By now, you probably have heard that Michael Loucks is leaving the US Attorney’s office in Boston, where he spent nearly 25 years and was the most visible and arguably influential prosecutor of health care fraud, especially fraud involving drugmakers.

During his tenure, the Boston office prosecuted several of the largest drugmakers, including TAP Pharmaceuticals, Schering-Plough, Sanofi-Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline and, most recently, Pfizer, which paid a record-setting $2.3 billion fine. Among these were some landmark cases that have since set a tone for government prosecution of off-label marketing (here’s the laundry list).

So what next for Loucks? And will the team he leaves behind retain a zeal for pursuing pharma wrongdoing? The In Vivo Blog speculates that prosecution of health care fraud may have crested, given that the focus of his successor, Carmen Ortiz, has been economic fraud. However, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, a non-profit funded by attorneys who file whistleblower lawsuits, thinks the pace of prosecutions will continue unabated. We briefly spoke with Loucks…

Pharmalot: So what next? And why leave now?
Loucks: I don’t know. I’ve been in the US Attorney’s office for 24-1/2 years and had the opportunity to be the Assistant US Attorney for 4-1/2 years and the Acting US Attorney for seven months. But I’m a need-a-mountain-to-climb kind of person. I’m 54 years old and it’s time to do something else. Even though it’s a crummy economy. But nobody asked me to leave or forced me to leave. The president picked somebody else to be the US Attorney…But it’s the first time in 30 years I haven’t felt any stress. I felt it leaving my body the day I made the announcement.

Pharmalot: So what will you look for? Are you talking with anyone now?
Loucks: I very much enjoyed work in the health care area. But one of the difficulties when you’re the US Attorney and a First Assistant is that it’s hard to look for a job while running the office The minute you talk to a law firm, you have to recuse yourself from anything the law firm is working on. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Going to work at a law firm is an option, in some respects, it’s a very appealing option.

Pharmalot: How long must you wait before you’re prevented from taking a certain job or clients? And would you consider representing drugmakers?
Loucks: There’s a one-year prohibition on handling cases that are before the US Attorney’s office….And I don’t know. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to and I don’t know if I’ll come to it. I know some very good prosecutors who went on to defend those they prosecuted…I dont’ know that there’s a philosophical issue there.

Pharmalot: Do you anticipate the office will shift its emphasis going forward?
Loucks: Well, look, the US Attorney’s Office in Boston recovered $6.8 or $6.9 billion from 1991 to 2009. That’s 30 percent of the nationwide total of all offices across the country and most of it was from drug companies. I think the emphasis of the office on health care prosecution will continue. You have some good lawyers there - Susan Winkler, Jeremy Sternberg and Sara Bloom.

The thing I worry about is the complete lack of funding given to health care across the country. Prosecuting offices have been getting $30 million for health care positions for the last eight years and it’s not gone up a penny. It’s completely flat budgeted – not enough to cover cost of living allowances for the laywers. We’ve recovered $6.8 billion and the government doesn’t have enough to cover the cost of living for the lawyers.

Pharmalot: Okay, but do you think Ortiz will shift the emphasis?
Loucks: I would say you have to ask her that question.