The Tylenol Mafia (55 page)

Public Affairs Officer, Jane Wray, said the manager of the Fort Leavenworth Commissary found “a number of bottles” of Tylenol from the recalled lot, 1910MD. She was uncertain how many bottles were found on the commissary store shelves and how many had been sold. “We’ve also checked the hospitals and Post Exchange,” she said, “but this [the commissary] was the only place Tylenol was found.”

Air Force officials also discovered several cases of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules with recalled-lot numbers at the Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois, and at the Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Air Force officials said that those cases were turned over to civilian authorities - aka, Johnson & Johnson.

Some of the Tylenol purchased in 1982 by the DOD and sold in military commissaries may have been diverted to the civilian retail class of trade. That would explain the five-year shelf life of the bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol involved in the 1982 Tylenol murders. Drug diversion was a big problem in the 1980s, and the subject of several Congressional hearings. Diverters actively sought out hospitals, long-term-care pharmacies, and Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) purchasers that bought drugs at discounted prices not available to wholesalers in the retail class of trade. The diverters then sold these discounted drugs for a quick profit to wholesalers in the retail class of trade. One example of this type of diversion was described in a January 9, 2001 letter from George T. Patterson, the Executive Director of the VA Acquisition Center in Hines, Illinois, to FSS non-prescription pharmaceutical distribution contractors:

I am writing to alert you to the possible diversion of products sold under your Federal Supply Schedule (FSS) contract. Based upon information and inquiries from some contractors and from the Indian Health Service (IHS) Regional Supply Service Center (RSSC),
Ada
, Oklahoma, we have reason to believe that large orders for drugs are being placed by tribal health care clinics, sometimes using a non-government pharmaceutical Prime Vendor (PPV) as an ordering intermediary, for resale or distribution to persons and entities not entitled to FSS pricing…

…We suggest that you examine incoming direct orders and chargeback requests for unusually large quantities being requested by or delivered to another government agency activity, such as a tribal clinic. If you notice such unusual orders, we suggest that you ask the ordering activity to justify the quantity ordered in terms of its own federal mission and patient base. Also, we recommend you scrutinize for possible diversion all tribal clinic orders placed through a non-government PPV. Ordering activities may be asked for documentation to prove their contractual relationship with IHS. Recent experience has demonstrated even IHS-authorized clinics ordering drugs through an IHS RSSC may suddenly increase their ordering quantities to divert drugs to a profit-making tribal enterprise…

From 1975 to 1982, the General Accounting Office (GAO) conducted dozens of investigations into the procurement operations for DOD storage depots, military commissaries, and self-service stores. These investigations revealed widespread incompetence, corruption, and fraud. In one report in 1982, the GAO said, “In our opinion, the failure to identify causes and prevent recurrence of reported discrepancies perpetuates conditions of loss of control of government material and payments to vendors for material not received. …Current practices and procedures do not ensure that (1) the government is receiving the material it has paid for, (2) DLA [Defense Logistics Agency] supply centers adjust related records for valid shipping discrepancies, and (3) the supply centers analyze reported discrepancies to identify and correct problem areas.”

According to a March 19, 1982 GAO report, the Military Commissary procurement divisions conducted a substantial amount of business through vendors’ representatives who acted as the intermediary between the buyer and the manufacturer.
 
The representative was often an independent firm, which provided its services to one or more manufacturers on a commission basis. These services usually ranged from calling on buyers for the purpose of presenting a manufacturer’s merchandise to performing in-store service, such as reordering and inventorying stock. In other words, the intermediaries that provided these services to the DOD commissaries were rack jobbers and merchandisers like the ones employed in the Chicago area by
Sav
-A-Stop and Zahn Drug.

A Chicago area third-party distributor that delivered Tylenol to the DOD Supply Depot in Hines (four miles south of Zahn Drug), and to Chicago area military commissaries, may have been the same distributor that shipped cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules to Chicago area outlets in September of 1982. If the Tylenol killer put cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules into the bottling production lines at a repackaging facility under contract to bottle that Tylenol for the United States Department of Defense, then the federal government obviously might want to suppress that information.

*****

Despite all the evidence pointing to ongoing poisonings of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in a Chicago area repackaging facility in 1982, the FBI and the Tylenol task force never conducted a proper investigation of the distribution channel. Instead, they simply turned over the Tylenol capsules from Chicago area stores, hospitals, and distribution centers to Johnson & Johnson. Their one legitimate suspect, Roger Arnold, worked in the distribution channel, but was effectively dropped from the investigation on October 26, 1982, just one day after he had been named as a co-conspirator in the Tylenol murder conspiracy story. The FBI, IDLE, and the press then became conspicuously silent about Roger Arnold.

In a nine-page synopsis of the Tylenol murders probe, IDLE Investigator, Richard
Tetyk
, wrote that Arnold had told his supervisor at Jewel that he was “mad at people and wanted to throw acid at them or poison them.” A few days before the Tylenol murders, Arnold purchased two one-way tickets to Thailand with a departure date of October 15, 1982. Arnold said he went to Thailand every year, but his lawyer said Arnold had never been to Thailand. A little more than a week after the Tylenol murders, Arnold, while holding a bag of white powder that he said was cyanide, walked into several North Side taverns and talked about killing people with cyanide. Arnold had access to Tylenol in the distribution channel, and he kept cyanide in the basement of his house just prior to the Tylenol murders. A substantial amount of circumstantial evidence makes Arnold a valid suspect in the Tylenol murders case, but no one has ever suggested a possible motive.

“One of the most sensational murder cases in this century has gone unsolved because the person who did it, randomly killed seven people,” said former U.S. Attorney, Dan Webb. “If you have no motive, if all you’re doing is killing people for no reason whatsoever, then that is likely to be the most perfect murder because there won’t be any ties back to you.”

There are, however, a couple of obvious motives that can be ascribed to Roger Arnold. For starters, he was angry at people in general and he was prone to violence. Arnold had talked about poisoning people, and he allegedly had threatened to kill his estranged wife with cyanide capsules. He was armed with cyanide and the necessary ingredients and knowledge to make deadly unconventional weapons. Arnold’s lawyer referred to Arnold as “a soldier of fortune type guy.” Arnold apparently adhered to the ideology of “
posse comitatus
,” a loosely organized far right social movement that opposes the United States federal government, believes in radical localism, and engages in paramilitary training. The term “
posse comitatus
” is a Latin phrase, meaning “force of the county.”

In the 1970s and 1980s,
posse comitatus
groups embraced the ideology of the American Christian Patriot Movement, which supports hostility against any form of government above the county level, vilifies Jews and non-whites as children of Satan, and advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government. Several active posse comitatus compounds were located not far from Chicago in 1982. The Posse at Tigerton Dells was in Tigerton, Wisconsin. The Covenant the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA) was in the Ozarks on the border of Missouri and Arkansas, and the Christian Patriots Defense League was in Louisville, Illinois.

Arnold’s literature included
The Anarchist Cookbook
, an instruction manual for making explosives; a stash of
Soldier of Fortune
magazines and a copy of
The Poor Man’s James Bond
, a survivalist manual written by former Minuteman, Kurt Saxon, which contained instructions for using cyanide-filled capsules to make lethal weapons. The vast majority of people who own these magazines and books are, of course, law-abiding citizens. But it is also true that these publications were standard fare among adherents of the
posse comitatus
movement whose leaders had stockpiled cyanide and had advocated mass murder in a war against Jews and “Jew sympathizers.”

In September of 1981, Robert Miles, the former Grand Dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan, had given about 200 pounds of cyanide to CSA leader, James Ellison, telling him: “Here, you’ll need this. It will kill a lot of people.” The FBI later confiscated that cyanide in a raid on CSA headquarters in 1985. Ellison testified that in 1981, Miles and Aryan Nation leader, Richard Butler, discussed using cyanide to pollute the water supplies of Chicago, New York City, or Washington D.C.

Just prior to the Tylenol murders, Arnold had used cyanide for unspecified “projects.” He was knowledgeable about the local distributors and had admitted to disposing of his cyanide in August 1982; the same month that J&J shipped some or all of the Tylenol involved in the poisonings to a Chicago area warehouse. Arnold was four days away from leaving the country when he was arrested on October 11, 1982. If prosecutors had brought a case against Arnold, they likely would have characterized his statements about poisoning people, made a week and a half after the Tylenol murders, as a confession to the Tylenol murders.

Guilty or not, a motivated attorney like Joseph Birkett, the state’s attorney in DuPage County from 1996 to December 2010, or Richard M. Daley, the state’s attorney in Cook County from 1981 to 1989, could probably have convinced a jury that Roger Arnold was the Tylenol killer. Charging Arnold with the Tylenol murders would have been an ideal way to close out the Tylenol tampering case as the work of a social outcast who had put cyanide-laced capsules into Tylenol bottles at the retail stores -
unless
an investigation of Arnold would have debunked this “approved theory” and unearthed the evidence of Johnson & Johnson’s liability for the tamperings. Pursuing Roger Arnold as a suspect, whether dead or alive, whether in 1982 or 2009, would have required an investigation of the distribution channel and might have led to a public disclosure of the true source of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules.

Under Title 21 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Johnson & Johnson was responsible for all aspects of manufacturing Tylenol, including all packaging and labeling operations, no matter where they were done. If authorities had traced the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules to a warehouse in the distribution channel, Johnson & Johnson likely would have been held liable for the Tylenol murders. Lynn Reiner’s cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules, because they were dispensed at Central DuPage Hospital, represented the smoking gun for Johnson & Johnson. It was clear that those capsules, since they were dispensed at a secure closed-door pharmacy, were filled with cyanide before they were delivered to the hospital.

J&J executives suppressed information related to the packaging and distribution of Tylenol in 1982. They also kept secret their knowledge of hundreds of instances of Tylenol tamperings and contaminations that had occurred in the years prior to the Tylenol murders. J&J kept those complaints under wraps until 1991 when the attorneys for the Tylenol victims’ families revealed that J&J had received nearly 300 consumer complaints of adulterated and contaminated Tylenol products in the three-year period leading up to the Tylenol murders. In describing these complaints, attorney Bruce Pfaff said, “Either capsules were missing, or some other medication was mixed in or there were foreign objects, pieces of metal, and even fingernails.” These incidents apparently did not involve poison, but they did highlight a known problem regarding Johnson & Johnson’s inability to stop tamperings that were occurring in Tylenol bottling production lines at McNeil and at third-party repackaging facilities. Did Johnson & Johnson executives also know – even before September 29, 1982 - that cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules were getting into the production lines at a repackaging facility in Illinois?

46

________

Just days before the deaths of seven Chicago area residents from cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules, Johnson & Johnson made some major personnel changes. James Burke appointed David Collins as the chairman of McNeil in September 1982. Collins was an Oak Park, Illinois-native, and had well-connected friends living at the center of the Tylenol murders crime scene. Collins hired two of his lifelong friends, both partners at the law office of Rooks, Pitts and Poust in DuPage County, “to help uncover the details” of the Tylenol murders.

Also in September 1982, Johnson & Johnson, a longtime proponent of decentralization, had begun to centralize the major processes related to the distribution of raw materials and finished goods. It had incorporated a new company, Johnson & Johnson Hospital Services Group, to take over the order fulfillment and the sales and logistics operations of J&J’s 13 largest operating companies.