Andy Moorman felt the world come to a standstill as he was filling up his car with gas.

This was back in March 2019. The now-former deputy chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of South Carolina was at a gas station in the city of Florence. He’d just walked out of the federal courthouse next door.

At first, as Moorman pulled his car up to the gas pump, he wasn’t fully registering the significance of the moment. Minutes earlier, a case on which Moorman had been working for more than three years had reached its conclusion. Nine defendants, the majority of them members of a national criminal drug trafficking gang, had just received sentences totaling nearly six decades in prison. Moorman was now putting some gas in his tank before driving back to his family in Greenville.