Chapter 7
Reisterstown, Maryland, 2008
Victor Borelli was a driven national salesman for Mallinckrodt. One of his biggest clients was a drug distributor named KeySource Medical based in Cincinnati. In May 2008, Borelli sent an email to Steve Cochrane, the vice president of purchasing for KeySource, telling Cochrane to order more pain pills—whether he needed them or not.
“If you are low, order more. If you are okay, order a little more. Capesce?” Borelli then joked, “destroy this email… Is that really possible? Oh Well…”
In another email, Borelli told Cochrane that twelve hundred bottles of oxycodone 30mg tablets had just been shipped to KeySource.
“Keep ’em coming!” Cochrane wrote back. “Flyin’ out of here. It’s like people are addicted to these things or something. Oh, wait, people are…”
“Just like Doritos,” Borelli wrote back. “Keep eating, we’ll make more.”
In his career, Borelli, ruddy-faced with short brown hair, had peddled everything from toothpaste to shampoo to coffee. By age forty-six, he had stints with some of the biggest consumer goods companies in the world: Unilever, a British-based multinational; H. J. Heinz, the famous ketchup company; and Sara Lee Corporation, best known for its buttery pound cake.
And then, in 2005, Borelli began selling opioids. He was hired as a district manager for Mallinckrodt, winning promotions to regional and then national sales manager, working out of a home office in Reisterstown, Maryland. He handled some of Mallinckrodt’s biggest drug distribution customers. Unlike Purdue, which pitched its wares directly to doctors, generic manufacturers didn’t need to market their products. They sold generic hydrocodone and oxycodone to drug distributors. Generic drugs are typically far less expensive than branded versions, requiring manufacturers to sell large volumes to turn a profit. There were only a half dozen national sales managers at the company, creating lucrative opportunities for people like Borelli, who could move tens of millions of tablets of oxycodone and bring home big bonuses.
Borelli, who graduated from Northeastern University in 1984 with a degree in business management, had seen the news stories about the opioid epidemic and how it was wrecking communities across America. He knew that companies like Mallinckrodt were under strict requirements to monitor suspiciously high orders of narcotics from their customers. But other company officials were supposed to watch for unusual ordering patterns among his distributor clients. He had only one responsibility, and that was to sell. Or as he wrote in an email to another Mallinckrodt official, “Ship, ship, ship.”
Borelli’s drive for sales and the extraordinary orders of oxycodone his company was moving unsettled some of his colleagues. In the spring of 2008, Brenda Rehkop, a Mallinckrodt customer service representative, wrote a note to Borelli about a new customer, Sunrise Wholesale, just outside Fort Lauderdale. Sunrise had placed an enormous order for 252,000 tablets of 30mg oxycodone.
“Were you expecting Sunrise to place such a large order??” Rehkop asked Borelli in an email. “And do they really want 2520 bottles of OXYCODONE HCL 30 MG TABS USP, 100 count each??”
Another executive forwarded the email to one of Mallinckrodt’s senior compliance officers with a note: “FYI—the customer service reps all state that Victor will tell them anything they want to hear just so he can get the sale…” The compliance officers, despite their obligation to scrutinize suspicious orders, did nothing to rein in Borelli.
Sunrise Wholesale was sending oxycodone by the bucketload to a doctor based in Delray Beach in Palm Beach County, Barry Schultz. On July 7, 2009, a Tennessee task force investigating drug trafficking in the state seized several 100-tablet bottles of Mallinckrodt-made oxycodone in a sting operation—and all of the prescriptions had been written by Schultz. The task force alerted Mallinckrodt because the company’s lot numbers were stamped on the bottles. Three days later, after checking its records, Mallinckrodt told the Tennessee authorities that Sunrise had sent the bottles of oxycodone to Schultz—20,400 tablets in the previous year.
At the same time, the Florida Department of Health filed an administrative complaint against Schultz for prescribing inordinate amounts of oxycodone. On one day, Schultz had prescribed 1,000 tablets to a single patient. He prescribed 20,000 over ten months to another. Schultz later said he had only been trying to relieve the pain of the patients who came to his clinic for help. But even after the seizure and the complaint against Schultz, Borelli kept shipping to Sunrise. In the six weeks after the task force notified Mallinckrodt about the Tennessee sting in July 2009, the company shipped another 2.1 million oxycodone tablets to Sunrise, and the company continued to supply Schultz. The doctor was later arrested on drug trafficking charges and sentenced to 157 years in prison.
In 2009, an executive at Mallinckrodt sent Borelli several news stories about the opioid crisis in Florida, including one chronicling how Broward County had become the pill-mill capital of the United States. The first line of another article read, “South Florida has become the largest supplier of illegal prescription drugs in the country.”
“Interesting article,” Borelli wrote back in an email.
But whatever concern had led executives to circulate the article did nothing to change the company’s practices.
In the seven years that Borelli worked as a salesman at Mallinckrodt, he was well compensated. In 2006, a year after arriving at the company, he received a $26,442 bonus. The next year, it jumped to $35,904. In 2008, when Mallinckrodt’s sales of oxycodone were skyrocketing, Borelli’s bonus soared as well, to $119,096. He twice received Mallinckrodt’s “President’s Club” top salesman award, and the company treated him to an all-expenses-paid trip to the Caribbean island of Saint Thomas.
On a single day in 2010, KeySource ordered 12,720 hundred-count bottles—or 1.2 million pills. The company ordered another 12,720 bottles to be delivered the following day. Again, Rehkop, the Mallinckrodt customer service representative, questioned the quantities sent to KeySource. That year, KeySource sent a total of 41 million tablets of Mallinckrodt-made oxycodone to its customers in Florida.
Rehkop sent an email to several people inside Mallinckrodt, including Borelli. “This will undoubtedly show up as a peculiar order,” she wrote. “Do you know why they are ordering so much oxy?”