Chapter 34
North Carolina, 2017
At 11 a.m. on November 15, Paul was waiting in a hallway at the headquarters of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners in Raleigh. The commissioners had heard about Paul’s lawsuit and invited him to give a presentation.
A door swung open. Out walked a man dressed in a bespoke broad pinstriped suit, tailored shirt, two-tone handmade shoes, and colorful socks. Paul J. Hanly Jr., a big-time Manhattan trial attorney.
Motherfucker, Paul thought.
Hanly and Paul were chasing the same clients. Both men knew the wreckage the drug companies had visited upon North Carolina. Between 1999 and 2017, more than thirteen thousand North Carolina residents had died from opioid overdoses. In 2017 alone, more than two thousand residents died, a 32 percent increase over the previous year.
Hanly was Paul’s opposite in almost every way—dapper, polished, and, at sixty-six, a veteran litigator. The scion of a colorful political family, Hanly had studied analytical philosophy at Cornell University, where he played center on the varsity football team. He earned a master’s degree at Cambridge University and a law degree at Georgetown in 1979. He then clerked for a federal judge in New Jersey who was close to his maternal grandfather, John V. Kenny. He had been one of New Jersey’s most powerful politicians. Hanly grew up admiring Kenny, who served as mayor of Jersey City from 1949 to 1953. He later went to prison in the 1970s for tax evasion.
Hanly had been working opioid cases for more than a decade. In the early 2000s, along with his partner, Jayne Conroy, he had been one of the first lawyers to take on Purdue Pharma. Tall, with streaks of gray hair, fifty-nine-year-old Conroy was another New York powerhouse. Like Hanly, she dressed stylishly, favoring vintage couture from the 1940s. One of five sisters, she had grown up in Woburn, Massachusetts, outside Boston. She was exposed to the world of mass torts at an early age. Her father, William Joseph Heimlich, was an inventor and a mechanical engineer whose skills in the leather industry were legendary. He spent more than thirty years dismantling U.S. tanneries, shipping them in pieces, and reassembling them in many developing countries. He also was the chief engineer for the John J. Riley Tannery that was a defendant in the high-profile litigation memorialized by the bestselling book and movie A Civil Action. The book documented a lawyer’s quixotic fight against the tannery, W. R. Grace, and Beatrice Foods, for allegedly causing cancer deaths in Woburn.
Conroy grew up sailing on Cape Cod and skiing in New England. She graduated from Dartmouth College and New England Law and married the owner of a Newton, Massachusetts, funeral home. She raised her two daughters upstairs from the parlor on the main floor and the embalming room in the basement.
Conroy began her legal career as a corporate defense attorney. She met Hanly in the mid-1980s when her office in Boston joined forces with his New York firm to represent the largest asbestos manufacturer in the world, England-based Turner & Newall. Workaholics with a shared sense of the law as vindicator, they hit it off from the start. Despite his sense of high style, Hanly could have a reserved and detached demeanor. Conroy, effortlessly winning, managed the social graces.
For years afterward, Conroy and Hanly made their living defending asbestos lawsuits. In 2002, they formed their own firm, New York–based Hanly Conroy, and switched sides to become plaintiffs’ lawyers, handling complex legal cases. They won hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements for families and victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, along with $60 million for 170 Haitian boys who were victims of alleged sexual abuse by a convicted pedophile at a Jesuit-sponsored orphanage in Haiti. They won billions of dollars for businesses and people harmed by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They were part of the legal team that secured a $14.7 billion global settlement for owners of Volkswagen vehicles following the 2016 emissions scandal. On behalf of the 9/11 victims, they also sued to ban the sale of tanzanite, a gem used to support Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network.
On the day after Christmas in 2002, while Hanly and his family were visiting Conroy’s family at her ski home in Mount Snow, Vermont, he received a call from a Washington, D.C., attorney. The attorney’s father was a doctor who had seen an alarming increase in addiction among pain patients. They had all been prescribed OxyContin. Could there be a lawsuit and was Hanly interested?
Hanly and Conroy began investigating a possible case against Purdue Pharma. They talked to medical experts, lawyers, and with addicted patients, who came from all walks of life—lawyers, doctors, truck drivers, longshoremen. After hearing their stories, Hanly and Conroy became convinced they had a case. But it was going to be too expensive for a five-person law firm to take on a major drug company. They needed a partner who could help provide money and resources.
They reached out to John Simmons, a successful Illinois attorney. Simmons had often been on the opposing side of the early asbestos cases. He had made tens of millions a year suing companies on behalf of victims.
On a snowy day in February 2003, Hanly and Conroy flew to St. Louis, rented a car, and drove across the Mississippi River to the tiny community of Edwardsville, Illinois. Simmons’s office was housed in an old Kroger grocery store. It was filled with dozens of lawyers. Hanly and Conroy, in formal dark suits, were ushered into one of the few offices in the aircraft-hangar-sized building to meet Simmons, clad in blue jeans, a lumberjack shirt, and construction boots.
Simmons grew up in nearby East Alton. He joined the U.S. Army, served as a combat engineer, and returned home to work with his father, building houses, before going to law school. He wanted to live and work where he grew up. But just because he wanted to live in a small town didn’t mean he did not have big ambitions. He wasn’t just relentless—he was ruthless. In the sea of plaintiffs’ lawyers, Simmons was a great white shark.
Conroy and Hanly laid out their case against Purdue. They planned to file about five hundred cases across the country in the next year—and they needed financial help. Would Simmons and his firm be interested in joining forces? Simmons listened intently. They had come highly recommended, and Simmons was impressed by their work on behalf of the 9/11 victims.
“Well, how much money do you think you’re going to need?” Simmons asked.
“For the next three to four months, we’re going to need a million dollars,” Hanly said.
Simmons pulled open the drawer of his desk, took out a checkbook, and wrote a check for $1 million. He handed it to Hanly. The pair sat poker-faced as Simmons asked if they needed anything else. Ten lawyers from your firm, Hanly replied.
Within weeks, a team of Simmons lawyers and staffers joined Hanly and Conroy as they embarked on their lawsuit against Purdue. They launched a television advertising campaign, urging people who had been lawfully prescribed OxyContin and had become addicted, or who knew of someone who had become addicted or died, to call an 800 number. They drove around the country from small town to small town, taking depositions from Purdue sales reps. They eventually filed about fourteen hundred cases in thirty states on behalf of five thousand patients who alleged Purdue had misled them about the risk of addiction from OxyContin.
In 2007, Purdue settled the lawsuits for $75 million. The Justice Department subpoenaed Hanly and Conroy’s firm for millions of pages of Purdue’s documents they had obtained during discovery. The department brought its own case against the company that resulted in the criminal convictions of three executives and the $634 million fine. In his Manhattan office, Hanly kept a souvenir from the case—a black stuffed gorilla in a blue T-shirt emblazoned with the word “OxyContin,” a gift that company reps once gave to doctors as a marketing ploy.
Seven years later, Hanly and Conroy joined forces with Simmons to create Simmons Hanly Conroy, headquartered in Alton, with offices in New York, Chicago, and other cities. They took on high-profile cases involving defective drugs and medical devices. They secured a $1 billion verdict against Johnson & Johnson subsidiary DePuy Orthopaedics over its metal-on-metal hip implant, and a $894 million settlement of cases against Pfizer for its Bextra and Celebrex painkillers.
In the summer of 2015, Conroy received a letter from Suffolk County attorney Dennis Brown on Long Island, where there had been an explosion of opioid overdoses and deaths. Would the firm consider bringing another lawsuit, this one representing a county instead of individuals, he asked?
By this time, Hanly had a personal experience with the dangers of OxyContin: His son Jake had become addicted, and like a lot of parents, Hanly was oblivious. Jake was first prescribed the drug at fourteen when he broke his arm while skateboarding. Over the next three years, Jake broke his arm two more times, again on his skateboard. Each time, he was prescribed OxyContin.
Early one morning in 2011, Hanly received a frantic call from Jake. He was crying. His girlfriend had overdosed and been rushed to the hospital. Jake confessed to his father that he had been addicted to pain pills for years. The girlfriend survived, and Hanly enrolled his son in a treatment program. Jake eventually recovered, and Hanly’s animosity toward Purdue intensified.
In August 2015, Hanly and Conroy drove to Long Island to meet with Lynne A. Bizzarro, the chief deputy county attorney in Suffolk County. There had only been two lawsuits in the country filed against opioid manufacturers by municipalities, and it was still a largely untested area of law. But they took the case.
About a year after meeting with Bizzarro, on August 31, 2016, Hanly and Conroy filed a complaint on behalf of Suffolk County against Purdue and other opioid makers, including Teva Pharmaceuticals, Cephalon, Johnson & Johnson, and Endo Pharmaceuticals. They also sued several physicians, including Russell Portenoy, the pain management doctor at New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital who had advocated for the wider use of opioids. By then, Portenoy had recanted. He told the Wall Street Journal in December 2012 that he had unwittingly provided incorrect information about opioids. “We didn’t know then what we know now,” he said. In a video cited by the Journal and made by the Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, Portenoy said: “Clearly, if I had an inkling of what I know now then, I wouldn’t have spoken in the way that I spoke. It was clearly the wrong thing to do.”
Hanly compared his lawsuit to the landmark tobacco litigation of the 1990s that alleged tobacco companies knew smoking caused lung cancer and cigarettes were addictive. For the next year, Hanly and Conroy were flooded with inquiries from other cities, towns, and counties around the nation interested in suing. It was that deluge of inquiries that eventually brought Hanly and Conroy into competition with Paul Farrell.
On November 16, 2017, the day after Hanly ran into Paul in Raleigh, Hanly traveled to Charlotte, North Carolina, to meet with county officials at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center. As he left the meeting on the center’s top floor, he ran into Paul, who was waiting in the wide marble hallway to pitch his lawsuit against drug distributors.
Son of a bitch, Paul thought. It was the second day in a row that Hanly had beaten him.
Hanly’s lawsuit against the manufacturers was different than Paul’s case against the distributors. Hanly didn’t know much about the distribution system for opioids. His case centered on how drug makers deceptively marketed painkillers to doctors and patients. But in North Carolina, as with everywhere they both went, the local officials had to choose between the two Pauls.
“I just want you to know that I will say only good things about you to them,” Farrell told Hanly. “I’ll tell them you’re a great lawyer. You’re focused on manufacturers. We’re focused on distributors. They can’t go wrong whoever they choose.”
Hanly looked at Paul and laughed. He had heard about this smart-aleck lawyer from West Virginia.
“Well, I would only say good things about you if I knew you,” Hanly said. “But I don’t.”