The Tylenol Mafia (57 page)

Irv Miller, a legal analyst for CBS-News commented on the FBI’s desire to collect Kaczynski’s DNA. Miller had been an assistant state’s attorney in Cook County, Illinois at the time of the 1982 Tylenol murders. “It [the testing of Kaczynski’s DNA] is a good law enforcement tool to rule out potential suspects in a case,” said Miller. However, if this is just good basic police work then why hadn’t the FBI asked Kaczynski for a DNA sample previously?

The FBI does, of course, already have Kaczynski’s DNA, but the FBI now says it wants a better quality DNA sample. What the FBI really wants, it appears, is to convince the public that the Unabomber is also the Tylenol killer. Then, when Kaczynski dies, the FBI can pin the Tylenol murders on him, just as they pinned the Anthrax attacks on Bruce Ivins shortly after he died from an overdose of Tylenol in June 2008. If the FBI succeeds in framing Kaczynski or some other patsy for the Tylenol murders, then the feds, the State of Illinois, and Johnson & Johnson will finally have their “madman” for the 1982 and 1986 Tylenol murders.

*****

In 1986, James Burke speculated about the mental make-up of the Tylenol killer. “A person who would put poison in the Tylenol capsules clearly was a deranged person,” said Burke. “Psychiatrists tell us that these people are saying they need help. These kinds of people know they are not well. They don’t want to be called kooks; they don’t mind being called sick. If that person came forward and asked for help, he would receive it, although that doesn’t mean the person would not have to deal with the halls of justice.”

In 1988, federal prosecutors in Seattle finally got the madman-in-the-retail-stores theory to stick when they convicted Stella Nickell for the cyanide-laced Excedrin poisonings of Bruce Nickell and Sue Snow. When commenting on Stella’s conviction, Private Detective Al Farr said, “Big business and big government got in bed together and cooked up a scheme to convict this woman, and they did it.”

The Stella Nickell case was not the only instance where big government and big business got together to cover up what was really going on in the drug supply system. By the time Bruce Nickell and Sue Snow died from cyanide-laced capsules in June 1986, the deaths from poisoned OTC capsules had been an ongoing problem for more than four years.

Jay Mitchell died of cyanide poisoning in July 1982 after taking an Extra Strength Tylenol capsule from a bottle of Tylenol purchased at the Buttrey-Osco store in Sheridan, Wyoming that received its Tylenol from an un-named wholesaler affiliated with Jewel-Osco in Illinois. There were also three deaths, initially unexplained, in Cook County between August 15, 1982 and December 1, 1982 that were actually cyanide poisoning deaths. In all of these cases, the victims had acetaminophen (Tylenol) in their blood when they died.

In February 1986, FDA spokesperson, William Grigg, said there had been several additional incidents since the 1982 Tylenol murders in which people were poisoned with Tylenol capsules. James Cope, of the Proprietary Association, said on June 18, 1986, that there had been twelve confirmed deaths from cyanide-filled capsules since the 1982 Tylenol murders. The actual number of deaths from cyanide-laced OTC capsules nationwide in the 1980s may be an astronomically horrific number.

After the seven deaths from cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago, and at least a dozen confirmed subsequent deaths from cyanide-laced OTC capsules through July 1986, the Proprietary Association, the primary lobbying group for OTC drug manufacturers, continued to lobby to keep unsealed capsules on the market. Instead of recommending that manufacturers use alternatives, such as sealed capsules, caplets, or gel-tabs - the Proprietary Association insisted that the real problem was that cyanide was too easy to buy. The FDA had turned the role of “regulator” over to the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists.

The term “self-regulation” was very much in vogue in the 1980s. Under self-regulation, corporations are supposed to monitor themselves and report to the Justice Department their regulatory violations and illegal activities. The motivation for self-reporting is that the federal government will go easy on repentant corporations. The reality is that corporations do not self-report their illegal activities, and the Justice Department rarely shows any interest in prosecuting corporations that misbehave. Nevertheless, federal regulatory agencies still today depend on the “free market” to ensure that corporations act in the best interests of consumers.

Johnson & Johnson has long portrayed itself as a company that puts the consumers’ interests first. In 1947, Robert Wood Johnson II made an impassioned plea to convince Congress to use taxpayer money to fund the construction of underground plants for Johnson & Johnson and other corporations. Johnson said these underground plants would ensure that production continued even in the event of a nuclear war. To emphasize his altruistic motive for increasing corporate welfare, Johnson patriotically declared, “Who will protect America if we don’t?” However, Johnson really just wanted to
protect
America’s money by taking control of it and using it to fund the growth of Johnson & Johnson. Today, a substantial portion of Johnson & Johnson’s U.S. pharmaceutical revenue comes from taxpayer-funded programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and
TriCare
. In 2004, the Medicaid program alone paid more than $2.8 billion for Johnson & Johnson drugs.

In the 1980s, there were simply no regulatory agencies, and certainly no lobbyists, working on behalf of consumers to force government officials to conduct proper investigations into the Tylenol tamperings. This is also true today. The new Tylenol task force has not presented any evidence related to its ongoing reactivated investigation. Instead, the un-named silent leaders of this new task force enlisted spokespersons from the 1982 investigation to parrot the old lines from the “approved theory” script. These spokespersons have never answered any questions about the evidence.

The anonymous leaders of the new Tylenol task force brought out the founder and former chairman of the McNeil Consumer Products Company, Wayne Nelson, to tell America that “many people” involved in the Tylenol murders investigation in 1982 believed that James Lewis was the Tylenol killer. Former Illinois Attorney General, Tyrone Fahner, came out to say, “We felt that he [Lewis] committed the murders, but we couldn’t prove it at that time.” Former FBI Agent, Brad Garret, took advantage of his new job as an ABC consultant to perpetuate the lie of the super-corrosiveness of cyanide on gel-based Tylenol capsules. Former U.S Attorney, Dan Webb, took a break from his duties as chairman of Winston & Strawn to say that the FBI’s search of Lewis’s apartment meant that the FBI had a reasonable basis to believe that there was evidence of a crime being housed there. The FBI announced that they were going to deploy new DNA technology to solve the Tylenol murders. The FBI said that the 25
^th
anniversary of the Tylenol murders had generated new tips. Not a single one of these statements is true.

This is what the evidence shows: James Lewis was in New York City from September 5, 1982 to December 27, 1982; the Tylenol task force never considered Lewis a valid suspect in the Tylenol murders; the Tylenol task force spent the first month of the investigation trying to pin the murders on one or more of the Tylenol victims’ relatives; authorities in DuPage County planted the eighth bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol in an attempt to frame a relative of one of the Tylenol poisoning victims for the murders; cyanide did not cause the gel-based Tylenol capsules to corrode in just a few days; the FBI did not have probable cause to search the Lewises’ apartment in 2009; the FBI has no DNA evidence relevant to the Tylenol murders; the 25
^th
anniversary did not generate new tips; and the FBI and Illinois officials are not following up on any new evidence related to the Tylenol murders.

The reactivated Tylenol murders investigation is a complete fraud. It is another red herring distracting the public from the evidence that indicts Johnson & Johnson, the FDA, and the United States Justice Department for their collusion in covering up a string of Tylenol tamperings and murders in the 1980s. In this sea of corruption, there is a seed of hope that had been quashed in 1982 and again in 1986, but might still germinate today. There was one government official during the Tylenol murders investigation in 1982 and another during the 1986 Tylenol murder investigation who went against the status quo, and disclosed important evidence relevant to these tampering incidents.

In 1982, the disclosures by Cook County Medical Examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, about the shelf life of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules revealed that the poisoned Tylenol capsules had been filled with cyanide before they were delivered to the retail stores. In 1986, Westchester District Attorney, Carl Vergari, disclosed a great deal of information revealing that the Tylenol killer had poisoned the capsules in a warehouse in the channel of distribution. There are government officials today who are knowledgeable of the Tylenol killers’ true modus operandi and the identity of the facilities where the tamperings occurred. These officials need to come forward, because the courageous leadership necessary to hold the appropriate individuals accountable for the Tylenol murders cover-up is certainly not going to come from within Johnson & Johnson.

The leadership standard set by James Burke continues today at Johnson & Johnson. Executives at this company have repeatedly failed to correct problems with the manufacturing processes at their plants; knowingly selling drugs that contain contaminants. Johnson & Johnson has run roughshod over feckless regulatory agencies for decades. From 2008 through 2010, the FDA apparently made an effort to crack down on Johnson & Johnson. In 2009, after J&J had refused for two years to recall Tylenol and other OTC products contaminated with TBA (a metabolite produced when TBP, a wood and plastic preservative, is exposed to mold), pressure from the FDA forced J&J to conduct numerous recalls of more than 150 million bottles of OTC medicines from hundreds of contaminated lots. J&J also had to shut down the McNeil manufacturing plant in Fort Washington indefinitely in April 2010 after the FDA publicly disclosed dozens of ongoing manufacturing violations at that plant. Johnson & Johnson is no longer the media darling it was in the 1980s; yet the company’s handling of the 1982 Tylenol murders is still portrayed in the media as the gold standard of crisis management.

Johnson & Johnson handled the Tylenol murders lawsuits just as it has handled many other liability lawsuits. It destroyed evidence, suppressed information, and turned the Tylenol investigation over to its lawyers who, with the cooperation of the Justice Department - a Justice Department that fully supports the use of protective orders to cover up corporate crimes - buried the truth. J&J convinced the judge who oversaw the 1982 Tylenol murders litigation to seal the court documents in that case so the public would never see the evidence that had been uncovered during discovery. A federal judge dismissed the 1986 Tylenol murder lawsuit based on false information about where and how the cyanide-laced Tylenol had been packaged. Johnson & Johnson managed the “Tylenol crisis” by covering up the facts. This behavior is the “gold standard” of crisis management celebrated by the Public Relations Society of America and Harvard Business School.

The gold standard of crisis management is rooted in the tenet that a corporation must never admit wrongdoing or take responsibility for its sins and crimes.
 
It is about creating a false reality for the public to look back on in the future. This “gold standard” requires corporate executives to lie, destroy evidence, and even cover up murders. In effect, they must do whatever is necessary to create a historical record that will be memorialized in the media in exactly the way the corporate entity wants that incident remembered. The crimes of executives, hiding behind the veil of the Corporation, are put into the shadow legal system where their sins are kept secret forever. The lawyer-lawmen of corporate America and the Justice Department have created a judicial system that is largely inaccessible to United States citizens. This system values political expediency over justice, closed-door arbitration over open trials, and secrecy over transparency. The result is a “justice” system designed for the benefit of corporations at the expense of individuals.

In an expose written in 1991, titled “
Drug Fiends; Even Inside Johnson & Johnson, Public Safety Can Take a Back Seat to Profits,” Morton Mintz
offered a sad commentary, still relevant today, of a society that allows Johnson & Johnson to practice business unfettered by morality and unencumbered by legal constraints. Mintz said, “When a corporation freely and repeatedly can do so much harm and then escape meaningful punishment, and when a CEO can stand by while hundreds are injured and some even killed and still be hailed as a champion of corporate ethics, there is something deeply wrong with the way America is doing business.”

Corporations have circumvented the ideal of the free market system by using their immense financial and political power to influence government agencies and officials to the point where corporations now dictate how the government “regulates” industry and “conducts” criminal and civil investigations. The sad truth is that Johnson & Johnson did indeed set the gold standard of crisis management with its handling of the Tylenol crisis. However, only through the eyes of a sociopathic corporate philosophy is this standard laudable. The actions of J&J executives after the Tylenol murders were certainly similar to the actions that the leaders of many large corporations would have taken then, and would still take today under similar circumstances.

Corporate entities rely on the shadow legal system and the silence of their employees to keep their crimes hidden. The corporate takeover of the justice system will be reversed only when individuals knowledgeable about corporate crimes come forward in large numbers to publicly disclose what they know. These honest Americans, by simply doing what is right, can take back America from the corporations that now own her. After all -- Who will protect America if we don’t?