F
Freedom Fighter
Guest
FOR A PRICE, GIULIANI DEFENDS LYING DANGEROUS DRUG PUSHERS!
-----------------------------
NY Times December 28, 2007
The Long Run
Under Attack, Drug Maker Turned to Giuliani for Help
By BARRY MEIER and ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/u...em&ex=1198990800&en=15071bb733ac6a63&ei=5087
In western Virginia, far from the limelight, United States Attorney
John L. Brownlee found himself on the telephone last year with a
political and legal superstar, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case
that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when
it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics.
The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving
its abuse.
Mr. Giuliani, celebrated for his alleged stewardship of New York City after
9/11, soon told the prosecutors they were wrong.
In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr.
Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the
controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani's missions was the job
of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because
they could trust him.
[ (;-))! ]
So it was no small success when, after the call, Mr. Brownlee did what
many people might have done when confronted with such celebrity: He
went out and bought a copy of Mr. Giuliani's book, "Leadership."
"I wanted to be prepared for my meetings with him," Mr. Brownlee said
in a recent interview.
Over the past few weeks, Mr. Giuliani's consulting business has
received increasing scrutiny, at times forcing him to defend his
business as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination.
But his work for Purdue, the company's first and longest-running
client, provides a window into how he used his standing as a
lawyer, a Republican insider and a national celebrity to aid a
controversial client and build a business fortune.
[Sell pot on the streetcorner and Giuliani throws you in jail, though no one
ever dies from pot. Sell OxyContin under false claims that it is safe, pay
Giuliani off, and you go scot-free!]
A former top federal prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani participated in two
meetings between Purdue officials and the head of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, the agency investigating the company. Giuliani
Partners took on the job of monitoring security improvements at
company facilities making OxyContin, an issue of concern to the D.E.A.
[No doubt he had their shredders working overtime.]
As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public
relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade
an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it
for OxyContin abuse.
Despite these efforts, Purdue suffered a crushing defeat in May at the
hands of Mr. Brownlee when the company and three top executives
pleaded guilty to criminal charges.
Mr. Giuliani, who declined to discuss his work for Purdue for this
article, has refused to talk in detail about his firm's clients. He
has said that he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of
the firm, which still represents Purdue.
[We are supposed to believe that this micromanaging control freak has
completely relinquished control and oversight of the company that bears his
name and made him rich?]
Giuliani Partners would not say how much Purdue had paid it, but one
consultant to the drug maker estimated that Mr. Giuliani's firm had,
in some years, earned several million dollars from the account.
[Far more than he could get from the drug criminals he hypocritically
prosecuted in the past.]
In the OxyContin case, Mr. Giuliani's supporters suggest that as a
cancer survivor himself, he was driven by a noble goal: to keep the
company's proven pain reliever available to the widest circle of
sufferers.
[How noble! Too bad that Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, two innocent
victims of Giuliani's trigger-happy Gestapo, did not survive to ease their
pains with OxyContin!]
"I understand the pain and distress that accompanies illness," Mr.
Giuliani said at the time. "I know that proper medications are
necessary for people to treat their sickness and improve their quality
of life."
To drive OxyContin's sales, Purdue, beginning in 1996, set in motion
what D.E.A. officials described as perhaps the most aggressive
promotional campaign for a high-powered narcotic ever undertaken. It
promoted the drug not only to pain specialists, but to family doctors
with little experience in treating serious pain or recognizing drug
abuse.
As a result of the expanded access, critics charged, OxyContin wound
up in the high schools and street corners of rural America where
curious teenagers crushed the pill, defeating the time-release
formula, and ended up addicts, or in some cases, dead.
Dennis Lee, the Virginia state prosecutor for Tazewell County, an area
hard hit by OxyContin abuse, said he was stunned several years ago to
learn that Mr. Giuliani was working for Purdue. He had a favorable
impression of Mr. Giuliani, he said, and a poor opinion of the
company, which he said had played down and dissembled about its drug's
problem.
"I was shocked," Mr. Lee said, "that he would basically become a
mouthpiece for Purdue."
Denials and Lobbying
Giuliani Partners served clients with a range of needs. The firm
helped large accounting firms fight computer hackers and promoted
Nextel's efforts to expand its access to public airwaves. But some of
the 55-person firm's clients, like Purdue Pharma, were facing more
difficult legal and public relations problems.
There were, for instance, the backers of a planned natural gas
terminal in Long Island Sound who were facing stiff environmental
opposition. Another client was a former cocaine smuggler hoping to win
federal contracts for a computer system to track down terrorists.
On the business of these clients andothers, Giuliani Partners carved
out a lucrative niche in corporate consulting, crisis management and
security.
In the process, Mr. Giuliani, a Brooklyn native whose legal career had
largely been spent in government, became a corporate trouble-shooter
with homes in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side. According to
financial disclosure forms filed in May, his net worth was more than
$30 million.
The crisis that brought Purdue to Mr. Giuliani in 2002 involved
OxyContin, a time-released form of the narcotic oxycodone, which had
turned into a blockbuster product with annual sales of more than $1
billion.
But along the way, the pain medication had also become a popular drug
for abuse. Among the company's critics were officials at the Drug
Enforcement Administration who said OxyContin had been a factor in
hundreds of overdose deaths. Some D.E.A. officials and others also
charged that Purdue had hyped the drug's resistance to abuse and then
failed to act swiftly when its misuse became apparent.
Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the Sacklers, a New York-area family
who are known as museum benefactors, denied it had done anything
wrong. But facing a growing number of investigations and lawsuits, it
spent millions on public relations experts, lobbyists and top-tier law
firms.
One piece, however, was missing: a highly credible and well-connected
political figure to serve as its point man. Purdue Pharma executives
saw Mr. Giuliani as that person, said a former company spokesman.
"He was just on the cover of Time Magazine, Man of the Year," that
former official, Robin Hogen, said. "Everyone was talking about his
extraordinary leadership in 9/11."
Giuliani Partners became involved in every aspect of the company's
problems, from the ballooning investigation by Mr. Brownlee to
repairing its battered image. Mr. Giuliani personally took on some
tasks, but a half-dozen members of his firm, including Bernard B.
Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, were also
involved.
Mr. Giuliani's most important liaison to the company was Daniel S.
Connolly, who had been a top lawyer in his administration. He spent so
much time at Purdue that he was issued a security pass.
"His judgment was always sought on almost any topic," said Mr. Hogen,
who now works for a public relations agency in San Francisco.
Mr. Connolly regularly attended Monday morning crisis management
sessions to develop programs that would shift the public spotlight
away from OxyContin. The issue, the company said, was not its conduct
but the larger question of prescription drug abuse.
To help draw attention to that issue, Mr. Giuliani became the public
face of a program called Rx Action Alliance, a consortium of drug
makers, physicians and law enforcement authorities working to curtail
such abuse.
"He was America's mayor," Mr. Hogen said of Mr. Giuliani's role as a
catalyst for the company's efforts. "People were drawn to him."
[Like flies to dog----.]
One person attracted by Mr. Giuliani's star power was Mr. Weldon, who
was upset because young people in his Pennsylvania district were
abusing OxyContin. Mr. Weldon, who lost his seat in 2006, said in a
recent interview that he had told the company he planned to publicly
speak out against it.
"This is really kind of outrageous," Mr. Weldon recalled telling a
Purdue representative. "You have got to do something more than say you
are concerned about it."
At Mr. Weldon's urging, the company agreed to finance a program aimed
at curbing prescription drug abuse. It also sent Mr. Giuliani to an
inaugural press conference for the program, held at a high school in
Mr. Weldon's district. With Mr. Giuliani at his side, Mr. Weldon opted
not to criticize the company.
"I am proud to be in Pennsylvania today standing with Curt Weldon - a
true leader," Mr. Giuliani said at the event. "I applaud the efforts
of Congressman Weldon and of Purdue Pharma in taking this battle in
the right direction."
Credit for Damage Control
Asa Hutchinson, the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in
2002, hardly needed an introduction to Mr. Giuliani. So it was perhaps
not surprising that Purdue chose Mr. Giuliani as the person to meet
with Mr. Hutchinson at a time when the drug maker was under intense
scrutiny by the D.E.A.
"You need to have somebody who has clout to get in the door to
legitimately make your presentation," said Jay P. McCloskey, a former
United States attorney in Maine who until recently worked for Purdue
as a consultant.
By 2002, Mr. Giuliani was already helping to raise money for a D.E.A.
museum, and his firm was part of a $1 million Justice Department
consulting contract to advise it on reorganizing its major drug
investigations.
The D.E.A. was not only critical of how OxyContin had been marketed,
its inspectors had found widespread security and record-keeping
problems at the company's manufacturing plants.
Several top D.E.A. staffers were recommending that the agency impose
severe sanctions against the drug maker, including possible
restrictions on how much OxyContin it could make.
At two meetings, the first at Giuliani Partners in early 2002, Mr.
Giuliani and Purdue's executives argued that they were already taking
steps to eliminate any problems.
Mr. Kerik had been sent to Purdue's manufacturing plants to revamp
internal security, they assured Mr. Hutchinson. The federal
investigators, they argued, should back down and give them a chance to
prove they could handle the problem on their own.
After the meetings, Mr. Hutchinson, who generally did not get involved
in individual investigations, asked D.E.A. officials several times to
brief him on the inquiry, Laura Nagel, the official in charge of it,
has said in previous interviews. She declined to comment for this
article.
D.E.A. officials say Mr. Giuliani ultimately did not affect the
inquiry's course. But Purdue Pharma did succeed in favorably resolving
the matter. In 2004, it paid a $2 million fine to settle the D.E.A.
record-keeping charges without admitting any wrongdoing. The sum was
far smaller than the amount first recommended by Ms. Nagel, which one
former D.E.A. official said was $20 million.
By the time of the 2004 settlement, it appeared that Purdue, with Mr.
Giuliani's help, had averted any significant damage. As the tide was
turning, the drug maker's top lawyer, Howard R. Udell, gave credit to
Mr. Giuliani.
"We believe that government officials are more comfortable knowing
that Giuliani is advising Purdue Pharma," Mr. Udell said in a
promotional brochure put out by Giuliani Partners. "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."
Parents Not Persuaded
The limits of stature, though, were evident in Mr. Giuliani's dealings
with Mr. Brownlee, the federal prosecutor from Virginia, whose case
against Purdue had been viewed by the company more as a nuisance than
a threat.
It is easy to see how lawyers for Purdue might have underestimated the
prosecutor. He ran a small office with 24 lawyers to cover 52
far-flung counties. But two of those lawyers, working out of a
satellite office in the tiny town of Abingdon, Va., near the Tennessee
border, had been investigating Purdue since 2002.
They had issued some 600 separate subpoenas and collected millions of
company documents. The case stretched the office's resources so thin
that state prosecutors had to be deputized to handle other federal
cases.
By comparison, Purdue's defense team comprised all-stars, including
Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Connolly and Mary Jo White, a former United States
attorney in New York.
Mr. Giuliani had been advising Purdue about how to respond to Mr.
Brownlee's inquiry since its start in 2002, including reviewing
documents the company had released in response to his subpoenas. And
he shared the defense team's view that Mr. Brownlee did not have any
evidence to link the company to crimes, several of those lawyers said.
Early last year, however, Mr. Brownlee told Purdue that he was
prepared to indict it and three top executives, including Mr. Udell,
the lawyer. The company then handed Mr. Giuliani his most crucial
assignment, to talk Mr. Brownlee down.
His selection was not by chance, company representatives said. They
figured Mr. Brownlee, a younger federal prosecutor, would look up to
Mr. Giuliani, who became a legend as a United States attorney in New
York.
Between June and October 2006, Mr. Giuliani met or spoke with the
prosecutor on six occasions. During those conversations, Mr. Giuliani
was cordial but pointed in arguing against what he felt were flaws in
the case.
Mr. Brownlee would not change course, though, even when the Purdue
legal team appealed, unsuccessfully, at the 11th hour to his superiors
at the Justice Department in Washington.
In October 2006, Mr. Brownlee told Mr. Giuliani and Purdue that he
expected to ask for a grand jury indictment by the end of the month.
Plea discussions ensued and Mr. Brownlee ultimately agreed that the
three executives would not have to do jail time.
By this time, Mr. Giuliani was actively planning his presidential bid,
as well as tending to other clients. On the day the legal team
completed the plea deals with Mr. Brownlee, Mr. Giuliani was in
Germany, giving a talk to business leaders.
He had a conference call with prosecutors for about a minute, but
there really was not much left to discuss, except the weather.
"He said that it was raining," Mr. Brownlee recalled.
In May, Purdue and its executives, after spending tens of millions of
dollars to repair the company's image, agreed to plea deals to avoid a
trial. Together, they paid $634.5 million in fines and payments.
After years of denial and a high-profile public relations campaign,
the company was forced to admit that it had misled doctors and
patients. But to the parents of young people who had died getting high
on OxyContin, the absence of jail time was evidence of Mr. Giuliani's
influence.
They voiced that view inside and outside the packed courtroom in
Abingdon where the men were sentenced in July.
Mr. Giuliani was 360 miles away at the time, campaigning in Myrtle
Beach, S.C., where he met with local firefighters and talked about
9/11. But his role in the case had been so substantial and sustained,
the presiding judge felt compelled to address the parents' concerns.
"It has been implied that because Mr. Giuliani is a prominent national
politician, Purdue may have received a favorable deal from the
government solely because of politics," said the judge, James P. Jones
of United States District Court. "I completely reject this claim."
Even today, some of those parents are not persuaded. Ed Bisch, whose
son died of an OxyContin overdose, said that he believed that Purdue
got a free pass for years thanks to Mr. Giuliani.
"It was all because of Giuliani," said Mr. Bisch. "And he got to take
the money."
-----------------------------
NY Times December 28, 2007
The Long Run
Under Attack, Drug Maker Turned to Giuliani for Help
By BARRY MEIER and ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/u...em&ex=1198990800&en=15071bb733ac6a63&ei=5087
In western Virginia, far from the limelight, United States Attorney
John L. Brownlee found himself on the telephone last year with a
political and legal superstar, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
For years, Mr. Brownlee and his small team had been building a case
that the maker of the painkiller OxyContin had misled the public when
it claimed the drug was less prone to abuse than competing narcotics.
The drug was believed to be a factor in hundreds of deaths involving
its abuse.
Mr. Giuliani, celebrated for his alleged stewardship of New York City after
9/11, soon told the prosecutors they were wrong.
In 2002, the drug maker, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., hired Mr.
Giuliani and his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, to help stem the
controversy about OxyContin. Among Mr. Giuliani's missions was the job
of convincing public officials that they could trust Purdue because
they could trust him.
[ (;-))! ]
So it was no small success when, after the call, Mr. Brownlee did what
many people might have done when confronted with such celebrity: He
went out and bought a copy of Mr. Giuliani's book, "Leadership."
"I wanted to be prepared for my meetings with him," Mr. Brownlee said
in a recent interview.
Over the past few weeks, Mr. Giuliani's consulting business has
received increasing scrutiny, at times forcing him to defend his
business as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination.
But his work for Purdue, the company's first and longest-running
client, provides a window into how he used his standing as a
lawyer, a Republican insider and a national celebrity to aid a
controversial client and build a business fortune.
[Sell pot on the streetcorner and Giuliani throws you in jail, though no one
ever dies from pot. Sell OxyContin under false claims that it is safe, pay
Giuliani off, and you go scot-free!]
A former top federal prosecutor, Mr. Giuliani participated in two
meetings between Purdue officials and the head of the Drug Enforcement
Administration, the agency investigating the company. Giuliani
Partners took on the job of monitoring security improvements at
company facilities making OxyContin, an issue of concern to the D.E.A.
[No doubt he had their shredders working overtime.]
As a celebrity, Mr. Giuliani helped the company win several public
relations battles, playing a role in an effort by Purdue to persuade
an influential Pennsylvania congressman, Curt Weldon, not to blame it
for OxyContin abuse.
Despite these efforts, Purdue suffered a crushing defeat in May at the
hands of Mr. Brownlee when the company and three top executives
pleaded guilty to criminal charges.
Mr. Giuliani, who declined to discuss his work for Purdue for this
article, has refused to talk in detail about his firm's clients. He
has said that he is no longer involved in the day-to-day management of
the firm, which still represents Purdue.
[We are supposed to believe that this micromanaging control freak has
completely relinquished control and oversight of the company that bears his
name and made him rich?]
Giuliani Partners would not say how much Purdue had paid it, but one
consultant to the drug maker estimated that Mr. Giuliani's firm had,
in some years, earned several million dollars from the account.
[Far more than he could get from the drug criminals he hypocritically
prosecuted in the past.]
In the OxyContin case, Mr. Giuliani's supporters suggest that as a
cancer survivor himself, he was driven by a noble goal: to keep the
company's proven pain reliever available to the widest circle of
sufferers.
[How noble! Too bad that Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, two innocent
victims of Giuliani's trigger-happy Gestapo, did not survive to ease their
pains with OxyContin!]
"I understand the pain and distress that accompanies illness," Mr.
Giuliani said at the time. "I know that proper medications are
necessary for people to treat their sickness and improve their quality
of life."
To drive OxyContin's sales, Purdue, beginning in 1996, set in motion
what D.E.A. officials described as perhaps the most aggressive
promotional campaign for a high-powered narcotic ever undertaken. It
promoted the drug not only to pain specialists, but to family doctors
with little experience in treating serious pain or recognizing drug
abuse.
As a result of the expanded access, critics charged, OxyContin wound
up in the high schools and street corners of rural America where
curious teenagers crushed the pill, defeating the time-release
formula, and ended up addicts, or in some cases, dead.
Dennis Lee, the Virginia state prosecutor for Tazewell County, an area
hard hit by OxyContin abuse, said he was stunned several years ago to
learn that Mr. Giuliani was working for Purdue. He had a favorable
impression of Mr. Giuliani, he said, and a poor opinion of the
company, which he said had played down and dissembled about its drug's
problem.
"I was shocked," Mr. Lee said, "that he would basically become a
mouthpiece for Purdue."
Denials and Lobbying
Giuliani Partners served clients with a range of needs. The firm
helped large accounting firms fight computer hackers and promoted
Nextel's efforts to expand its access to public airwaves. But some of
the 55-person firm's clients, like Purdue Pharma, were facing more
difficult legal and public relations problems.
There were, for instance, the backers of a planned natural gas
terminal in Long Island Sound who were facing stiff environmental
opposition. Another client was a former cocaine smuggler hoping to win
federal contracts for a computer system to track down terrorists.
On the business of these clients andothers, Giuliani Partners carved
out a lucrative niche in corporate consulting, crisis management and
security.
In the process, Mr. Giuliani, a Brooklyn native whose legal career had
largely been spent in government, became a corporate trouble-shooter
with homes in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side. According to
financial disclosure forms filed in May, his net worth was more than
$30 million.
The crisis that brought Purdue to Mr. Giuliani in 2002 involved
OxyContin, a time-released form of the narcotic oxycodone, which had
turned into a blockbuster product with annual sales of more than $1
billion.
But along the way, the pain medication had also become a popular drug
for abuse. Among the company's critics were officials at the Drug
Enforcement Administration who said OxyContin had been a factor in
hundreds of overdose deaths. Some D.E.A. officials and others also
charged that Purdue had hyped the drug's resistance to abuse and then
failed to act swiftly when its misuse became apparent.
Purdue Pharma, which is owned by the Sacklers, a New York-area family
who are known as museum benefactors, denied it had done anything
wrong. But facing a growing number of investigations and lawsuits, it
spent millions on public relations experts, lobbyists and top-tier law
firms.
One piece, however, was missing: a highly credible and well-connected
political figure to serve as its point man. Purdue Pharma executives
saw Mr. Giuliani as that person, said a former company spokesman.
"He was just on the cover of Time Magazine, Man of the Year," that
former official, Robin Hogen, said. "Everyone was talking about his
extraordinary leadership in 9/11."
Giuliani Partners became involved in every aspect of the company's
problems, from the ballooning investigation by Mr. Brownlee to
repairing its battered image. Mr. Giuliani personally took on some
tasks, but a half-dozen members of his firm, including Bernard B.
Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, were also
involved.
Mr. Giuliani's most important liaison to the company was Daniel S.
Connolly, who had been a top lawyer in his administration. He spent so
much time at Purdue that he was issued a security pass.
"His judgment was always sought on almost any topic," said Mr. Hogen,
who now works for a public relations agency in San Francisco.
Mr. Connolly regularly attended Monday morning crisis management
sessions to develop programs that would shift the public spotlight
away from OxyContin. The issue, the company said, was not its conduct
but the larger question of prescription drug abuse.
To help draw attention to that issue, Mr. Giuliani became the public
face of a program called Rx Action Alliance, a consortium of drug
makers, physicians and law enforcement authorities working to curtail
such abuse.
"He was America's mayor," Mr. Hogen said of Mr. Giuliani's role as a
catalyst for the company's efforts. "People were drawn to him."
[Like flies to dog----.]
One person attracted by Mr. Giuliani's star power was Mr. Weldon, who
was upset because young people in his Pennsylvania district were
abusing OxyContin. Mr. Weldon, who lost his seat in 2006, said in a
recent interview that he had told the company he planned to publicly
speak out against it.
"This is really kind of outrageous," Mr. Weldon recalled telling a
Purdue representative. "You have got to do something more than say you
are concerned about it."
At Mr. Weldon's urging, the company agreed to finance a program aimed
at curbing prescription drug abuse. It also sent Mr. Giuliani to an
inaugural press conference for the program, held at a high school in
Mr. Weldon's district. With Mr. Giuliani at his side, Mr. Weldon opted
not to criticize the company.
"I am proud to be in Pennsylvania today standing with Curt Weldon - a
true leader," Mr. Giuliani said at the event. "I applaud the efforts
of Congressman Weldon and of Purdue Pharma in taking this battle in
the right direction."
Credit for Damage Control
Asa Hutchinson, the director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in
2002, hardly needed an introduction to Mr. Giuliani. So it was perhaps
not surprising that Purdue chose Mr. Giuliani as the person to meet
with Mr. Hutchinson at a time when the drug maker was under intense
scrutiny by the D.E.A.
"You need to have somebody who has clout to get in the door to
legitimately make your presentation," said Jay P. McCloskey, a former
United States attorney in Maine who until recently worked for Purdue
as a consultant.
By 2002, Mr. Giuliani was already helping to raise money for a D.E.A.
museum, and his firm was part of a $1 million Justice Department
consulting contract to advise it on reorganizing its major drug
investigations.
The D.E.A. was not only critical of how OxyContin had been marketed,
its inspectors had found widespread security and record-keeping
problems at the company's manufacturing plants.
Several top D.E.A. staffers were recommending that the agency impose
severe sanctions against the drug maker, including possible
restrictions on how much OxyContin it could make.
At two meetings, the first at Giuliani Partners in early 2002, Mr.
Giuliani and Purdue's executives argued that they were already taking
steps to eliminate any problems.
Mr. Kerik had been sent to Purdue's manufacturing plants to revamp
internal security, they assured Mr. Hutchinson. The federal
investigators, they argued, should back down and give them a chance to
prove they could handle the problem on their own.
After the meetings, Mr. Hutchinson, who generally did not get involved
in individual investigations, asked D.E.A. officials several times to
brief him on the inquiry, Laura Nagel, the official in charge of it,
has said in previous interviews. She declined to comment for this
article.
D.E.A. officials say Mr. Giuliani ultimately did not affect the
inquiry's course. But Purdue Pharma did succeed in favorably resolving
the matter. In 2004, it paid a $2 million fine to settle the D.E.A.
record-keeping charges without admitting any wrongdoing. The sum was
far smaller than the amount first recommended by Ms. Nagel, which one
former D.E.A. official said was $20 million.
By the time of the 2004 settlement, it appeared that Purdue, with Mr.
Giuliani's help, had averted any significant damage. As the tide was
turning, the drug maker's top lawyer, Howard R. Udell, gave credit to
Mr. Giuliani.
"We believe that government officials are more comfortable knowing
that Giuliani is advising Purdue Pharma," Mr. Udell said in a
promotional brochure put out by Giuliani Partners. "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."
Parents Not Persuaded
The limits of stature, though, were evident in Mr. Giuliani's dealings
with Mr. Brownlee, the federal prosecutor from Virginia, whose case
against Purdue had been viewed by the company more as a nuisance than
a threat.
It is easy to see how lawyers for Purdue might have underestimated the
prosecutor. He ran a small office with 24 lawyers to cover 52
far-flung counties. But two of those lawyers, working out of a
satellite office in the tiny town of Abingdon, Va., near the Tennessee
border, had been investigating Purdue since 2002.
They had issued some 600 separate subpoenas and collected millions of
company documents. The case stretched the office's resources so thin
that state prosecutors had to be deputized to handle other federal
cases.
By comparison, Purdue's defense team comprised all-stars, including
Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Connolly and Mary Jo White, a former United States
attorney in New York.
Mr. Giuliani had been advising Purdue about how to respond to Mr.
Brownlee's inquiry since its start in 2002, including reviewing
documents the company had released in response to his subpoenas. And
he shared the defense team's view that Mr. Brownlee did not have any
evidence to link the company to crimes, several of those lawyers said.
Early last year, however, Mr. Brownlee told Purdue that he was
prepared to indict it and three top executives, including Mr. Udell,
the lawyer. The company then handed Mr. Giuliani his most crucial
assignment, to talk Mr. Brownlee down.
His selection was not by chance, company representatives said. They
figured Mr. Brownlee, a younger federal prosecutor, would look up to
Mr. Giuliani, who became a legend as a United States attorney in New
York.
Between June and October 2006, Mr. Giuliani met or spoke with the
prosecutor on six occasions. During those conversations, Mr. Giuliani
was cordial but pointed in arguing against what he felt were flaws in
the case.
Mr. Brownlee would not change course, though, even when the Purdue
legal team appealed, unsuccessfully, at the 11th hour to his superiors
at the Justice Department in Washington.
In October 2006, Mr. Brownlee told Mr. Giuliani and Purdue that he
expected to ask for a grand jury indictment by the end of the month.
Plea discussions ensued and Mr. Brownlee ultimately agreed that the
three executives would not have to do jail time.
By this time, Mr. Giuliani was actively planning his presidential bid,
as well as tending to other clients. On the day the legal team
completed the plea deals with Mr. Brownlee, Mr. Giuliani was in
Germany, giving a talk to business leaders.
He had a conference call with prosecutors for about a minute, but
there really was not much left to discuss, except the weather.
"He said that it was raining," Mr. Brownlee recalled.
In May, Purdue and its executives, after spending tens of millions of
dollars to repair the company's image, agreed to plea deals to avoid a
trial. Together, they paid $634.5 million in fines and payments.
After years of denial and a high-profile public relations campaign,
the company was forced to admit that it had misled doctors and
patients. But to the parents of young people who had died getting high
on OxyContin, the absence of jail time was evidence of Mr. Giuliani's
influence.
They voiced that view inside and outside the packed courtroom in
Abingdon where the men were sentenced in July.
Mr. Giuliani was 360 miles away at the time, campaigning in Myrtle
Beach, S.C., where he met with local firefighters and talked about
9/11. But his role in the case had been so substantial and sustained,
the presiding judge felt compelled to address the parents' concerns.
"It has been implied that because Mr. Giuliani is a prominent national
politician, Purdue may have received a favorable deal from the
government solely because of politics," said the judge, James P. Jones
of United States District Court. "I completely reject this claim."
Even today, some of those parents are not persuaded. Ed Bisch, whose
son died of an OxyContin overdose, said that he believed that Purdue
got a free pass for years thanks to Mr. Giuliani.
"It was all because of Giuliani," said Mr. Bisch. "And he got to take
the money."
