrived, Sewell joined him in his vehicle. Sewell had told Ortega that a meeting at Freedom later that day might provide valuable evidence. The two men had been working together for several weeks, and they got along well—Sewell later described Ortega as “absolutely the friendliest guy there could be”—but this was their first time out in the field together, and Sewell was taken aback by Ortega’s stern demeanor. “I just didn’t see him as a very intimidating person. Well, when I was in the car with him, I cannot begin to explain how wrong I was,” Sewell later said. “He reached out and shook my hand and nearly broke it . . . you just got this feeling that, my God, if he had to, he could just reach over and snap your neck without even thinking about it.”

Ortega had been a special agent with the F.B.I. for seventeen years, and he was experienced in health-care-fraud investigations. He tried to set Sewell at ease as he rolled up a piece of clear tape and stuck it inside Sewell’s shirt pocket, preparing to outfit him with a small recording device. Sewell was surprised by how low-tech the recorder looked, like something you’d find in a cluttered kitchen drawer. “It reminded me of kind of an old TV-antenna connector, but miniaturized,” he said. The device would record for between two and four hours, and under no circumstances should Sewell fiddle with it. It wasn’t easy to get a judge’s permission to secretly record executives, and strict rules governed how it could be done; Ortega would have to be the one to turn the device on and off.

The wire would capture everything that Sewell did. “All I could keep thinking of was, the whole world in court someday is going to know what radio station I listen to, and hear my pen click, and, you know, when I’m sitting here scratching myself, is the stenographer going to realize that that rustling isn’t papers, it’s me scratching myself?” Sewell said. “But Ed had said in an earlier conversation not to worry, these people are professionals, they’ve heard you burp and fart. . . . You’ll never surprise these guys.”

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Ortega warned Sewell that he would probably feel conspicuous, as if everyone he encountered knew immediately that he was wearing a wire, but urged him to go about his day as normal. He gave Sewell some final words of advice—“Don’t worry, just relax”—and then sent him back to Freedom, the recorder running in his pocket.

The first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.

Institutional denial, obfuscation, and retaliation are hallmarks of many whistle-blowing cases. In the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the New York City police officer Frank Serpico captured the popular imagination when he tried to expose rampant bribery and corruption in the N.Y.P.D., culminating in an episode in which he was shot in the face under bizarre circumstances during a drug raid. (He eventually took his evidence to the Times, which published a front-page story that led to an independent investigation that ultimately validated his allegations.) Since then, notable whistle-blowers have included Karen Silkwood, who revealed worker-safety issues inside an Oklahoma nuclear plant; Jeffrey Wigand, who went on “60 Minutes” in 1996 and disclosed that the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation had misled the public about the addictive and carcinogenic properties of cigarettes; Sherron Watkins, who exposed accounting fraud at Enron; and, in 2013, the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information about vast government surveillance programs. Whistle-blowers are usually, but not always, employees or members of the group on which they’re blowing the whistle; after they do so, their lives are never the same.

To become a whistle-blower, Darren Sewell had filed what is known as a “qui tam” complaint—the term comes from a Latin phrase that translates as “he who brings an action for the king as well as for himself.” Qui-tam cases are brought under the False Claims Act, a law passed in 1863, under President Lincoln, in response to war profiteers peddling defective weapons and ailing mules to the Union Army. The law allows private citizens to file suit on behalf of the government against anyone believed to be defrauding the government. The vast majority of these cases involve health care. To some, qui-tam cases are controversial because whistle-blowers share in the money that the government recovers. This provision was included in the legislation to encourage individuals, especially those who might be involved in the theft themselves, to report the abuse. One of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Jacob Howard, of Michigan, said that he had based the qui-tam provision on the “old-fashioned idea of hold[ing] out a temptation, and ‘setting a rogue to catch a rogue’ . . . a reward for the informer who comes into court and betrays his co-conspirator.”