The Tylenol Mafia (30 page)

Vergari was “a straight shooter who was only interested in prosecuting according to law,” said Michael Edelman, a prosecutor under Vergari. “Everybody knew he was straight as an arrow,” Edelman said. “If you broke the law, you got prosecuted. If you didn’t break the law, you didn’t get prosecuted.”

 
“He was the kind of guy that also spoke to people about justice,” attorney Peter Goodrich said. “He just inspired people to do the right thing.”

Vergari oversaw the prosecution of several high-profile cases, but he rarely commented publicly about them. He was not a headline seeker. Vergari’s frequent news conferences and outspoken demeanor during the Tylenol murder investigation were thus out of character for the media-shy district attorney. He evidently understood that the only way to get federal officials to conduct a proper investigation was to speak publicly about evidence that the FBI, the FDA, and J&J refused to disclose.

Vergari was a seasoned prosecutor, not easily influenced by politicians engaged in partisan politics. He most certainly would not bow down to the almighty Johnson & Johnson. Nor would he blindly accept the unsubstantiated statements of J&J’s spin-doctors and the political appointees at the FDA.

From the outset, Vergari had serious doubts about the Tylenol tampering theory publicized by J&J and the FDA. He did not believe that cyanide would eat through gel-based Tylenol capsules in “8 to 10 days” as Hyland had claimed, or “within about two weeks” as J&J claimed. During a press conference on Tuesday, Vergari said several theories were being investigated, but tampering at the McNeil factory had not been ruled out.

A reporter then mentioned that other officials believed that the bottle may have been bought elsewhere, tampered with, and then put on the shelf in the Bronxville
A&P
store. “That’s one theory,” replied Vergari. “As far as I’m concerned, it [the tampering] could have happened anywhere. It might have happened at the factory, it might have happened during shipping, it might have happened at the store.”

The statements from Hyland and J&J executives regarding the super-corrosiveness of cyanide concerned Vergari. He said these officials, by stating that the tampering occurred within 10 days of Elsroth’s death, had created “the false and dangerous impression that people shouldn’t worry about the bottles they bought before that time.”

Vergari was right to worry. New York retailers were taking very lightly the directive to remove Tylenol capsules temporarily from their store-shelves. On Friday, four days after officials had learned about the Tylenol poisoning, New York City inspectors visited 350 stores, and 65 were still selling Tylenol capsules despite a ban by the city’s Health Department. Also on Friday, inspectors from the Onondaga County Health Department in New York visited stores throughout that county. Of the 308 stores visited, 30 were still selling Tylenol capsules.

James Burke seemed sure that the embargo of Tylenol capsules in New York would be short-lived. Moreover, he appeared confident that he would not fail, as he had in 1982, to get through this crisis without recalling Tylenol capsules. Burke sought to minimize any perceived parallel between the latest Tylenol poisoning and the poisoning incident in 1982. He did, however, suggest that this latest incident had opened up some old emotional wounds.

“I guess it’s true with lots of us; when things start going too well, we start to worry,” said Burke, referring to Tylenol’s record sales during the past year. “The first two anniversaries of the Chicago murders were sleepless nights for me,” he said, “because I thought; if somebody’s out there, that’s when they’ll do it. They didn’t. And I had come to the point where I was really quite convinced that that was an isolated incident and behind us once and for all,” Burke recalled. “I did worry - That Saturday night . . . I had a dream that Chicago had happened all over again. And, of course, Monday we found out that it didn’t happen in Chicago but, indeed, we had had an incident in Westchester [County].”

Burke later remarked that the poisoner was “someone who is mentally ill” and “these kinds of people, for the most part, know they’re not well. They don’t like to be called kooks, but they don’t mind being called sick. They understand at some level that they are sick.” Burke then suggested that the killer could be rehabilitated.

“There has been enormous progress in the area of mental health,” said Burke. “There are things that can be done. It doesn’t mean that the person wouldn’t have to deal with the halls of justice, but it does mean that the person might be able to get some help if they wanted. I don’t know; I’m just reaching,” Burke confessed.

While Burke speculated about the mental health of the Tylenol killer, Yonkers Deputy Chief John McClain worked day and night to track down leads and map out strategy. “We talked to the delivery men, the stock boys, the customers; even to some children at the store,” said McClain. “We want to know: ‘Who delivered these boxes?’ ‘Were they damaged?’ ‘Who put them on the shelves?’ ‘Were they rotated?’ You interview and re-interview, and then interview some more,” McClain said. “We’re looking for inconsistencies, half-truths; lies, if you will.”

Chief McClain did not know it then, but several inconsistencies, half-truths, and lies had already been told, but not by any of the potential suspects that McClain and his men had interviewed. These inconsistencies and half-truths had instead come from Johnson & Johnson and the FDA; and they were still well hidden when things took a sudden turn for the worse for Johnson & Johnson.

29

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By Thursday, February 13, 1986, officials from J&J and the FDA were beginning to feel a measure of relief. The Tylenol tampering apparently was an isolated incident, just as they said it was. Then, on Thursday afternoon, a paper litmus strip inserted into a Tylenol bottle at the FDA lab in Brooklyn, New York turned blue, indicating the presence of cyanide. Byron Tart, an FDA consumer safety officer at the lab, had examined the Tylenol package for signs of tampering. There were none. The outer package flap was glued shut, and the bottle’s seals showed no signs of tampering. He removed the tamper-resistant packaging and opened the bottle. Some of the capsules seemed misaligned. Five of the 24 capsules contained cyanide. The Tylenol in the bottle was from Lot AHA090 with an expiration date of April 1987. It had been manufactured in McNeil’s plant in Puerto Rico.

Within two hours of the FDA’s discovery, Burke received a telephone call from FDA Commissioner Frank Young. “Jim, are you sitting down?” Young asked. “We’ve found a second bottle.”

“Frank, that is the worst news you could give us,” Burke replied.

Young said the second bottle of cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules had been pulled off the shelves of a Woolworth store just two blocks from the A&P store where the first bottle of poisoned Tylenol had been purchased. He said that when chemists opened the capsules to examine them, they noticed that the words “Tylenol,” which normally appeared parallel to each other on each half of the capsules, were misaligned on five of the capsules. He also said, “You could see more brown color” than was normal in the acetaminophen powder in the capsules. “There were no visible signs of tampering on the packaging,” said Young.

Burke had initially assigned the job of managing the crisis to McNeil President, Joseph Chiesa. Now, with the discovery of more poisoned Tylenol, Burke took command. He put together a full-fledged “crisis team” of high-level executives who would meet daily to manage the crisis. The team included J&J President, David Clare; McNeil and Company Group Chairman, David Collins; J&J Public Relations Vice President, Larry Foster; J&J General Counsel, George Frazza; and McNeil Consumer Products Company President, Joseph Chiesa. It was decided early on, said Foster, “to be completely open” with the public.

In a collaborative effort, J&J and the FBI scoured the Westchester County area and picked up all bottles of Tylenol capsules within a three-mile radius of the Bronxville
A&P
and Woolworth stores that had been linked to the poisoned Tylenol. Already, the investigation had become a combined effort between Johnson & Johnson and the FBI.

Johnson & Johnson made preparations with federal officials to fly the latest sample to the FDA lab in Cincinnati to determine if the cyanide matched the poison that killed Elsroth. J&J’s corporate jet was not immediately available, so the FDA arranged for a late-night commercial flight scheduled to leave New York at 10 p.m. The flight was delayed two hours by bad weather in New York. When the plane touched down in Cincinnati, the cyanide sample was immediately rushed to the FDA lab.

At 2 a.m. Friday morning, Fred Fricke called from Cincinnati to report that the cyanide samples from both of the bottles were the same. The chemical analysis revealed that the cyanide in the second bottle of poisoned Extra Strength Tylenol was chemically identical to the potassium cyanide implicated in the death of Diane Elsroth. “Therefore, both samples must have come from the same source,” said Frank Young.

The FDA said the chemical make-up of the cyanide in the adulterated Tylenol capsules from both bottles was the same. Federal officials determined that five of the capsules in the second bottle contained a compound of 90% potassium cyanide and 10% inert materials. That was a substantially different mix than had initially been reported for the adulterated Tylenol capsules from Elsroth’s Tylenol bottle.

West Chester County Medical Examiner, Millard Hyland, had said previously that three of the remaining 21 capsules in Elsroth’s bottle contained a brown mixture that was 60 percent potassium cyanide and various inert materials. More specifically, the
New York Times
had reported on February 12th that the adulterated capsules in Elsroth’s bottle contained 60 percent potassium cyanide and 40 percent inert materials, including silver and iron. But now, the FDA said that the adulterated Tylenol capsules in both bottles contained an amount of potassium cyanide that was 90 percent pure, and thus the chemical components or “fingerprint” of the two batches of poison “line up exactly.”

The FDA never acknowledged or explained the discrepancy between the initial findings regarding the cyanide-mix in Elsroth’s bottle and the subsequent, amended findings. Instead, FDA Deputy Commissioner, John Norris, simply said that the “matching” chemical profiles raise “the possibility that the same person or persons who put the drug in the first bottle put it in the second.

All of a sudden,” said Norris, “it was clear that whoever did the first tampering was willing to have more people die. He was willing to kill more than once. The dimensions changed dramatically.”

FDA Commissioner Frank Young said the poisoning “still appears to be a local occurrence in the greater New York area.” Federal investigators “still think this is a local occurrence,” he added.

FDA Deputy Commissioner John Norris said that while the agency still believes “this is a localized matter; we can’t take the chance it’s not.”

Carl Vergari saw things differently. “The reports we’re getting, is that there was no tampering afterward [after the Tylenol was packaged]. So this would lend support to the theory that somewhere during the manufacturing process is when the cyanide was put into the capsules at the plant,” explained Vergari. He cited industrial sabotage and a disgruntled plant employee as two theories.

Tampering at the plant is “one avenue we are exploring, but not the only one,” said Vergari. “In all likelihood,” he said, “the probabilities are that the contamination occurred sometime during the manufacturing process.”

Burke reacted to the discovery of the second bottle of poisoned Tylenol by calling the tampering “an act of terrorism, pure and simple,” and a “national problem that affects everything” Americans “eat and drink.” Nevertheless, Burke said he had no plans “at this time” to initiate a nationwide recall, stating that such a recall would “remind the terrorist out there that he has won.”

 
“It is our belief,” said Burke, “that based on current knowledge, that a national recall is not indicated. However, if consumers in any part of the country wish to return their packages of Tylenol, the company would exchange them for the caplet or tablet forms of the drug or give them a full refund.” J&J enlisted the Maple Plain Company in Minnesota once again to handle the reverse distribution of Tylenol bottles returned by consumers.

Burke announced that Johnson & Johnson was offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the identification of those responsible for the poisoning and asked anyone with such information to call the Federal Bureau of Investigation at 1-800-334-2344. Burke then blasted the local New York media for what he said was sensational reporting, objecting to such words and phrases as “horrors” and “terrified discovery.”

“I think the local broadcast media have turned this thing into a circus,” Burke complained. “I think it’s outrageous.” Burke even blamed the media for failing to inform the public that Johnson & Johnson believed Tylenol tablets and caplets were safe. “There are people out there who are suffering with pain or who have pain,” said Burke, “and I believe you owe it to them, as well as to us, to remind them that the [Tylenol] tablets and caplets are available”

Bubbling just underneath what Burke referred to as the “sensational reporting” in the local media was a story that threatened to cause unrest among Johnson & Johnson’s mostly unconcerned Tylenol customers. At about the same time the second bottle had tested positive for cyanide on Thursday, February 13
^th
, a third bottle of Tylenol had also tested positive for cyanide. George Gerstenberg, the director of the FDA’s Brooklyn office, said a trace of cyanide had been found in one capsule from a third bottle. “It was so small an amount that we could barely detect it here, and that’s why we had to wait all day (Thursday) until we could confirm it in our Cincinnati plant.” Gerstenberg said this third bottle was from an A&P store in Shrub Oak, about 27 miles north of Bronxville.