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Speaker 4: Plus, you are now listening to True Murder, the most
Speaker 4: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
Speaker 4: have written about them Gaesy.
Speaker 2: Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week, another fascinating author
Speaker 2: talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true
Speaker 2: crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author
Speaker 2: Dan Zupanski, Good Evening. In twenty ten, a brave whistleblower
Speaker 2: alerted the police to doctor Stan Lee's corrupt pain management
Speaker 2: clinic in Queens, New York. Lee spent years supplying more
Speaker 2: than seventy patients a day with oxy codone and trading
Speaker 2: prescriptions for cash. Emergency room doctors, psychiatrist and desperate family
Speaker 2: members warned him that his patients were at risk of death,
Speaker 2: but he would not stop. In Bad Medicine, former prosecutor
Speaker 2: Charlotte Bismuth meticulously recounts the jaw dropping details of this
Speaker 2: criminal case that would span four years, culminating in a
Speaker 2: landmark trial. As a new assistant district attorney and single mother,
Speaker 2: Bismuth worked tirelessly with her team to bring doctor Lee
Speaker 2: to justice. Bad Medicine is a chilling story of corruption
Speaker 2: and greed and an important look at the role individual
Speaker 2: doctors play in America's opioid epidemic. The book that we're
Speaker 2: featuring this evening is Bad Medicine, Catching New York's Deadliest
Speaker 2: Pill Pusher, with my special guest, author and former prosecutor
Speaker 2: Charlotte Bismuth. Welcome to the prog and thank you so
Speaker 2: much for this interview. Charlotte Bismuth.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me Dan. I'm really filled.
Speaker 1: I wish I'd known your podcast when I was younger
Speaker 1: and didn't know any other true crime fans. Thank you.
Speaker 5: There we go great, Thank you, Thank you so much
Speaker 5: for this. This isn't an extraordinary and remarkable story. And
Speaker 5: let's get right to this. Tell us where you were
Speaker 5: professionally in your career in November twenty ten before we
Speaker 5: talk about the faithful event which occurred at work December first,
Speaker 5: December twenty ten, I.
Speaker 1: Was an attorney. I had been admitted to the bar
Speaker 1: for just over six years, I believe at the time.
Speaker 1: I'd started my career at the law firm of Deba,
Speaker 1: Boys and Plimpton, and then moved after about four and
Speaker 1: a half years to the DA's office, where I began
Speaker 1: in the Appeals Unit. As an appellate attorney, I defended
Speaker 1: convictions before the Appellate Division First Department, which involved a
Speaker 1: lot of brief writing, but luckily also many arguments in
Speaker 1: front of a panel of judges. So in June of
Speaker 1: twenty ten, I had just requested and received a transfer
Speaker 1: or secundment technically to the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor,
Speaker 1: which is a unique entity that takes adas from all
Speaker 1: five boroughs of New York City and has jurisdiction over
Speaker 1: all felony narcotics crimes within the five boroughs. So it
Speaker 1: allows for a much more rapid and coordinated prosecution of
Speaker 1: high level narcotics cases, some of which involve international cartels.
Speaker 5: Right now, you said that you were you suffered from
Speaker 5: a state of privileged innocence, but you had just taken
Speaker 5: on your first pill case involving a supermodel and forged
Speaker 5: prescription and vicodin. Just tell us where you were in
Speaker 5: terms of what you believed as your state of privileged
Speaker 5: innocence at this time.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that supermodel case is a great example.
Speaker 1: She was a woman who had fallen into a vicodin addiction,
Speaker 1: who had stolen prescriptions from two physicians forged them and
Speaker 1: then submitted them to pharmacies across the city. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: we prosecuted her to the full extent for the theft
Speaker 1: and forgery of those prescriptions, and she was admitted into
Speaker 1: a diversion program. But what I recall is that I
Speaker 1: attributed to her much more agency and bad intent then
Speaker 1: I think would have been medically appropriate to do so.
Speaker 1: And you know, we supported her application for a diversion program.
Speaker 1: But it was, you know, very tempting, I think, to
Speaker 1: think to when an individual who's in diversion relapses, to
Speaker 1: think that some time in prison will correct that the
Speaker 1: situation or send some sort of a message. And I
Speaker 1: wish that I had known then what I know now.
Speaker 1: Not to say that I would do anything perfectly now,
Speaker 1: but I think understanding is an education is really important.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. Let's talk about this faithful event that happens December first,
Speaker 5: twenty ten. You're working late, you go to the ladies
Speaker 5: room and you pass by your burial chief's office. He's
Speaker 5: also they're also part of me working late. What happens?
Speaker 5: What does she say to you?
Speaker 1: Well, it was I remember that it was very quiet
Speaker 1: in the office. Our offices were extremely busy during the day,
Speaker 1: especially because we had undercovers coming through and people were constantly,
Speaker 1: you know, yelling, clear the halls, you see, clear the halls.
Speaker 1: So I was walking down the hall. My boss's office
Speaker 1: light was on. She called me into her office and
Speaker 1: she had one of those tiny little post it notes,
Speaker 1: you know, the absolute smallest format that you can get,
Speaker 1: and she said, we got a call from the NYPD.
Speaker 1: Can you look into it? And I looked at the
Speaker 1: post it. It had a detective's name on it, his
Speaker 1: phone number, but it also had the name of a doctor,
Speaker 1: doctor Lee, and part of an address forty seventh Road
Speaker 1: in Queen's And I would add that part of my
Speaker 1: state of privileged innocence. And I think, you know, the
Speaker 1: one that was to be shattered most completely was I
Speaker 1: did not think of doctors as criminals or as having
Speaker 1: the potential to be criminals with respect to their patients. Obviously,
Speaker 1: we've you know, we've heard one off horror stories about
Speaker 1: sexual abuse or things like that. But it sure to
Speaker 1: me a complaint that involved, as this one did, a
Speaker 1: doctor and his prescriptions didn't make sense, because that is
Speaker 1: what doctors do. They write prescriptions, they authorize treatments. They're
Speaker 1: licensed by the state to do so, and they have
Speaker 1: our trust to do so. So apparently the complainant told
Speaker 1: the NYPD there's a doctor and queen selling prescriptions to
Speaker 1: kids who don't need them. So, you know, the first step, obviously,
Speaker 1: there's so many threshold questions. Is the doctor licensed, is
Speaker 1: the doctor you know, practicing within the area for which
Speaker 1: he's licensed, is the complainant credible? What age kids are
Speaker 1: we talking about, and what kind of prescriptions? And are
Speaker 1: we the right office to be answering these questions and
Speaker 1: looking into this case? And so that's really where we
Speaker 1: began to make sure and that you know, this is
Speaker 1: really the philosophy of the Manhattan Die's Office and Special
Speaker 1: Narcotics to make sure that we didn't just jump in
Speaker 1: with the mindset of criminal prosecution, but to ensure that we,
Speaker 1: you know, it was the right thing to do so,
Speaker 1: and that we had proper jurisdiction to do so.
Speaker 5: Now there's a complainant, and that's how we led to
Speaker 5: this tip. And so this tipster is you've asked for
Speaker 5: availability to be able to speak to this person, but
Speaker 5: in the interim you do a little research. Again, you
Speaker 5: were a little bit naive. So you did some research
Speaker 5: about some things, and what did you find about doctor Lee,
Speaker 5: but also just in general some of the things you found.
Speaker 1: Well, I would I would respectfully push back on being naive,
Speaker 1: only in the sense that I, you know, there's more
Speaker 1: of an imposter syndrome effect going on there, which is
Speaker 1: that even though I was in my mid thirties, with
Speaker 1: you know, degrees from great universities and a good background
Speaker 1: at a great law firm, I never took for granted
Speaker 1: the lay of the land, meaning that you know, I
Speaker 1: wanted to be an appellet lawyer to make sure that
Speaker 1: I understood New York state law as opposed to the
Speaker 1: federal law which I had been practicing. And in this case,
Speaker 1: I wanted to make sure that I understood before I
Speaker 1: drew any conclusions about the legitimacy of the doctor's practice,
Speaker 1: what were the rules that applied to physicians. What were
Speaker 1: these medications that we were talking about where, you know,
Speaker 1: how they were classified or scheduled, and what were the
Speaker 1: risks and benefits of these medications? And the other element
Speaker 1: of it was that, you know, I think I would
Speaker 1: have done that research in any event, because that's just
Speaker 1: how I operate, but we didn't have access to the tipster.
Speaker 1: When I asked the NYPD to put me in touch
Speaker 1: with him, they wouldn't because and this is sort of
Speaker 1: a very interesting question that you ask, because it reveals
Speaker 1: how much you know, we have evolved at the time,
Speaker 1: a complainant in a narcotics case for the NYPD was
Speaker 1: automatically put through this sort of credibility test where they
Speaker 1: had to go out and make controlled buys for narcotics.
Speaker 1: But this tipster was not complaining about, you know, a
Speaker 1: craft dealer or a cartel operation. He was complaining about
Speaker 1: a doctor. He was also recovering from substance use disorder.
Speaker 1: The last thing that he wanted to do was to
Speaker 1: be put back out on the street and have his
Speaker 1: credibility tested by buying drugs. So we had a long
Speaker 1: tussle with the NYPD. They were, you know, acting in
Speaker 1: good faith, but we believe that they were wrong to
Speaker 1: maintain this requirement, and ultimately we had to go around
Speaker 1: them and find the complainant directly, which meant that we
Speaker 1: ended up running the investigation. This was not a case
Speaker 1: where as usual, the NYPD runs the investigation and then
Speaker 1: turns it over to the DA's office. We owned it
Speaker 1: from really from day one.
Speaker 5: What did you find out about doctor Lee in terms
Speaker 5: of his ability, his lawful right to write prescriptions, but
Speaker 5: also in opioid addiction itself, Yes.
Speaker 1: Excellent point. We identified him as having a pain management
Speaker 1: practice in Queen's but also as the part of a
Speaker 1: very well respected anesthesiology practice at a teaching hospital in
Speaker 1: New Jersey, and he had been there for a number
Speaker 1: of years. He was very well credentialed, and he ran
Speaker 1: this uh pain management practice in Queens, so in a
Speaker 1: different state. He was licensed in both states. He was
Speaker 1: the d A registrant, which meant that he was authorized
Speaker 1: to prescribe controlled substances, and interestingly, on his website he
Speaker 1: was also an authorized upernorphine prescriber, of which there were
Speaker 1: not that many at the time. And interestingly, in order
Speaker 1: to become a upernorphine prescriber, you have to go through
Speaker 1: an extra level of training which is called and obtain
Speaker 1: another registration which is called an X registration like the
Speaker 1: letter X, and he had done run. But what I
Speaker 1: thought was peculiar at the time was the notion that
Speaker 1: a physician could both prescribe medications that were susceptible to
Speaker 1: cause addiction and also offer treatment for addiction. And I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I found that to be so incredibly cynical.
Speaker 1: And of course that's where again I had so much
Speaker 1: to learn, because first of all, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: huge gap right now where physicians who prescribe these medications
Speaker 1: don't know how to taper their patients off and don't
Speaker 1: know how to address the problem of a patient with
Speaker 1: legitimate pain becoming dependent or addicted. And so those doctors,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a good thing for doctors to have
Speaker 1: that training to recognize the signs and to be able
Speaker 1: to help their patients find an exit strategy. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, what we're seeing now with the Sackler
Speaker 1: family and Produe Pharma is the extreme cynicism of both
Speaker 1: having launched the opioid epidemic with the sale and false
Speaker 1: marketing of oxy content and trying to benefit from the
Speaker 1: pool of the massive pool of people suffering from open
Speaker 1: use disorder by marketing treatments for that disorder, the so
Speaker 1: called Project Tango from a few years ago. So that's
Speaker 1: what I feared with doctor Lee, and little did I
Speaker 1: know that it was, you know, the plan of a
Speaker 1: large corporate pharmaceutical company.
Speaker 5: Right. You talk about your earliest partner, Joe Hall, and
Speaker 5: he's an investigator and a veteran New York Police Department
Speaker 5: homicide detective, and so you had the ambitious job of
Speaker 5: trying to locate witnesses. You opened the book with one
Speaker 5: of the people that you've found out about, Ali Walton.
Speaker 5: But tell us a little bit about Joe Hall and
Speaker 5: your work and what about the complainant. Do you finally
Speaker 5: get to meet this person, to get to speak to them.
Speaker 1: Yes, about Joe Hall, I will say that it was
Speaker 1: one of the best things that ever happened to me
Speaker 1: in my life, and one of my greatest honors to
Speaker 1: not just meet him, but be able to work with him.
Speaker 1: I had no idea that I was partnered with a legend.
Speaker 1: As it turned out, Joe Hall had participated in a
Speaker 1: number of very sensitive investigations, including investigations involving corrupt police officers.
Speaker 1: So you know, I knew that he had a great reputation.
Speaker 1: But Joe Hall is also someone who's very humble, who's
Speaker 1: extremely hard working, and who you know, will get along
Speaker 1: well with anyone who behaves with respect and works. You know,
Speaker 1: nobody can work as hard as he does, but who
Speaker 1: works hard? So Joe was assigned to the case. When
Speaker 1: we ran into this roadblock with the NYPD and the complainant,
Speaker 1: I don't know how he did it, but next thing
Speaker 1: I know, he asked me if I was ready to
Speaker 1: meet this young man whose name in the book is
Speaker 1: Eddie Velaura, just to protect his privacy, and he brought
Speaker 1: him in and we were able to have a series
Speaker 1: of conversation with him. And that's really where you know,
Speaker 1: that's that's a very good test of an early law
Speaker 1: enforcement slash investigative partnership. Is an interview, but especially a
Speaker 1: joint interview, because you know, the hierarchy was very strange
Speaker 1: in a way. I was the prosecutor, but at the
Speaker 1: same time I was a, you know, much more junior
Speaker 1: player in law enforcement than Joe Hall. He was a
Speaker 1: very experienced investigator, but he also respected my, you know,
Speaker 1: my decision to sort of structure the interview, and he
Speaker 1: knew that he had to sort of let me frame
Speaker 1: the interview with the usual cautions and disclaimers. So we
Speaker 1: very quickly developed this system. Where as we were talking,
Speaker 1: we were both very sensitive to the fact that We
Speaker 1: didn't want this young man to feel cornered by two interviewers,
Speaker 1: and we sort of developed these signals where, you know,
Speaker 1: if Joe wanted to ask a question or I wanted
Speaker 1: to jump back in, we would allow each other to
Speaker 1: do that. And as a result, we had a series
Speaker 1: of very productive conversations with this young man that left
Speaker 1: us with such a good understanding of the type of
Speaker 1: practice that he was complaining about. That this was a
Speaker 1: practice where, you know, prices for pills were put up
Speaker 1: on the wall in paper, where patients waited outside for
Speaker 1: hours starting early in the morning, and were called with
Speaker 1: numbered tickets rather than appointments, where people traded pills and
Speaker 1: prescriptions for cash coming out of the office, and most
Speaker 1: shockingly to this young man and also to us, where
Speaker 1: the doctor did not care about the underlying medical conditions
Speaker 1: of his patients. Our tips are in fact, had an
Speaker 1: immune disorder, and one of the things that offunded him
Speaker 1: the most was that doctor Lee really didn't care about
Speaker 1: the diagnosis or about the specific kind of pain that
Speaker 1: he was experiencing.
Speaker 5: Now, in your investigation, in Joe Hall's investigation, you uncover
Speaker 5: other people that were involved with doctor Lee's business, in
Speaker 5: his practice. But there is a certain period of time
Speaker 5: in this investigation before you are able to get a
Speaker 5: search warrant and tell us about this approximately a year
Speaker 5: of this investigation. How you find people to tell you
Speaker 5: the stories about this doctor Lee's behavior.
Speaker 1: Well, I will tell you that year was one of
Speaker 1: the most difficult that I can recall, because we understood,
Speaker 1: after really just a few weeks or you know, barely
Speaker 1: a few months, that we were dealing with a threat
Speaker 1: to public health and that there were, you know, men
Speaker 1: and women who were receiving prescriptions from this doctor that
Speaker 1: could lead to death. We were progressively beginning to hear
Speaker 1: about overdoses, both fatal and non fatal, and I woke up,
Speaker 1: as I know Joe did, every morning, with the fear
Speaker 1: of hearing about another death. And you know, and that
Speaker 1: tells you a lot, because we went very quickly from
Speaker 1: being concerned of hearing about a death to being concerned
Speaker 1: of hearing of another one, or another one, or another one.
Speaker 1: And it got to the point where, by the time
Speaker 1: doctor Lee was arrested in November twenty eleven, we knew
Speaker 1: of sixteen fatal overdoses within his patient population. Now, not
Speaker 1: all of those had happened, you know, while they were
Speaker 1: immediately under his care. A couple had happened after the
Speaker 1: patients left his care, but they were all within a
Speaker 1: year of having left the clinic, and some of them,
Speaker 1: like Nicholas Rappold and Joseph Haig, had occurred within just
Speaker 1: a few days of their last visit. So this was
Speaker 1: beyond chilling. It was nerve wracking. It was absolutely terrifying.
Speaker 1: We felt such a weight, we were so concerned about
Speaker 1: what might happen under our watch. And then in June
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, you know, and the nightmare became real. We
Speaker 1: learned that there had been a shooting in a pharmacy
Speaker 1: in Medford, Long Island. Four people had been shot in
Speaker 1: cold blood, the pharmacist, his young assistant, and two customers.
Speaker 1: The next morning, when I came into the office, my
Speaker 1: boss Bridget walked in, as well as did our criminal analyst,
Speaker 1: Stephanie Mioto, and the three of us, you know, just
Speaker 1: knew that we wanted to look through our database of
Speaker 1: patient records, prescription records, and check whether any of doctor
Speaker 1: Lee's patients had ever filled a prescription at that pharmacy.
Speaker 1: Nobody said it out loud, but we all were concerned
Speaker 1: that maybe, you know, one of them had been driven
Speaker 1: to crime, and in fact, we identified one name, actually
Speaker 1: two names, one current patient one former patient. They were
Speaker 1: married to each other, and we ended upwarding that information
Speaker 1: to the Suffolk County Police and the next thing we know,
Speaker 1: David Laffer was arrested and pled guilty, and that was
Speaker 1: absolutely devastating because you know, he went into that pharmacy
Speaker 1: to steal hydrocodone pills, which was the medication that doctor
Speaker 1: Lee had been prescribing to him, and he stole eleven
Speaker 1: thousand of them and he took four lives. So once
Speaker 1: that happened, we had to take a very very hard
Speaker 1: look at what we knew because you know, obviously there's
Speaker 1: a high bar to arrest someone to get a search
Speaker 1: warrant to shut down a medical clinic. Again, you're talking
Speaker 1: about a doctor who writes prescriptions, which he's allowed to do.
Speaker 1: So Joe and I and Stephanie that was the extent
Speaker 1: of the team more or less at the time, really
Speaker 1: went into overdrive. We added a couple more investigators to
Speaker 1: the team, and we finally were able to hone in
Speaker 1: on one patient whose name was Michael Cornetta, who had
Speaker 1: died of an overdose the year before, I believe in
Speaker 1: November twenty ten, and at the age of thirty seven,
Speaker 1: and he was His method was to suck on fentanyl patches,
Speaker 1: so he would get fentanyl patches prescribed by doctor Lee,
Speaker 1: and then he would cut them open and he would
Speaker 1: aspire the gel. It led to a number of non
Speaker 1: fatal overdoses, and unfortunately, it led finally to a fatal overdose.
Speaker 1: And the way that we were able to make a
Speaker 1: case without having access to doctor Lee's own patient records
Speaker 1: is that we received We sought out medical records from
Speaker 1: every hospital in the city that we believe Michael Cornetta
Speaker 1: might have gone to, and we finally, in one of
Speaker 1: those records saw a note from a psychiatrist who had
Speaker 1: not only treated him after an overdose, but who called
Speaker 1: doctor Lee. Made a note in her file of that
Speaker 1: call and told doctor Lee that she was calling from
Speaker 1: the emergency room about a patient who had overdosed on fentanyl.
Speaker 1: And that was a clincher because it showed us that
Speaker 1: doctor Lee was put on notice of the risk to
Speaker 1: his patient, and yet what happened he prescribed sentinel to
Speaker 1: him again, and that is how we were able to
Speaker 1: present evidence to the grand jury, and the grand jury
Speaker 1: voted a felony charge, while several felony charges against doctor Lee,
Speaker 1: including reckless endangerment in the third degree I'm sorry in
Speaker 1: the second degree. And so we were able to obtain
Speaker 1: a search warrant and arrest doctor Lee, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: we were able to shut down his clinic. So that
Speaker 1: was in November twenty eleven.
Speaker 5: When you went and executed that search warrant. What did
Speaker 5: you find interesting in terms of the record keeping by
Speaker 5: doctor Lee.
Speaker 1: So I was waiting at home, unable to sleep, waiting
Speaker 1: for Joe to call me and tell me that they
Speaker 1: were in, that they were safe, that everybody was safe.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, the first thing that surprised us
Speaker 1: was the tipster had told us about this sheet pasted
Speaker 1: up somewhere in the office listing doctor Lee's prices. We
Speaker 1: you know, while we found him to be credible, we
Speaker 1: thought that that would be rather extraordinary and surprising, and
Speaker 1: yet it was there. It was written in sort of
Speaker 1: this you know, earth that's medical jargon, but essentially what
Speaker 1: it said was the more pills you want, the more
Speaker 1: you pay. We only accept cash. The more prescriptions you want,
Speaker 1: the more you pay. If you're seeing other doctors, you
Speaker 1: pay more. If you have suicidal ideation, you pay more.
Speaker 1: And I, you know, it's hard to express what Joe
Speaker 1: and I felt when we saw that, because you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: from an investigative standpoint, you really can't wish for anything
Speaker 1: more than having your suspects, you know, spell out the
Speaker 1: nature of their exploitation and crime in writing on paper.
Speaker 2: And at the.
Speaker 1: Same time, it just indicated such a dehumanization of his patients,
Speaker 1: and such a level of indifference and such such a
Speaker 1: powerful greed that it became obviously a crucial piece of evidence,
Speaker 1: but really something that we have we have never seen again,
Speaker 1: that they did not see again in any other cases.
Speaker 5: Now you spend the next amount of time gathering up
Speaker 5: the necessary information and evidence to be able to prosecute
Speaker 5: this case, and you have a very, very experienced trial
Speaker 5: partner that's while it was your partner. Maybe tell us
Speaker 5: about Peter Cogozian.
Speaker 1: I would love to. Peter koog Asian was is a
Speaker 1: lifelong Manhattan assistant to Search attorney. He's held a number
Speaker 1: of high level positions in the office. He is now
Speaker 1: suffering from als. He is hospitalized, his brain is still
Speaker 1: you know, the one of the most powerful machines that
Speaker 1: I've ever encountered. And Peter, Peter and I had a
Speaker 1: bit of friction in the beginning because he was sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, for the first few years of the investigation,
Speaker 1: he was sort of hovering as an occasional expert slash consultant.
Speaker 1: You know, he was something someone that we went to
Speaker 1: if we had a question about you know, ethics or
Speaker 1: strategy or legal research to uh, you know, he's really
Speaker 1: the ultimate devil's advocate. And when we were preparing to
Speaker 1: bring the the second sort of portion of evidence before
Speaker 1: the grand jury to try to obtain a superseding indictment,
Speaker 1: so an indictment that could both capture all of doctor
Speaker 1: Lee's criminal conduct and absorb the previous indictment, my boss,
Speaker 1: Bridget Brennan, assigned Peter to be the senior trial council.
Speaker 1: While I had been practicing law for a number of years,
Speaker 1: I'd done a couple of trials, Peter had done dozens
Speaker 1: of trials. And also key point, I had never prosecuted
Speaker 1: a homicide. And this wasn't just one homicide case. It
Speaker 1: was a double homicide, so I was delighted to have
Speaker 1: Peter come on. However, Peter and I had very very
Speaker 1: different work styles. He is more of the messy genius style.
Speaker 1: I am more of the you know, compulsively meet and
Speaker 1: organized and sort of you know, obsessive about thoroughness. Where
Speaker 1: one of Peter's skills, which is born of his experiences,
Speaker 1: that he knows exactly what he needs to get and
Speaker 1: he doesn't worry about all the things that he might
Speaker 1: be able to get but doesn't really need. So our
Speaker 1: partnership was a little bit fraut. But ultimately what really
Speaker 1: brought us together with Joe in you know, a very
Speaker 1: very tight commitment to this case, was that we had
Speaker 1: never seen anything like it. And you know, it doesn't
Speaker 1: say much for me just because I hadn't you know,
Speaker 1: I'd only been practicing law for.
Speaker 2: A few years.
Speaker 1: But Joe and Peter together had decades of experience working
Speaker 1: on the most horrific crimes of the city, and neither
Speaker 1: of them could get over the cruelty of this case
Speaker 1: and also just the death count. It was staggering.
Speaker 5: Now in your investigation, of course, and you showcase this
Speaker 5: in the book as well. You go back and forth
Speaker 5: to these real exactly of the damage and the and
Speaker 5: the end result of overdose. Tell us about who you
Speaker 5: first meet in terms of in terms of Margaret Rappled
Speaker 5: or Joseph Haig's family, which do you find do you
Speaker 5: locate first and speak to them? And what do they
Speaker 5: have to say to you about Vincent Lee or Bardon Stanley.
Speaker 1: We first identified Nicholas Raphold as an overdose victim, and
Speaker 1: Joe began reaching out to Margaret, but he knew that
Speaker 1: it would take time. I can't remember which one we
Speaker 1: spoke to you first, but it is possible that we
Speaker 1: made I know that we made contact first with Margaret,
Speaker 1: but it's possible that we first spoke to members of
Speaker 1: the Haigue family because Joseph Higgs's father was also a
Speaker 1: former NYPD detective, and so I believe he was, you know,
Speaker 1: more understanding of what the process might involve and more
Speaker 1: willing to speak to you know, not that Margaret was unwilling,
Speaker 1: but I think for Joseph Haig's father, he was able
Speaker 1: to set aside his grief because he felt that he
Speaker 1: had a sense of duty to collaborate with us, whereas
Speaker 1: Margaret really really just wasn't strong enough yet to talk
Speaker 1: about it, and we had to respect that. There finally
Speaker 1: came a moment when she was ready to talk. We
Speaker 1: sent Joe and Buddy Leasala to speak with her a
Speaker 1: couple times at her house, and then when she felt ready,
Speaker 1: I met with her, along with Joe and Buddy in
Speaker 1: the principal's office of the school where she worked, the
Speaker 1: special education school where she worked. And you know that
Speaker 1: that interview is really burnt into my mind for a
Speaker 1: number of reasons. You know, I've been working on I'd
Speaker 1: worked on appeals, I'd worked on narcotics cases. I'd never
Speaker 1: worked on a homicide. I was so nervous at the
Speaker 1: thought of saying the wrong thing, and not just to
Speaker 1: a mother who was grieving, but saying the wrong thing
Speaker 1: such that I would, you know, jeopardize the case in
Speaker 1: some way. Also, at the time, I had two kids,
Speaker 1: two young kids. I was in the middle of a
Speaker 1: divorce for a variety of personal reasons, I had this
Speaker 1: sort of extreme sensitivity to the idea of anybody losing
Speaker 1: their child. And you know, and so she, in my mind,
Speaker 1: she was somebody who had survived the worst. It was
Speaker 1: still very, very fresh for her. Nicholas had been dead,
Speaker 1: I think just over a year if that, and he
Speaker 1: died alone. He died alone in his car overnight. He
Speaker 1: was even issued a parking ticket while he was in
Speaker 1: the car deceased. So there was really a sort of
Speaker 1: cruelty and loneliness to his death that was very hard
Speaker 1: for all of us to accept. And Margaret, you know,
Speaker 1: from our very first meeting, she said, he was no angel.
Speaker 1: She wasn't out there to get anyone. She just wanted
Speaker 1: to know what happened. And she just had a sense
Speaker 1: that it wasn't just an accident, you know, because at
Speaker 1: the time and again we've you know, we've evolved from this,
Speaker 1: but overdoses were simply classified as accidents, and you know,
Speaker 1: they became statistics. Now because we had started with doctor
Speaker 1: Lee and worked our way towards Nicholas's death, we were
Speaker 1: able to look at it from a different angle. But
Speaker 1: it became really a moral imperative for us to never
Speaker 1: again assume that these overdose deaths were just accidents, you know,
Speaker 1: And of course we can't trace back all of them,
Speaker 1: and in some cases, you know, the responsibility isn't the
Speaker 1: same as it is in this case. Where you had
Speaker 1: a licensed physician who was not a drug user himself,
Speaker 1: who was driven by greed. But it's really important, I think,
Speaker 1: to see these deaths as untimely, unnecessary, and worthy of investigation.
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Speaker 5: Now you talked about that. Certainly you regarded this and
Speaker 5: your office as a prosecutable crimes and homicide potential convictions,
Speaker 5: also reckless endangerment. And so there is at least five,
Speaker 5: if I'm not correct, five people that you're dealing with
Speaker 5: in terms of charges. Tell us more about the trial
Speaker 5: which happens in Begins in twenty fourteen, we.
Speaker 1: Actually identified twenty patients out of more than one thousand
Speaker 1: for whom we could bring charges against doctor Lee. And
Speaker 1: the way that we did that was after the search warrant,
Speaker 1: we literally sat down in a conference room with I
Speaker 1: think it was twelve hundred patient files and went through
Speaker 1: them one by one and then cross referenced against prescription records,
Speaker 1: medical records records from other medical offices, interviews with family members,
Speaker 1: interviews with the individual. If we could we really know,
Speaker 1: any time that we saw something that could potentially be
Speaker 1: connected to criminal conduct, we ran it down. So we
Speaker 1: ultimately winnowed it down to twenty patients where we felt
Speaker 1: that we could prove to a jury that doctor Lee
Speaker 1: not only had sold prescriptions not in good faith, but
Speaker 1: in many of those cases had recklessly endangered the life
Speaker 1: of those patients or had conducted committed i'm sorry, insurance
Speaker 1: fraud with respect to those patients. We also discovered, of course,
Speaker 1: that he was exploiting Medicare patients by promising to pay
Speaker 1: them back, forcing them to pay cash upfront, and then
Speaker 1: of course keeping all of the money. So the trial
Speaker 1: was an event that we dreaded, that we feared because
Speaker 1: we knew that it would be massive. You know, I
Speaker 1: realized that I may be saying something that prosecutors don't
Speaker 1: usually say, but you know, I think anybody who says
Speaker 1: that they're not nervous about a trial is probably not
Speaker 1: telling the whole truth, because you know, there is such
Speaker 1: a high pressure, not just because and actually not because
Speaker 1: you want to win, but because you want to get
Speaker 1: it right, and you know you will. We felt a
Speaker 1: tremendous pressure to do everything absolutely to the tea because
Speaker 1: there had never been a case like this before where
Speaker 1: doctor was being tried on charges of homicide for the
Speaker 1: overdose death of a patient. We also, you know, twenty
Speaker 1: patients that just meant it. You know, hundreds of pieces
Speaker 1: of evidence. We had seventy two witnesses lined up, many
Speaker 1: of whom didn't necessarily have a stable home or place
Speaker 1: of employment. So it was sort of a daily We
Speaker 1: would wake up every day and wonder will our witnesses
Speaker 1: be able to come in, how will they come in,
Speaker 1: how will the day unfold? You can't necessarily present evidence
Speaker 1: to the jury in a most linear fashion because you
Speaker 1: have to respect people's schedules. It was it was a
Speaker 1: roller coaster. It was in many ways a tremendous civics
Speaker 1: lesson because we would have physicians and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: other professionals coming in who had very very difficult, demanding
Speaker 1: jobs but who felt so strongly about doing their part
Speaker 1: and showing up. We had former patients of doctor Lee
Speaker 1: who had criminal conviction convictions on their record or who
Speaker 1: had to come in and tell the jury that they
Speaker 1: had lied to doctor Lee, and they were willing to
Speaker 1: come in and stand up. So it was extraordinary. And
Speaker 1: you know, there were also very difficult days where cross
Speaker 1: examination would push witnesses to you know, deep levels of upset.
Speaker 1: One woman collapsed on the stand because she was so
Speaker 1: devastated by cross examination. So it was those were four very,
Speaker 1: very long months, and what got us through was the teamwork,
Speaker 1: not just that we felt at the core level of me,
Speaker 1: Peter Joe, but the team of experts and attorneys from
Speaker 1: our office and other offices, and the witnesses who were
Speaker 1: determined no matter how hard it was to you know,
Speaker 1: and no matter whether we got it conviction because of
Speaker 1: course there's no certainty, but they wanted the truth to
Speaker 1: be known. And that is the beauty of a trial,
Speaker 1: is that whether you win or lose, you know, the
Speaker 1: facts are out there and they are tested.
Speaker 5: You said also that it would end up being likely
Speaker 5: a battle of the expert witnesses, and so you both
Speaker 5: had adequate expert witnesses to testify. The main crux of this, though,
Speaker 5: was that you had to prove these two homicide charges. Again,
Speaker 5: this is never this is unprecedented, So you need to
Speaker 5: prove that. How did you use the stories and what
Speaker 5: were the story of Margaret Rappled and Joseph Haig that
Speaker 5: that demonstrated clearly the homicide charges that you were trying
Speaker 5: to prosecute.
Speaker 1: That's an excellent, excellent question because it really gets to
Speaker 1: the tension in both the case and the trial. Doctor
Speaker 1: Lee made a very smart move in retaining an attorney
Speaker 1: who was actually a medical malpractice specialist, and so they
Speaker 1: shifted the ground of debate at trial away from, you know,
Speaker 1: the burden of proof on the charges and more towards
Speaker 1: what is medicine. What is a doctor's role? Is who
Speaker 1: is responsible when a patient defies the doctor's orders? And
Speaker 1: you know, we had to prove in order to satisfy
Speaker 1: the burden on the charge of an illegal faiale of
Speaker 1: a prescript, we had to prove that the doctor was
Speaker 1: acting other than in good faith. And there was a
Speaker 1: very very little case precedent in New York State. To
Speaker 1: explain what that meant. We had a couple of factors
Speaker 1: from you know, a case that was not binding on
Speaker 1: our court that indicated that, you know, there were certain
Speaker 1: behaviors like seeing large numbers of patients accepting only cash,
Speaker 1: having the sort of cookie cutter prescriptions that were the
Speaker 1: same for every patient. So we relied on those factors.
Speaker 1: But the defense attorney mister Bellair and doctor Lee really
Speaker 1: leaned heavily into the notion of not only a physician's discretion,
Speaker 1: but a physician's reliance on the patient and trust in
Speaker 1: the patient, and their argument was really that doctor Lee
Speaker 1: had been betrayed by his patients. Now, you know, we
Speaker 1: did two things to counter that. First, we built a
Speaker 1: very very strong case about the money. We followed the money,
Speaker 1: and we proved the jury that all of the decisions
Speaker 1: that were so called medical decisions for doctor Lee were
Speaker 1: actually about money. For instance, doctor Lee claimed that he
Speaker 1: was very sensitive to the fact that his patients should
Speaker 1: not see other doctors or obtain controlled substances from other doctors.
Speaker 1: But we prove to the jury, using doctor Lee's own
Speaker 1: medical records, that he was actually monetizing that fact. So
Speaker 1: you asked earlier about what made these records unusual, if anything,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you have ever had a doctor
Speaker 1: who noted in the margins of your medical records the
Speaker 1: amount of money that you were paying him or her
Speaker 1: on that visit, an amount of money in cash and
Speaker 1: maybe with an right or you know, extra fifty dollars
Speaker 1: for seeing another doctor, extra fifty dollars for coming too early.
Speaker 1: That's what we found in the records, and that's what
Speaker 1: we were able to confront doctor Lee with at trial.
Speaker 1: So you know that really countered his sort of medical defense.
Speaker 1: Now on the recklessness I'm sorry, I'm the reckless homicide,
Speaker 1: which is manslaughter. The standard there is that you have
Speaker 1: to be aware of a substantial risk and then consciously
Speaker 1: disregard that risk. Now before we even get to proving it,
Speaker 1: there was the debate about whether that was the appropriate charge,
Speaker 1: because there's another homicide charge that we considered, which is
Speaker 1: criminally negligent homicide. The difficulty is that with criminally negligent homicide,
Speaker 1: you know, it's doctor Lee had too much knowledge. He
Speaker 1: was a not just a trained and licensed physician, but
Speaker 1: he was a very good physician. He was also an anesthesiologist.
Speaker 1: So this is a man who walked that line between
Speaker 1: life and death, you know, every day at work, who
Speaker 1: knew how to put patients in a state of unconsciousness
Speaker 1: and bring them back, who also had this ex registration
Speaker 1: which meant that he was also aware of opioid use disorder.
Speaker 1: So criminally negligent homicide just didn't fit the facts right,
Speaker 1: whereas reckless man's laughter for doctor Lee really captured his
Speaker 1: conduct and what In response specifically to your question about
Speaker 1: Joseph Hagen, Nicholas Raphold the clincher was that he had
Speaker 1: been put on notice not just with them, but through
Speaker 1: his treatment of other patients that there was a substantial
Speaker 1: risk that they weren't just going to take more than prescribed,
Speaker 1: but that they might die. So the way that we
Speaker 1: proved that was that we were able to marshal the
Speaker 1: medical records from all twenty of these patients and build
Speaker 1: a timeline for the jury where they saw that for
Speaker 1: up to three years before doctor Lee even met Nickle
Speaker 1: wrap Hold, he knew that he had patients who were
Speaker 1: taking more than prescribed, who were trading the pills for
Speaker 1: other drugs, who were overdosing fatally and non fatally. That
Speaker 1: those patients tended to be young, they tended to be male,
Speaker 1: they tended to have, you know, no diagnostic records, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So by the time Nicholas Raphold walked into
Speaker 1: his office, doctor Lee should have known, and in fact
Speaker 1: he did know. So the other you know, one of
Speaker 1: the key pieces of evidence was a handwritten log or
Speaker 1: a set of handwritten logs that doctor Lee's staff kept
Speaker 1: for every day of his practice, where you could see
Speaker 1: not just how many patients he saw per day, but
Speaker 1: what he charged them, and there I remember, we confronted
Speaker 1: him with one of those logs he had seen sixty
Speaker 1: one patients in a day, which was you know, rather
Speaker 1: low for him. He would go up to one hundred.
Speaker 1: One of the first patients he saw was a patient
Speaker 1: whose father had written to him begging him to stop
Speaker 1: prescribing a couple of years earlier.
Speaker 2: She was there.
Speaker 1: This was in twenty ten. Then there was you know,
Speaker 1: another patient who had later died of an overdose. There
Speaker 1: was Joseph Haig, and then there was Nicholas Raphold, and
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly, Nicholas Rappold was number sixty one
Speaker 1: out of sixty one patient. So you have this circumstantial
Speaker 1: evidence that, you know, how much attention would he have
Speaker 1: paid to this twenty one year old man after having
Speaker 1: seeing sixty other patients in the course of just a regular,
Speaker 1: you know, a regular length workday and the patients you know,
Speaker 1: also worked. Taking the stand and saying these visits lasted
Speaker 1: only as long as it took for him to write
Speaker 1: the prescription and take the money. So it really allowed
Speaker 1: the jury to understand what reckless is. Recklessness meant that
Speaker 1: was recklessness. Recklessness was you know, knowing the risk and
Speaker 1: disregarding it. Recklessness was seeing sixty one patients in a
Speaker 1: day and then just writing a prescription to number sixty
Speaker 1: one and sending him off even though you know, you
Speaker 1: knew that he might well take more or overdose. And
Speaker 1: I have to say, you know, even talking about it,
Speaker 1: it was devastating to work on and it was very
Speaker 1: hard for the jury as well.
Speaker 5: What's interesting is you also outlined the five rules that
Speaker 5: Peter Coogesian was very experienced attorney thirty five years. He
Speaker 5: had five rules for cross examination and doctor Lee. It's
Speaker 5: very interesting. He took the stand, but he'd have to
Speaker 5: answer some of these questions. I think it would be
Speaker 5: advised where it normally wouldn't be in criminal cases. So
Speaker 5: he started this cross examining with a definite strategy from
Speaker 5: all his years of experience. And you outline those five
Speaker 5: rules that he uses and used in this case to
Speaker 5: be able to get doctor Lee to admit to certain lives.
Speaker 5: As you write, rules like rule four breakdown conclusions, have
Speaker 5: the defendant deny established evidence in the case. Isolate those
Speaker 5: parts of the defense story that are implausible and untruthful.
Speaker 5: So he had an incredible strategy to be able to
Speaker 5: over the course of this this is a long testimony.
Speaker 5: He was on the stand four days, wasn't he?
Speaker 1: He really was. It was extremely long. So Peter, you know,
Speaker 1: over the course of his long career, had met many
Speaker 1: attorneys and he in fact had trained many eighty's and
Speaker 1: including me. Tom Denachus was as one of the ada's
Speaker 1: who'd had the greatest influence over Peter, and Peter tended
Speaker 1: to quote him very very frequently, and there were in
Speaker 1: fact five rules. Rule number one for cross examination was
Speaker 1: actually also one that I would say was Peter's rule
Speaker 1: number one in life, and that is always lead. So
Speaker 1: always lead means that you're always asking leading questions on
Speaker 1: cross examination. You're not asking open ended questions. And that's
Speaker 1: something that Peter did very very strictly and skillfully for
Speaker 1: the first several hours of the cross examination and in
Speaker 1: fact most of it, which was he would build questions
Speaker 1: that moved along in very small increments and obtain doctor
Speaker 1: Lee's confirmation of those points to you know, to the
Speaker 1: point where you you could see the conclusion coming and
Speaker 1: there was no escaping it. For instance, you know, he
Speaker 1: would ask doctor about, you know, the payments that he
Speaker 1: received and the fact that he charged. You know, it
Speaker 1: was one hundred and fifty dollars as a baseline for
Speaker 1: a visit, and then there were extra fifty dollars for
Speaker 1: this seeing extra you know, seeing other physicians wanting more pills,
Speaker 1: and you know, on such and such days you saw
Speaker 1: X number of people, so that makes sense. And then
Speaker 1: you made a you know, your wife made a bank
Speaker 1: deposit of seven thousand dollars or so in cash. And
Speaker 1: so doctor Lee couldn't deny any one of those individual facts,
Speaker 1: but the conclusion was so much larger than just the
Speaker 1: some of those responses. And you know, Peter really did
Speaker 1: a He was obsessive in preparing the cross examination. He
Speaker 1: was obviously in a state of extreme stress. He lost
Speaker 1: i would say, twenty to thirty pounds during the trial,
Speaker 1: which only later we learned was really the pre cursor
Speaker 1: to his illness. We thought that it was just the
Speaker 1: stress of trial, but it wasn't. And you know, he
Speaker 1: was in he was at the height of his powers,
Speaker 1: his you know, advocacy powers. He really poured absolutely everything
Speaker 1: that he had into preparing this cross examination. In fact,
Speaker 1: his office which was always sort of a you know,
Speaker 1: unnavigable cavern of piles of papers and books about magic
Speaker 1: and old shoes. Was absolutely I mean, you couldn't even
Speaker 1: get into it, you know. And he came for the
Speaker 1: cross examination with piles and piles of paper, and so
Speaker 1: he had this sort of Colombo like style. But just
Speaker 1: like Colombo, he knew exactly where he was going and
Speaker 1: there was no escape. And I'm sorry I realized I
Speaker 1: may have digressed a little bit from your question, but
Speaker 1: it's obviously very important to me, you know, especially knowing
Speaker 1: Peter's condition now, to really on or his work and
Speaker 1: talk about it and describe, you know, how much it
Speaker 1: takes to prepare for a case like this and also
Speaker 1: execute it.
Speaker 5: You also talk and I've found it interesting for an
Speaker 5: attorney to say the kinds of things you were said,
Speaker 5: but it was still measured but still critical. You talked
Speaker 5: about yourself, and you talked about Peter, and you also
Speaker 5: talked about Blair, the defense attorney. You said that you
Speaker 5: described it as you both all of you or were
Speaker 5: in the legal universe. However, there was a different spirit
Speaker 5: to Peter and yourself as opposed to Blair. Can you
Speaker 5: explain that?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: So in that courtroom, think of it as you know,
Speaker 1: there's a play within a play within a play, there's
Speaker 1: a you know, you are in a court of law.
Speaker 1: It is a sacred space with rules, with its own
Speaker 1: you know, coded codes and language, so a way that
Speaker 1: you're supposed to behave areas where certain people can enter
Speaker 1: and others not. So you you know, already as an attorney,
Speaker 1: you become sort of privy to that landscape and the
Speaker 1: significance of each area within the courtroom. That being said,
Speaker 1: as a more junior attorney, you're less familiar with it.
Speaker 1: You're more reliant on the court officers or the court
Speaker 1: staff or your own you know, your own team to
Speaker 1: help orient you. And that's not always something that happens
Speaker 1: very smoothly. Sometimes I think we let young attorneys stumble
Speaker 1: around a bit more as almost part of a you know,
Speaker 1: unconscious sort of hazing ritual. So as between Peter and
Speaker 1: mister Bellair, I was, even though I'd been practicing law
Speaker 1: for you know, seven years or so, at the time,
Speaker 1: I was the absolute rookie. I'm also I'm also you know,
Speaker 1: on the small side. I don't think I have the
Speaker 1: deepest or more most authoritative voice. And you know, there
Speaker 1: there were all sorts of perceptions and hierarchies at play
Speaker 1: that made it possible for Peter to, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: be treated with the respect that he deserved. Because he
Speaker 1: had been an outstanding assistant district attorney and member of
Speaker 1: the Bar Association for many years. He was well known
Speaker 1: in the legal community. But for me to become a
Speaker 1: bit I think at times, a bit of a scapegoat,
Speaker 1: and you know, and also legitimately there I was, you know,
Speaker 1: we're all still learning all the time. I was definitely
Speaker 1: learning a lot, and I had a sense of wanting
Speaker 1: to do everything really to a point of absolute completion
Speaker 1: and clarity that was maybe not necessary or maybe you know,
Speaker 1: more more work than the court needed to do at
Speaker 1: the time. So I think between the you know, the
Speaker 1: age dynamics, the gender dynamics, the differences and experience levels there,
Speaker 1: you know, there there were tensions often and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it's clear that sometimes Peter, if Peter could bring up
Speaker 1: a point, it would have more traction than if I
Speaker 1: brought it up. But Peter really taught me how to
Speaker 1: stand my ground. He was very very respectful of our
Speaker 1: We had a very clear agreement about who would do what,
Speaker 1: and we stuck to it. And interestingly, you know, when
Speaker 1: I say a play within a play, I say that
Speaker 1: because you have the jury watching and they are outsiders,
Speaker 1: and then you have the members of the audience, and
Speaker 1: then you have possibly the defendant's family, right or the
Speaker 1: victims' families. So the jury noticed some of these dynamics,
Speaker 1: and in fact, at the end of the trial, members
Speaker 1: of the jury told Joe Hall that they had noticed
Speaker 1: some of the dynamics between the attorneys, and members of
Speaker 1: the judges staff told me that they had felt badly
Speaker 1: for me during the trial, which I thought was, you know,
Speaker 1: sweet to say, but also bittersweet, because you know, I
Speaker 1: think I realize that it's bizarre for a lawyer to
Speaker 1: say this, as you mentioned, but you know, you sometimes
Speaker 1: really feel like the crazy person in the room, and
Speaker 1: as it turns out, you know, it's just that things
Speaker 1: may not be done that way. But it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that you're wrong, and it certainly doesn't mean that you're
Speaker 1: out of line.
Speaker 5: Right. You also talk about this potential of order of
Speaker 5: dismissal that Blair moves for at this end of this
Speaker 5: very very long trial. Tell us about the verdicts, tell
Speaker 5: us about the trepidation before the verdicts and the deliberation
Speaker 5: tell us about this.
Speaker 1: That trepidation, I would say, began the day we arranged
Speaker 1: doctor Lee on the first indictment November twenty eleven, and
Speaker 1: only built from then on because we knew that this
Speaker 1: was a very, very unusual case. And you know, I
Speaker 1: think part of our obsessional work for me and Peter
Speaker 1: and Joe and Stephanie was that we we wanted to
Speaker 1: make sure that we were double checking, triple checking everything,
Speaker 1: that we weren't missing something or misunderstanding or misrepresenting because
Speaker 1: of this possibility that at any moment the rug might
Speaker 1: get pulled from under our So, you know, when the
Speaker 1: judge found at the close of our case that there
Speaker 1: was you know, there were sufficient sufficient reason to go forward,
Speaker 1: that was a That was a tremendous relief, But of
Speaker 1: course it only meant that you were moving on to
Speaker 1: another even more uncertain phase of the trial, which was
Speaker 1: first would there be a defense and second what would
Speaker 1: that defense consist of? We had no idea, And in fact,
Speaker 1: mister Bellair, who was a very you know, zealous advocate,
Speaker 1: as you know, he was his job to do, refused
Speaker 1: to disclose the name of his medical expert until the
Speaker 1: moment that person took the stand. Under criminal procedure law,
Speaker 1: he should have turned over the name of the expert
Speaker 1: with his discovery when he turned over the experts report.
Speaker 1: He refused to do so and was in fact held
Speaker 1: in contempt by the judge. So, you know, we didn't know,
Speaker 1: We didn't know what would happen. Ultimately, mister Bellair did
Speaker 1: decide to present a defense, and he called doctor Lee
Speaker 1: to the stand and then, my goodness, I you know
Speaker 1: the tension in the room. You could have you know,
Speaker 1: you could have you could have grabbed it and you know,
Speaker 1: twisted it. It was. We didn't know what he would say,
Speaker 1: and every every sentence he uttered was a surprise. We
Speaker 1: had been waiting years to understand. Why how how could
Speaker 1: he have seen, you know, Tracy Howard, as her name
Speaker 1: is in the book, come in. How could he have
Speaker 1: heard her tell him about her father's suicide, heard her
Speaker 1: tell him that she wanted to commit suicide with his pills,
Speaker 1: and then let her walk out. And so to hear
Speaker 1: him address each of those patients, you know, we hung
Speaker 1: on every word and it was unfortunately, never there was
Speaker 1: never a moment of relief or understanding because until the
Speaker 1: very end, doctor Lee denied responsibility, claimed that he had
Speaker 1: been acting in good faith, that he had been betrayed
Speaker 1: by his patients. And I'm not sure if you're aware,
Speaker 1: but we learned just a few weeks ago that he
Speaker 1: died in April in prison of COVID, which you know,
Speaker 1: was very upsetting because he was not sentenced to death.
Speaker 1: Justice was not served by his you know, lonely and
Speaker 1: isolated and what must have been a very frightening death.
Speaker 1: And you know, we will never we will never know
Speaker 1: the answers to many questions. And I, Margaret Rapholed and
Speaker 1: others from the case, and I and Peter all agreed
Speaker 1: that nobody deserves to die like that.
Speaker 5: Tell us about the verdicts, and tell us about the sentencing.
Speaker 1: So the grand jury indicted doctor Lee on two hundred
Speaker 1: eighteen counts, of which two hundred eleven were taken to trial. Now,
Speaker 1: those counts in the two manslaughter counts, so for Joseph Hagen,
Speaker 1: Nicholas Rappols, three counts of reckless endangerment in the second
Speaker 1: degree for Michael Cornetta and two other patients, And it
Speaker 1: also included three counts of reckless endangerment in the first degree. Now,
Speaker 1: everybody talks about the homicide counts and they are absolutely significant,
Speaker 1: but I have to say that for me, the three
Speaker 1: counts of reckless endangerment in the first degree were extremely
Speaker 1: significant because the standard there is depraved indifference to human life.
Speaker 1: Anybody who is familiar with New York State law, or
Speaker 1: who has watched a few seminal episodes of law and
Speaker 1: Order will know that depraved in difference is extremely hard
Speaker 1: to prove. And the jury found sufficient evidence of depraved
Speaker 1: indifference to human life in the case that we presented,
Speaker 1: and that was a source of tremendous you know, validation,
Speaker 1: I think for the families, uh, you know, to know
Speaker 1: that their loved one had in fact deserve to be
Speaker 1: treated and viewed as a human being, that their suffering
Speaker 1: had called for a different treatment. So those three counts
Speaker 1: were very significant, and they were upheld on appeal, which
Speaker 1: was I think the you know, the biggest surprise of
Speaker 1: all when the case went to the Court of appeals
Speaker 1: and then there were for all of the for each
Speaker 1: of the patients, the twenty patients, there were a series
Speaker 1: of charges of criminal sale for prescription of a I'm
Speaker 1: sorry criminal sale or prescription for controlled substance. So we
Speaker 1: actually had presented evidence to the grand jury for every
Speaker 1: prescription that we believed had been made not in good faith,
Speaker 1: in exchange for cash, so not for a medical reason.
Speaker 1: We asked the jury to indicte doctor Lee on that
Speaker 1: charge and they did. And so you had this think
Speaker 1: of it as sort of the foundation of the case,
Speaker 1: where all of these charges and I believe there were
Speaker 1: more than one hundred of them that you know, that
Speaker 1: really formed the structure of the case. And then you
Speaker 1: had sort of towers where on one side you would
Speaker 1: build from those too reckless endangerment, another side you would
Speaker 1: build homicide, and then surrounding it we had the financial crimes,
Speaker 1: which included a scheme to defraud, so that captured all
Speaker 1: of the insurance fraud conduct and the finance exploitation of
Speaker 1: the Medicare patients. And it also included or was associated
Speaker 1: with doctor Lee's falsification of records. So he was also
Speaker 1: under investigation by the Professional Oversight Agency in New York,
Speaker 1: but he had been submitting altered records to them, and
Speaker 1: so we used that evidence to undermine his credibility as well,
Speaker 1: and to show that you know, his denials of the
Speaker 1: insurance fraud, you know that the jury should not credit those,
Speaker 1: So those were sort of tied together in our minds.
Speaker 1: All in all, he was convicted on one hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety eight out of two hundred eleven counts.
Speaker 5: Yes, it's also amazing that his own record keeping and
Speaker 5: his own arrogant behavior believing he would that, ignoring warnings
Speaker 5: from professionals, that he was really instrumental, especially with his
Speaker 5: own testimony in his own conviction. Absolutely, absolutely, very satisfying.
Speaker 5: In the end. Here, when you decided to write this book,
Speaker 5: you talked about your partner in this, Peter Cogesian, and
Speaker 5: him being in the hospital and this manuscript. Can you
Speaker 5: just share that with us?
Speaker 1: Yes, So Peter was diagnosed with ALS. With ALS a
Speaker 1: few years after the trial, progressively lost his ability to speak,
Speaker 1: to move, even to breathe independently, and he was hospitalized
Speaker 1: in Manhattan. I think the probably about two years ago.
Speaker 1: And so I was able then, and you know, at
Speaker 1: the time, I thought that this was something that I
Speaker 1: would be able to do for a much longer time
Speaker 1: to come. Who knew about COVID, of course, So when
Speaker 1: the manuscript was almost ready, I would go to the
Speaker 1: hospital and stay you know, anywhere from one to four
Speaker 1: hours and read the book to him. And it was,
Speaker 1: you know, it was terrifying in a way because I
Speaker 1: knew that I had to talk about I had the
Speaker 1: hope of writing a book that sort of lifted the
Speaker 1: curtain on what it's really like, how messy life really is.
Speaker 1: How do you build a team when none of you
Speaker 1: are perfect, and when you know, especially me, I'm I
Speaker 1: didn't really know how to work within a team. So
Speaker 1: how do you do all those things? So I wanted
Speaker 1: to tell the truth. And at the same time, my
Speaker 1: relationship with Peter had really evolved at the point where
Speaker 1: not only you know, had my respect for him grown tremendously,
Speaker 1: but we were friends. We were he you know, he
Speaker 1: was my mentor, he was my inspiration in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways. I still teased him about how messy he was,
Speaker 1: and there were things, you know, where we still wrangled
Speaker 1: each other, but we were friends, and the last thing
Speaker 1: I wanted to do was hurt my friend, especially because
Speaker 1: he was not in a position to respond with his
Speaker 1: quick wit the way that he would have before. So
Speaker 1: there was this, you know, this strange series of events
Speaker 1: where every time I went in knowing that I had
Speaker 1: pages to read that were about him, and I would
Speaker 1: be so nervous, and then you know, I would show
Speaker 1: up and one day his best friend was already there
Speaker 1: and asked me to read in front of him. The
Speaker 1: other day was his priest, you know, or his son.
Speaker 1: One day when I was about to read an especially
Speaker 1: difficult passage, and I told myself, you know, if I
Speaker 1: can't put in a book what I would not be
Speaker 1: willing to read too, obviously to Peter, but also to
Speaker 1: his priest. And at the same time, I wanted to
Speaker 1: tell the truth so that you know, I learned a
Speaker 1: lot about writing in the sense that I learned how
Speaker 1: to you know, how to edit so that you you know,
Speaker 1: you get to the point. And obviously I had tremendous
Speaker 1: help from my editor, Jessica DeLong and Juliet Heifitz, who
Speaker 1: who reread the book and helped me to find really
Speaker 1: the true words to sort of try to capture that,
Speaker 1: you know, that ambivalence that we have, and that the
Speaker 1: fact that a friendship can be many, many different things,
Speaker 1: and that each of us is you know, operates and
Speaker 1: in many ways that don't always make sense. Really trying
Speaker 1: to communicate the love and the affection and the respect
Speaker 1: that I had for every member of the team. So
Speaker 1: it was an unforgettable experience. Also because being in a
Speaker 1: room with Peter, who at the time was already paralyzed,
Speaker 1: unable to speak or breathe on his own, someone whom
Speaker 1: I had seen in court, you know, marshaling very complex evidence,
Speaker 1: managing very very difficult logistics, you know, responding on his
Speaker 1: feet at the drop of a hat to the most
Speaker 1: you know, complicated legal arguments. And to be in a
Speaker 1: room where really the only thing we could do is
Speaker 1: just sit there and keep each other company and you know,
Speaker 1: make him feel the presence of our friendship and that
Speaker 1: you know, I it's an working with him on the
Speaker 1: trial and subsequently being able to spend that time with
Speaker 1: him has had a tremendous impact on me.
Speaker 5: Yes, I want to congratulate you for you and Peter
Speaker 5: and your teams rereadible prosecution of doctor Lee. There's so
Speaker 5: much more to this book that we won't have time
Speaker 5: to go into, and you do an incredible job of
Speaker 5: showing the real personal impact that a doctor like this
Speaker 5: and the big Pharma has created in not only the US,
Speaker 5: but other countries as well. I want to thank you
Speaker 5: very much for coming on and talking about bad Medicine
Speaker 5: Catching New York's Deadliest Pill Pusher. Thank you so much,
Speaker 5: Charlotte Bismus. Is there a Facebook page or website that
Speaker 5: we might take a look at, and when does this
Speaker 5: book officially going to be released?
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for having me Dan first of all,
Speaker 1: and I apologize for the background noise of puppy and toddler.
Speaker 1: The book comes out on January nineteenth, and I would
Speaker 1: love your listeners to know that I'm donating a portion
Speaker 1: of my proceeds to set up which is a coalition
Speaker 1: of groups from around the country founded by parents who've
Speaker 1: lost their children to overdoses, and I'm working with them
Speaker 1: now and I hope to make donations as a result
Speaker 1: of the book. So I thank everybody for their support.
Speaker 1: And the book should be on sale online and in
Speaker 1: every you know, hopefully in your local bookstore that really
Speaker 1: needs our support, right.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, Charlotte Bismuth. Bad Medicine Catching New
Speaker 5: York's Deadliest Pill Pusher. Thank you, good night, Thank you,