Buz Nachlas
G. Zachary (Zach) Terwilliger with his wife, Anne.
Alexandria resident G. Zachary “Zach” Terwilliger is standing behind a bar in his basement on a Saturday, his wife Anne nearby, telling a hilarious story about one of the most terrifying moments of his life involving a wild boar. He laughs about it now.
Lighthearted moments with his family — he met his wife 20 years ago at their alma mater, the University of Virginia, and they have two young children — keep him grounded.
The levity balances the life of the 38-year-old Del Ray resident, who recently became the second youngest U.S. attorney in the United States, serving as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. He first stepped foot in the office as an intern when he was a senior in high school, attending St. Stephens and St. Agnes in Alexandria.
“The school was really my anchor,” he said in a recent interview at his office, located in Alexandria’s Carlyle neighborhood. At St. Stephens, he was class president, served as captain of the football team and was co-captain of the lacrosse team with now-Councilman John Chapman.
“As my wife likes to say, I peaked in high school,” Terwilliger jokes. “That was the high-water mark. Until I got this job.”
He was recently appointed to be the top federal law enforcement officer, from Northern Virginia to Virginia Beach, overseeing 300 employees at his office as well as the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
He’s up to his neck in cases involving everything from sex trafficking to opioids to gangs to white collar fraud. Some of the most important cases — involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and CIA espionage, and previously, the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, a conspirator in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — come through the office.
“To get to do this in your hometown is just tremendous,” he said. “You look out the window here and see the Masonic Temple — my friends and I used to play up there during middle school and got into a huge snowball fight during a snowstorm.”
Born in Washington, D.C., Terwilliger was six months old when his family moved to Vermont, where his father, George Terwilliger III, was U.S. attorney. “We got threatened a few times,” he said. “I have a very distinct memory in first grade, the nuns took my sister and I and hid us in the convent. A motorcycle gang my dad was prosecuting was threatening us.”
His family returned to Northern Virginia when he was 11 after his dad accepted a position as deputy attorney general under Attorney General William Barr (serving in the job the first time around), in 1991-93, in the George H.W. Bush administration. As a little boy, Terwilliger ran around his father’s Justice Department office, he said. (Years later, he would return to that office to serve as chief of staff to then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.)
Terwilliger graduated from law school at William & Mary and clerked in Florida. He focused on criminal law “because I’m a people person,” he said. “I really liked the fact I’d be using my skills for justice and for good.”
He returned to Alexandria, joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria as an assistant U.S. attorney, and successfully prosecuting MS-13 gang members, human trafficking cases and other violent and white-collar crimes for nearly a decade. When the MS-13 gang threatened Terwilliger and his family, his wife left town and he moved out of their home to a secure location with protection from the U.S. Marshals Service.
He feels some of the most impactful cases he worked on involved sex trafficking of underage women. “This was happening right under our noses in Alexandria,” he said.
The cases themselves were not that complex, but breaking through and building trust with the victims could be difficult. Another case that sticks with him is prosecuting a group that found people on the verge of foreclosure and swindled them out of their “last nickels” pretending to help them stay in their homes.
“That was incredibly gratifying” to put the bad guys behind bars, he said. Another case that he’ll always remember was one that involved heroin traffickers who targeted young to middle-aged women who “had their lives together,” but hooked them on the drug to steal from them.
After prosecuting violent crimes, Terwilliger then headed to Capitol Hill for a year serving as counsel to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley. “It has its own language, its own rules, its own dress code. Everyone on the Hill literally had brown shoes on. I try not to be a follower but I kid you not, it made a difference,” he laughs.
It expanded his network and his Hill experience helped land him his position working with then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Working in that office “was a marathon,” he said. “I’m a hard worker. In the 18 months I was there I had never worked that hard in a sustained manner.” In addition to working on matters such as the opioid crisis, the office was also busy rebuilding relationships with state and local law enforcement, he noted.
“To get to be his chief of staff I got to see everything. It was...for me, I never in a million years thought that would happen,” he said. “I never thought I’d be traveling around the country with the attorney general. I still pinch myself.”
From there, he was appointed, last year, to his current job as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Terwilliger said he feels lucky and is happy at the turn of events that has brought him full circle to a job he relishes. He thought, instead, that he and his family would eventually move away from Alexandria, to a mid-market city that was more affordable, he said.
“We love the community that is Alexandria. Not only was our family here but our church, our friends. This is a great place to raise a family,” he said. “One of the key parts of Alexandria,” he said, is the great communication between feds and locals working together to fight opioids, gangs and sex trafficking. “It works really well together here.”
Today, Terwilliger counts other “top cops” in Alexandria — including Commonwealth Attorney Bryan Porter and Alexandria Sheriff Dana Lawhorne — as his colleagues.
“For me, coming back here, it’s really a community,” he said. “I go to a restaurant and see my 8th-grade math teacher or the farmers’ market and see my P.E. teacher... I feel like a son of Alexandria.”
