But the firm’s legal bills were mounting—to the tune of $3 million a month—and Purdue still had 285 lawsuits pending against it, including another whistle-blower suit, filed by Marek Zakrzewski, an assistant research director who described raising safety concerns with seventeen different higher-ups about the “serious negative implications” of the drug, according to his complaint. His bosses banned him from undertaking additional research into the problems and even from informing the company’s regulatory department about his concerns, his suit claimed. Fired in May 2003 after complaining to the FDA, Zakrzewski eventually dropped his lawsuit, citing illness, the following year. He’d had a heart attack from the stress of working at Purdue Pharma and was fired while on medical leave, according to his filing. A Purdue spokesman countered that the researcher dropped the suit after the firm refused to settle the case, calling the allegations “baseless.”
To help burnish its image in the face of so many legal, financial, and public-relations problems, Purdue hired former New York mayor and Republican insider Rudy Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. Just a few months after his lauded response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Giuliani’s job was to convince “public officials they could trust Purdue because they could trust him,” as Barry Meier and another writer at the New York Times put it.
The DEA was already investigating lax security standards at the company’s manufacturing plants following the 2001 arrest of two Purdue employees accused of trying to steal thousands of pills. Giuliani brokered a behind-the-scenes negotiation of the fine paid by the Purdue affiliate that ran its New Jersey pill factory, including the condition that the firm pay a $2 million civil penalty—without admitting any wrongdoing. The DEA’s diversion control manager, tasked with making sure drugs are lawfully used and not diverted into illicit trafficking, was left fuming; she had argued for a $10 million fine. She was sure Giuliani and company executives had gone over her head to her boss in an attempt to gain “access and insights into how to manage things politically.” At a luncheon, Giuliani had helped raise $20,000 for a new DEA Museum historical exhibit.
Facing a growing number of lawsuits and investigations, Purdue Pharma heaped praise on its American hero and new political star: “We believe that government officials are more comfortable knowing that Giuliani is advising Purdue Pharma,” Udell gushed in a promotional brochure. “It is clear to us, and we hope it is clear to the government, that Giuliani would not take an assignment with a company that he felt was acting in an improper way.”
After all, not only was Giuliani old pals with the DEA director, but he also had just been named Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2001.
The terrorist attacks had elevated Giuliani’s stature, but in a boon moment for his future employer, they also temporarily diverted media attention from OxyContin. A sales executive said as much to Purdue employees on September 12, via voicemail, giving them the day off. The message the sales manager left, according to a former Purdue staffer: At least the tragedy for the nation would take OxyContin off the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.
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The RAPP parents believed White’s wrongful-termination case would prove that Purdue’s marketing practices had crossed a legal line. “We had such high hopes that she would be one of our saviors,” Van Rooyan said.
Ed Bisch drove twelve hours from Philadelphia in 2005 so he could sit in a Tampa federal courtroom beside Lee Nuss at Karen White’s civil trial, the first case against Purdue to progress beyond summary judgment. White was asking the jury to award her $138,000 in lost wages plus $690,000 for emotional pain. Depressed and anxious since her dismissal, she had never before been fired from a job.
“They were counting on us to run out of steam,” Bisch recalled. “They were all lawyered up and Rudy Giuliani’d up.” He counted ten lawyers on Purdue’s side, not including staff, quarterbacked by the formidable Atlanta-based firm of King and Spalding, whose clients ranged from cigarette makers to Coca-Cola. White’s lone attorney estimated Purdue spent $500,000 defending the case, an amount a Purdue spokesman declined to confirm.
White was tall and trim, a thirty-six-year-old brunet based in Lakeland, Florida. She’d been a champion of the drug’s painkilling properties early on, having witnessed her mother’s painful, premature death from cancer.
White argued that she was wrongly fired for refusing to participate in aggressive marketing of OxyContin that, in her opinion, several times crossed the line into breaking the law. White’s attorney named two specific doctors she was urged to call on who were widely known for overprescribing. Both eventually lost their medical licenses for shoddy prescribing, including one who’d handed out prescription drugs in exchange for sex.
At the time, prescription drug abuse had become so rampant in White’s Florida sales territory that one opioid-addicted Orange County veterinarian had recently been caught using the names of several pet owners’ dogs—including Brutus, Cha Cha, and Lady—to forge more than a thousand OxyContin prescriptions.
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White had a single lawyer and no staff, not unless you counted Bisch, Lee Nuss, and Nuss’s late son, Randy, who was tucked inside her mini urn. Nuss also brought her rosary beads, loaning an extra set to White to hold during the proceedings.
A few days into the trial, Nuss realized she’d accidentally left the beads behind in her car. Excusing herself to retrieve them, she handed White her son’s urn to hold during her absence at the plaintiff’s table.
“Really?” White said, tearing up, as Nuss recalled it. “You would let me do that?”
When Nuss returned with the beads, she was surprised to see White coming out of the courtroom so soon. A recess had already been called. “Where’s Ed?” she asked.
He had to leave the building, White told her, adding, “Lee, please, don’t get upset.”
“Why?” Nuss wanted to know.
“You’re not gonna believe this, but Ed had to take your son out of the courthouse.”
Purdue’s lawyers had heard about the urn and asked the judge to have it removed from the building.
Bisch and White expected the grieving mom to blow up, but Nuss surprised them by laughing instead. She told her friends, “My son is not here in body, but he is definitely here in spirit.
“He might have left the building, but he will be back!”
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Bisch was due back at work in Philly before the jury’s decision came in—but he was not surprised when Nuss called with the verdict. “Ed, there’s just too much money involved,” she told him. “We really thought we were doing something, only to find out, nobody is gonna do anything.”
The jury ruled in favor of Purdue, whose lawyer called the case a “personal disagreement with promoting the drug in an entirely legal way.” While White believed calling on sleazy pill prescribers was illegal, her lawyer had not proved the illegality of the company’s sales strategies.
“The court basically said, ‘Don’t tell us what you believe. Tell us what you know,’” explained University of Kentucky legal scholar Richard Ausness, who has written about the difficulty of winning civil cases against Purdue, citing among other reasons the company’s hefty defense chest. At the request of a Purdue lawyer, the government’s highly critical 2003 Government Accountability Office study of Purdue’s marketing practices was ruled inadmissible in court.