Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,33
negotiations were complete, a Purdue-owned holding company, Purdue Frederick, would plead guilty to a single misbranding felony and the company’s executives to misdemeanor charges of misbranding the drug. In a bit of legal-language parsing, the executives would not stipulate that they’d had direct knowledge of the misbranding, only that “the court may accept these facts in support of their guilty pleas.” In other words, their only crime was that they headed up a firm wherein other people committed crimes.
Compared with the charges Ramseyer and Mountcastle had originally threatened, the final agreement was a mixed bag. Prosecutors initially wanted to impose the $1 billion corporate fine as well as multiple felony charges against both the company and the executives. “But we got what we could get,” said a prosecutor involved in the case.
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Purdue, for its part, had initially proposed paying $10 million and incurring no felony charges—“an insult,” according to a government source involved in the negotiations. “It was clear they thought we’d take a very small sum of money and go away—because it would be a lot of money for a district of our size,” the source said. “I will tell you, what we ended up with was far closer to where we started than where they started.
“Their lawyers were shocked,” the negotiator added. “They did not expect the firmness with which we approached this.…Had they not agreed, we were fully prepared to take them to trial.” The Sacklers, anyway, were convinced. Midway through the negotiations, following a Washington meeting of both sides, word filtered down from the Sackler family: “We can’t buy our way out of this one. Make this case go away,” the government negotiator recalled. If that meant throwing three executives under the bus, well, then, the men had been loyal employees for many years. But the Sacklers had to do what the Sacklers had to do.
The Sacklers understood that a federal jury convened in southwest Virginia, a region that had now seen as many as two hundred OxyContin-related deaths, could have awarded far harsher penalties. “We weren’t just trying to get a little bit of money from them. The goal was to stop the criminal behavior, punish it, and to strip them of their profits,” the negotiator said.
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On a clear day in May 2007, in the atrium of a downtown Roanoke office building, Brownlee unveiled the news of the settlement: The company and its top executives would plead guilty to their role in a marketing blitz that hyped OxyContin’s strengths while downplaying its propensity for addiction and abuse. To resolve the federal criminal and civil misbranding charges, Purdue would pay $600 million in fines and admit that for six years it had fraudulently marketed OxyContin as being less prone to abuse and having fewer narcotic side effects than instant-release versions of the drug—a felony misbranding charge. Top executives Paul Goldenheim, Michael Friedman, and Udell would pony up $34.5 million (or, rather, the firm would, on their behalf) and plead guilty to misdemeanor versions of the crime. The fines against Purdue and its executives accounted for about 90 percent of the company’s profits from the time the drug went on the market, in 1996, until 2001, when Purdue dropped the insert language about the timed-lapse mechanism’s ability to “reduce the abuse liability of a drug,” Brownlee explained. It was the eleventh-largest fine paid by a pharmaceutical firm in the Justice Department’s history.
Best of all for people like Bisch, Van Rooyan, and Nuss: An Abingdon sentencing hearing was planned for mid-July that would bring the Connecticut executives face-to-face with grieving parents, who were invited to discuss—on record, in court—the damage OxyContin had wrought. The executives would not serve any jail time, per the plea agreement, though it was ultimately up to the judge, at their court appearance, to sign off on the deal and outline the exact terms of their probation and community service.
Brownlee enjoyed presenting his evidence at the press conference, unfolding his podium against a staggering backdrop of documents amassed by Gregg Wood, the stoic prosecutors Randy Ramseyer and Rick Mountcastle, and scores of others recruited to the team—all of whom stood to his right. To his left sat an assortment of evidence culled from the two thousand cardboard containers they’d filled with documents, depositions, and data. The boxes were lined up in columns four to five feet high.
For added visual effect, Brownlee displayed falsified charts created by Purdue that had claimed “smooth and sustained blood levels” and “fewer peaks and valleys” for patients on OxyContin.