The Tylenol Mafia (37 page)

Reporters, eager to get a response to Vergari’s bombshell revelation, made calls to their usual FBI contacts, but all were unavailable, reportedly because of the President’s Day holiday. On Sunday evening, February 16
^th
, FBI spokesperson Jack French picked up his phone at FBI headquarters in Washington D.C., and then declined to confirm or deny Vergari’s assertions. “We’re not commenting on anyone else’s comments,” French told the reporter. “We’re not commenting on the Tylenol case other than to say we are devoting all our resources to it. We are certainly not commenting on any evidence or the investigation thus far.”

Asked why, in view of Vergari’s statement, the FBI had not called on the manufacturer to issue a nationwide recall, French said he could not address “theoretical” questions. The next day, Burke recalled all Tylenol capsules nationwide.

On Monday, February 17
^th
, the same day J&J withdrew OTC capsules from the market, authorities from the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, the Yonkers Police Department, and the FBI toured J&J’s facilities in Montgomeryville and Fort Washington. Hundreds of employees worked at the Fort Washington plant, which had been built in 1961, while Robert Wood Johnson II was still at the helm of Johnson & Johnson. On the day of the tour, however, both the Fort Washington and Montgomeryville plants were empty. They were closed for the Presidents’ Day holiday, and their employees were thus not available for questioning. The tour was nothing more than a public relations stunt to give the appearance of an investigation; not unlike the sham investigation conducted by Cook County toxicologist Michael Schaffer at the Fort Washington plant five days after the 1982 Tylenol murders.

Yonkers’ Police Chief, Owen McClain, said the trip to the plants did not offer “any additional information,” thus confirming the futility of this 1986 Presidents’ Day “inspection.” The FBI refused to discuss the visit, stating only that it is “unlikely” the contamination occurred during the manufacturing process. Jack French assured the public that the FBI was still in the process of conducting a thorough investigation. “No leads are being left uncovered,” he proclaimed.

Westchester County Prosecutor, Bruce Bendish, shortly after touring the J&J facilities, conferred with Carl Vergari. They agreed that a proper investigation of the Fort Washington plant was needed. The next day, Vergari announced that the tour had “suggested additional broad areas of inquiries.”

“We still haven't eliminated anything,” Vergari said. “We haven’t had evidence to exclude tampering at the factory.” Vergari then declared that the case of the poisoned Extra Strength Tylenol capsules was “still wide open.”

One day after the tour of the Fort Washington and Montgomeryville facilities, the FBI gave its first official statement regarding the Tylenol tampering investigation. Milt Ahlerich, Chief of Public Affairs for the FBI, said the investigators who examined the bottles that had contained the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules found “no evidence of tampering” with the containers or their packaging. The packaging, as the FBI had now officially confirmed, had not been tampered with. Yet Ahlerich refused to accept these findings at face value, making the inane statement that a lack of evidence “does not mean that the tampering did not occur.”

J&J and the FDA then also released public statements to discredit Vergari. They insisted that the weight of evidence suggested that the crime was a local one. “We do not have any proof it didn’t happen in the plant or the warehouse,” said Burke, “but all logic tells us it didn’t.” However, as any reasonable person would have concluded, all logic pointed to the fact that the cyanide-laced capsules were in the Tylenol bottles before they were packaged and shipped to the retail stores.

Burke went on to note a “considerable amount of confusion” in the case that may have led to an opinion held by Carl Vergari that the pills were probably adulterated at the manufacturing plants. In reality, as Burke certainly knew, there was no confusion on the part of Carl Vergari. Every bit of physical evidence pointed to tampering during the manufacturing and packaging process. The facts were overwhelmingly on Vergari’s side, but he was up against the most powerful entities in the land. The FDA and the FBI were firmly aligned with Johnson & Johnson. Even the president of the United States was in Johnson & Johnson’s corner.

On February 20, 1986, ten days after the nation learned about the Tylenol poisoning in New York, Burke attended an economic affairs meeting of business leaders at the White House. President Ronald Reagan stopped by to give his support to Burke and Johnson & Johnson. President Reagan stood before the group of corporate leaders and praised Burke for his handling of the Tylenol incidents. Mr. Burke “has lived up to the highest ideals of corporate responsibility and grace under pressure,” said President Reagan, adding: “Jim Burke of Johnson & Johnson, you have our deepest appreciation.” The corporate executives in attendance applauded the president’s remarks.

Later that day, Burke spoke at a news conference at the National Press Club. “We were flattered that he [President Reagan] was complimentary in Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the case, and I was a little tongue-tied,” said Burke, a bit too modestly. Burke knew President Reagan quite well, and it is unlikely that he would have been “tongue-tied” by Reagan’s remarks.

President Reagan had a soft spot for Johnson & Johnson. First Lady Nancy Reagan’s stepfather, Dr Loyal Davis, a neurosurgeon, had a long and profitable relationship with the company. Dr. Davis was the chairman of the Department of Surgery at Northwestern University in Illinois, and a longtime consultant for J&J subsidiary, Ethicon. Davis’s direct line to the White House had proved beneficial to Johnson & Johnson when Ethicon had a product up for FDA approval in 1981.

In May 1981, J&J was waiting, not very patiently, for FDA approval of a new Ethicon suture. Dr. Davis called Reagan’s Deputy Chief, Michael
Deaver
, to find out if maybe someone could check the status of that application. A White House official promptly made two phone calls to the FDA - one on May 5
^th
, and a second on May 7
^th
- about the Ethicon suture under review. Arthur Hayes, the recently appointed FDA commissioner, was inclined to give James Burke and Ronald Reagan whatever they wanted. Ethicon’s new PDS (
polydioxanone
) suture was approved on November 13, 1981.

Shortly after the FDA approved Ethicon’s application to market its new suture, someone from inside the White House told a reporter about the White House calls that had been made to the FDA on behalf of Ethicon. On November 19, 1981, a White House spokesperson admitted to the episode. The Department of Health and Human Services then tersely announced that its Inspector General had opened “a preliminary inquiry to establish the facts” in the case. That inquiry was quietly dropped.

Just six months after President Reagan praised Burke for his handling of the Tylenol poisonings, Burke was invited back to the White House for a black-tie dinner affair with President Reagan and his wife, Nancy. The dinner was held on July 16, 1986. Burke and five others, including Pat Murphy, a journalist and publisher of the
Republic
and
The Phoenix Gazette
, and Lynn Cheney, the wife of then Congressman Dick Cheney, were seated at Reagan’s table.

In 1986 Burke was a long-time friend of President Reagan. Reagan had appointed Burke to the President’s Commission on Executive Exchange (PCEE) on September 14, 1981. The PCEE, an agency of the Executive Branch, was created to increase knowledge and mutual understanding between the public and the private sectors. In support of its mission, the PCEE administered an executive exchange program between the Executive Branch and private corporations. The PCEE was the quintessential revolving door between big government and big business.

On February 10, 1986, the day Burke said he learned about the death of Diane Elsroth, President Reagan had re-appointed Burke to another two-year term on the PCEE. Burke was still a member of the PCEE in 1989 when it came under fire for fraud, gross waste, and mismanagement. Gordon Hamel, the Commission’s director of executive placement, had reported to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) about the ongoing fraud and waste at the taxpayer-funded commission. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush issued an unusual Executive Order, abolishing the 11-member PCEE after it had come under the scrutiny of both Congress and a federal inspector general. In November 2002, Elaine Kaplan, the OSC chief, said a subsequent investigation by the OSC had substantiated claims by Hamel of “illegality, gross waste, and mismanagement” at PCEE.

*****

Neither Johnson & Johnson’s media blitz nor Burke’s close relationship with President Reagan changed the fact that Vergari had spilled the beans. Vergari had publicly disclosed the FBI’s evidentiary findings from its own forensic analysis, showing that the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules were in the Tylenol bottles
before
they were packaged in three layers of tamper-resistant seals. Nevertheless, the FBI’s official line was that the lack of any evidence that the packaging had been tampered with “does not mean that the tampering did not occur.”

FBI spokesperson, Lane Bonner, said, “Our investigation to date indicates that it is unlikely that contamination occurred during the manufacturing stages.” Bonner offered no evidence to support his statement, because there was none.

Vergari’s public disclosure of the FBI’s findings had created a real problem for proponents of the “approved theory.” That problem needed to be rectified. So the FBI ordered a bogus second inspection of the tamper-resistant packaging and then fabricated new forensic findings that aligned with the approved theory. For this second inspection, the FBI claimed to have used a sophisticated investigatory technique; the mechanism for which they refused to disclose to the public.

FBI spokesperson, Milt Ahlerich, held a news conference on February 26, 1982 “because of the intense national interest in the case.” He made only a brief appearance to read the official FBI statement:

Previously undetected signs of tampering have now been discovered using sophisticated scientific examinations. Our examinations have further determined it was possible to invade the bottles after packaging was complete without detection through conventional means of examination.

Ahlerich provided no explanation of how this “inspection” was conducted and supplied no proof that the packaging had been tampered with or how it could have been done. But the official FBI statement, which in fact revealed no new information at all, did conform to the approved theory. Ahlerich refused to answer any questions, but several “un-named authorities” attending the news conference confirmed that the Bureau’s findings applied to both bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules.

Johnson & Johnson, elated by the FBI’s official statement, said they welcomed the Bureau’s finding. “The company has contended that it was extremely unlikely that the capsules were tainted during the manufacturing process,” said James Murray. “We were puzzled all along as to how someone could have breached the three safety seals on the bottle and carton without being detected,” he said. “We find the FBI statement very interesting.”

Larry Foster said, “The FBI statement supports what we have believed all along - that the tampering took place after it [the Tylenol] left the plant.”

“We have felt from the beginning that there was tampering,” said J&J spokesperson, Robert Kniffin. “There had been no evidence of it before this, and now there is.”

In fact, there still was no evidence of tampering - only a press release. Every fiber of evidence related to the murder of Diane Elsroth pointed to a killer who had gotten the cyanide-filled capsules into the Tylenol bottles at a repackaging facility
before
they were packaged in three layers of tamper-resistant seals.

Officials at the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office were not buying the FBI’s spin. Bruce Bendish, chief of the homicide unit, said he had not seen the FBI’s report “so we don’t know what scientific processes they used to determine this… we have eliminated no theory, no possibilities, including [tampering at] the factory,” he said. “We have eliminated nothing. We don’t consider this a major break and we’ll still consider all alternatives.” The well-substantiated theory that said the tamperings had occurred during manufacturing - as Bendish would soon realize - had, however, been eliminated behind a closed door at the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C.

The FBI used a fabricated, undocumented, bogus forensic analysis to discredit Carl Vergari and discount the accurate evidentiary findings made by its own agents. These bogus forensic findings were not at all surprising, considering their source. The FBI’s forensic lab in Washington D.C., where the Tylenol bottles and packaging were inspected, has a long history of falsifying, misrepresenting, and fabricating evidence. In 1995, investigative reporters John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne published an expose of the sordid history of the FBI lab, titled, “Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab.”

“As the FBI’s research and training facility in Washington D.C. came to dominate forensic science research in this country during the 1980s,” wrote Kelly and Wearne, “the laboratory division continued to employ and to promote researchers and examiners who patently ignored the most basic scientific procedures and fixed (i.e. falsified) results.”

In July 1994, believing that the claim that the bloody glove found on O. J. Simpson’s estate had been planted was far-fetched,
USA Today
and the Gannett News Service trawled legal and media databases for comparative cases. The research was done to study the quality of forensic research conducted at FBI labs. They found 85 instances that had occurred since 1974 in which prosecutors knowingly or unknowingly used tainted evidence that had convicted the innocent or freed the guilty. These were just the known cases, cases that for one reason or another had come to light or made the news.