Water Tower in Chelsea Manifests a Secret Life
by Alex Vadukil
The New York Times
May 22, 2013

A trapdoor in the water tower opened when the guests approached. Thumping live music, candlelight, chatter and the sound of clinking glasses emerged, as well as a helping hand.

Inside was a round wooden space no bigger than a freight elevator, filled with about a dozen people sipping whiskey cocktails. Couples sat at five petite tables built into the cedar paneling. A young woman mixed drinks behind a bar. Above people’s heads, a two-man band — accordion and upright bass — serenaded from a platform.

But amid the revelry, the staff communicated using headsets, checking that the operation remained unnoticed outside. In the event that the police did arrive, several exit routes were planned. This was life inside the Night Heron, a decidedly illegal nightclub run by a group of adventure-minded artists in a water tower atop a vacant building in Chelsea for eight weekends in March, April and May.

The Night Heron was as exclusive as it was lawless. The only way to get in was to be handed a pocket watch by a prior guest (who had been instructed to offer minimal explanation), report to a street corner at a certain time, and call a number pasted inside the watch. Mysterious helpers led guests through one decrepit building into another and up 12 flights of stairs to the roof. The watches were taken at the door, but guests were given the chance to buy watches at the end of the night if they wanted to continue the chain of invitation.

The Heron’s architect was N. D. Austin, a 31-year-old artist known for what he calls “trespass theater.” “It’s about making the invisible visible,” he said of his philosophy.

Mr. Austin located a suitable water tower by scouring Buildings Department records for violations with egregious scaffold fines. That can indicate a neglectful landlord, he said, which meant it might be a vacant building ripe for adopting as one’s own.

One Saturday night last month, 12 guests squeezed through the trap door into the space. “The great thing about the upright bass is how it got up here,” said Dirby Luongo, one of Mr. Austin’s collaborators who played the doorman. “It’s like a ship in a bottle.”

At one table, a first date was in progress. Chelsea Cammarota, 35, explained that she and her date did not know each other well. “He sent me a photo of a clock,” she recounted. “I said, ‘I’ve seen a lot of “Law and Order.” ’ ” Nevertheless, her date, Steve Showalter, told her, “We’re going to do something fun.” But he was clueless, too, running on blind faith in the friend who had given him the watch.

Caroline and Michael Ventura, a married couple, arrived for the next seating. There were three per night, each lasting an hour and a half. Mr. Ventura said a friend had arrived at his office unannounced to give him the watch. “He placed it onto my desk, looked at me and said, ‘I will answer no questions.’ ” On the way over, Mr. Ventura and his wife wondered where the night might lead: Some place underground? Some sort of sex club?

The night’s final seating ended near 3 a.m., culminating with a loud drinking ballad from the band, the sardine-packed audience stomping and yelling along. Tipsy guests exited back through the hole like paratroopers to greet a quiet, blinking skyline.

By Charles Veitch

It’s probably something a pilot should ask long before getting into the cockpit. But one professional skywriter traced the cheeky message above downtown Los Angeles on March 23 as part of an elaborate prank by comedian Kurt Braunohler.

Photo by Robyn Von Swank

If you blinked, you missed it — Braunohler wrote in a Tumblr post that the message lasted only about 20 minutes before disappearing. But the prank got a second wind on Monday when a photo of the message, taken by Robyn Von Swank, was uploaded to Reddit’s image hosting site Imgur.

At the time of this writing, the photo had been up-voted to the front page of Reddit and received over 1 million views (the daytime population of downtown LA is estimated to be about 207,440).

The comedian said he was “psyched” that his ephemeral joke now has a second life on Reddit but admitted Monday was the first time he had ever truly used the site.

“I learned a lot about Reddit today,” said Braunohler in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. “And I don’t know the guy who put it up but I got to thank him.”

“It’s such a stupid thing, and I love stupid,” Braunohler said. “I’m just so excited that the internet loves stupid too!”

Braunohler launched a Kickstarter campaign in January to raise money for the “incredibly idiotic stunt.” Fans of the concept donated a total of $6,820, and Braunohler asked backers to vote on which message to skywrite above Los Angeles.

“How do I land” won, and Braunohler hosted a party at the Perch rooftop bar in downtown LA for supporters to take in the airborne antic. One of the founders of Kickstarter, who happened to be in LA at the same time, extended his trip by one day to attend the event, Braunohler said.

Despite his success on the crowdfunding site, Braunohler said the skywriting stunt was his first and probably last Kickstarter venture.

“I don’t want to be the Kickstarter comedian,” he said. Still, he admits “it’s very tempting to do a bunch of ideas this way.”

Currently Braunohler is attempting a nationwide stunt involving billboards. But since it’s taking a lot longer than he thought it would, he’s keeping himself and Los Angeles amused with more public pranks on a smaller scale. For those in the Silver Lake area, be on the lookout Friday for a joke involving a sassy stop sign.

Braunohler was host of the 2012 IFC show “Bunk” and performs a weekly variety show with Kristen Schaal called “Hot Tub with Kurt and Kristen.” His first comedy album debuts in July.

Some of the biggest names in marketing, including Ford Motor, General Motors, Hyundai Motor, Reebok and PepsiCo, have been forced recently to apologize to consumers who mounted loud public outcries against ads that hinged on subjects like race, rape and suicide.

PepsiCo found itself meeting this week with the Rev. Al Sharpton and the family of Emmet Till — the teenager whose death in Mississippi in 1955 helped energize the civil rights movement — to try to quell multiple controversies involving its Mountain Dew brand.

“It’s like the Wild West,” said Paul Malmstrom, a founding partner of the New York office of the Mother ad agency.

Advertising experts offer a long list of reasons for the increasing frequency of such incidents, but the primary reason they keep happening, they say, is the growing anxiety on Madison Avenue to create ads that will be noticed and break through the clutter.

“It’s the pressure to create ‘viral’ advertising, the urge to get more views online, that leads people to push the envelope,” said Tor Myhren, president and chief creative officer at Grey New York. He added that another contributing factor was the focus on younger consumers. “There’s so much ‘How do we speak to millennials?’ in meetings,” he said.

The toll that those controversies are taking on the ad business is in some instances more than just embarrassment. Two senior creative executives at JWT India, including a managing partner, lost their jobs after the company produced fake ads for the Ford Figo hatchback that showed women bound and gagged in the trunk as celebrities like Paris Hilton and Silvio Berlusconi sat behind the wheel.

JWT apologized, as did Ford, although there was nothing to suggest that the carmaker had either approved or known about the fake ads.

The celebrities in the Ford India ads appeared without consent, but even instances where stars agree to work with a brand can be fraught with risk.

Those celebrities, particularly rappers and actors with images as rebellious rule-breakers and risk-takers, often appeal to marketers’ youthful target audiences and have huge followings on social media. That is what drew Mountain Dew to Lil Wayne, the rapper who signed a multimillion-dollar celebrity endorsement deal with the soft-drink brand last year. The brand severed ties with the artist last week, however, after the Till family took issue with an ad that referred to Till with vulgar lyrics sung by Lil Wayne on a remix of “Karate Chop,” by the rapper Future.

As part of its efforts, the family also brought attention to an offensive Mountain Dew video ad created by the hip-hop producer and rap artist known as Tyler, the Creator. The spot featured a battered white waitress trying to identify her assailant from a lineup that included African-American men and a goat. Mountain Dew dropped the ad on May 1.

On Wednesday at the PepsiCo offices in White Plains, company executives, including Frank Cooper, the chief marketing officer for global consumer engagement for Pepsi, and Till family members gathered for a private meeting with Mr. Sharpton.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Sharpton described the meeting as good and its tone as respectful. He said, “The family explained the pain that they have gone through since the killing” and Pepsi executives “repeated their apology and said they would have nothing to do with Wayne and his tour.”

In a statement, the Till family said: “We look forward to ongoing and meaningful collaborations which bridge the music community, corporations, grass-roots organizations and youth.” A representative from PepsiCo agreed that the meeting had been amicable but declined to provide details.

David Schwab, senior vice president at Octagon First Call, a division of Octagon, the sports and entertainment marketing agency, said that brands used stars “to build awareness and create differentiation.”

“But a celebrity who can be a difference maker can come with a high risk,” Mr. Schwab warned, meaning “there is more pressure on brands to be careful.”

In April, Reebok dropped the rapper Rick Ross after the brand came under pressure for a lyric he performed in the Rocko song “U.O.E.N.O.” that referred to drugging a woman and having sex with her without her knowledge.

Hyundai UK dropped an ad last month that featured a man trying to commit suicide by running his car in a garage. The ad, meant for the European market, depicted how the effort failed because the car was a zero-emission Hyundai. The revelation was meant as a punch line, but consumers were horrified at what they deemed an attempt to make light of suicide.

General Motors scuttled an ad that promoted its Chevrolet Trax, a small sport utility vehicle that is sold in countries including Canada. The ad, set in the 1930s, featured a modern remix of a song from that era that included references to Chinese people using phrases like “ching ching, chop suey.”

Bob Garfield, the longtime advertising critic who is an author of the book “Can’t Buy Me Like,” said the situation was aggravated by the Internet culture on which millennials dote, which he described as “no holds barred,” where “a sense of permissiveness reigns.” It ought to come as no surprise, he added, that “incredible lapses of judgment” are taking place regularly at major brands and their marketing agencies.

Nancy Hill, president and chief executive at the trade organization for the ad industry, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, said the “race to retweet and to click ‘thumbs up,’ ” overwhelms the impulse “to take a step back and make sure the ad is crafted exactly the way you want it to be received.”

Mr. Schwab said marketers like PepsiCo must pause for “due diligence” when dealing with celebrities like Lil Wayne, “learning what is the history of these people, what their lyrics say, what is their fan interaction — even a simple Google search.”

Mr. Myhren of Grey New York said his agency ran all ads through a legal clearance process and he hoped clients would run those ads through their own clearance processes as well.

Still, “you will see more” ad controversies, he predicted, until “there will be a really bad one, something that will happen to a major, major marketer that will make everyone rethink the checks and balances.”

Mr. Sharpton said he intended to lead a broader conversation with the executives of PepsiCo, other major corporations and the music industry, civil rights groups and the families of Mr. Till and Trayvon Martin. He said he would contact executives at Coca-Cola, Walmart, the record label Cash Money and the rap mogul Russell Simmons, among others, and expected to hold a meeting within the next 30 days.

“I don’t want to shut down black artists, but how do we protect ourselves against depravation and misogyny?” Mr. Sharpton said. “The artists do not understand that you may have a younger following, but you’re dealing with corporate responsibility from older stockholders who are just not going to tolerate that.”

The epic inside story of long-term criminal fraud at Ranbaxy, the Indian drug company that makes generic Lipitor for millions of Americans.

1. The assignment

On the morning of Aug. 18, 2004, Dinesh Thakur hurried to a hastily arranged meeting with his boss at the gleaming offices of Ranbaxy Laboratories in Gurgaon, India, 20 miles south of New Delhi. It was so early that he passed gardeners watering impeccable shrubs and cleaners still polishing the lobby’s tile floors. As always, Thakur was punctual and organized. He had a round face and low-key demeanor, with deep-set eyes that gave him a doleful appearance.

His boss, Dr. Rajinder Kumar, Ranbaxy’s head of research and development, had joined the generic-drug company just two months earlier from GlaxoSmithKline, where he had served as global head of psychiatry for clinical research and development. Tall and handsome with elegant manners, Kumar, known as Raj, had a reputation for integrity. Thakur liked and respected him.

Like Kumar, Thakur had left a brand-name pharmaceutical company for Ranbaxy. Thakur, then 35, an American-trained engineer and a naturalized U.S. citizen, had worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) in New Jersey for 10 years. In 2002 a former mentor recruited him to Ranbaxy by appealing to his native patriotism. So he had moved his wife and baby son to Gurgaon to join India’s largest drugmaker and its first multinational pharmaceutical company.

When he stepped into Kumar’s office that morning, Thakur was surprised by his boss’ appearance. He looked weary and uneasy, his eyes puffy and dark. He had returned the previous day from South Africa, where he had met with government regulators. It was clear that the meeting had not gone well.
The two men strolled into the hall to order tea from white-uniformed waiters. As they returned, Kumar said, “We are in big trouble,” and motioned for Thakur to be quiet. Back in his office, Kumar handed him a letter from the World Health Organization. It summarized the results of an inspection that WHO had done at Vimta Laboratories, an Indian company that Ranbaxy hired to administer clinical tests of its AIDS medicine. The inspection had focused on antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that Ranbaxy was selling to the South African government to save the lives of its AIDS-ravaged population.

As Thakur read, his jaw dropped. The WHO had uncovered what seemed to the two men to be astonishing fraud. The Vimta tests appeared to be fabricated. Test results from separate patients, which normally would have differed from one another, were identical, as if xeroxed.

Thakur listened intently. Kumar had not even gotten to the really bad news. On the plane back to India, his traveling companion, another Ranbaxy executive, confided that the problem was not limited to Vimta or to those ARV drugs.

“What do you mean?” asked Thakur, barely able to grasp what Kumar was saying.

The problem, said Kumar, went deeper. He directed Thakur to put aside his other responsibilities and go through the company’s portfolio — ultimately, every drug, every market, every production line — and uncover the truth about Ranbaxy’s testing practices and where the company’s liabilities lay.

Thakur left Kumar’s office stunned. He returned home that evening to find his 3-year-old son playing on the front lawn. The previous year in India, the boy had developed a serious ear infection. A pediatrician prescribed Ranbaxy’s version of amoxiclav, a powerful antibiotic. For three scary days, his son’s 102° fever persisted, despite the medicine. Finally, the pediatrician changed the prescription to the brand-name antibiotic made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Within a day, his fever disappeared. Thakur hadn’t thought about it much before. Now he took the boy in his arms and resolved not to give his family any more Ranbaxy drugs until he knew the truth.
What Thakur unearthed over the next months would form some of the most devastating allegations ever made about the conduct of a drug company. His information would lead Ranbaxy into a multiyear regulatory battle with the FDA, and into the crosshairs of a Justice Department investigation that, almost nine years later, has finally come to a resolution.

On May 13, Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to seven federal criminal counts of selling adulterated drugs with intent to defraud, failing to report that its drugs didn’t meet specifications, and making intentionally false statements to the government. Ranbaxy agreed to pay $500 million in fines, forfeitures, and penalties — the most ever levied against a generic-drug company. (No current or former Ranbaxy executives were charged with crimes.) Thakur’s confidential whistleblower complaint, which he filed in 2007 and which describes how the company fabricated and falsified data to win FDA approvals, was also unsealed. Under federal whistleblower law, Thakur will receive more than $48 million as part of the resolution of the case.

Fortune’s account of what occurred inside Ranbaxy and how the FDA responded to it raises serious questions about whether our government can effectively safeguard a drug supply that last year was 84% generic, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, much of that manufactured in distant places. More than 80% of active pharmaceutical ingredients for all U.S. drugs now come from overseas, as do 40% of finished pills and capsules. (Click here for a list of Ranbaxy products in the U.S.)

2. The dark side of the generics boom

Today’s global market for generic drugs is $242 billion and growing. In America we have embraced generics as a vital way to control costs, a trend likely only to accelerate as health reform extends treatment to millions and our population ages.

Ranbaxy was the first foreign generics manufacturer to sell drugs in the U.S. and rose rapidly to become, today, the sixth-largest generic-drug maker in the country, with more than $1 billion in U.S. sales last year (and $2.3 billion worldwide). The company, now majority owned by Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo, sells its products in more than 150 countries and has 14,600 employees.

As our dependence on generic drugs from overseas has grown, so have questions about their oversight and safety. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that in 2009, regulators inspected only 11% of foreign drug manufacturing plants, while they inspected 40% of domestic ones.

The FDA has increased its inspections of foreign plants in recent years with a goal of reaching parity with the frequency of domestic inspections. It now has agents based in India and other countries. But even if the frequency were equal, the inspections themselves are not. Due to complex logistics, foreign inspections can last less than a week and allow companies weeks of advance notice, while domestic ones can last up to six weeks and are unannounced. “The reality is that we simply don’t know what we’re dealing with,” says Dr. Roger Bate, an international pharmaceutical expert. “No one has actually gone into these sites to expose what’s going on.”

Fortune’s investigation yields the first comprehensive picture of how one under-policed and far-flung generics company operated. It is not a tale of cutting corners or lax manufacturing practices but one of outright fraud, in which the company knowingly sold substandard drugs around the world — including in the U.S. — while working to deceive regulators. The impact on patients will likely never be known. But it is clear that millions of people worldwide got medicine of dubious quality from Ranbaxy.

The rough outlines of the fraud at Ranbaxy first emerged in a 2008 court filing by the Justice Department. But its extent and depth and the involvement of top company executives have not been previously revealed. Fortune has also uncovered evidence that the company’s misconduct continued well into 2009, even after the FDA restricted the company’s activities.
This account is based on more than 1,000 confidential Ranbaxy documents, including internal reports, memos, e-mails, hundreds of pages of FDA documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and court records. Fortune interviewed more than a dozen former and current employees, as well as 40 scientists, public health experts, patient advocates, congressional investigators, and regulators.

Ranbaxy declined multiple requests to make representatives available for interviews. Instead the company directed Fortune to a press release it issued on the day of its guilty plea. “While we are disappointed by the conduct of the past that led to this investigation, we strongly believe that settling this matter now is in the best interest of all of Ranbaxy’s stakeholders,” CEO Arun Sawhney stated in the release. “Ranbaxy has successfully launched several generic products recently and is well-positioned for future growth … Our conduct is guided by our philosophy of ‘Quality and Patients First.’ ” (A Daiichi Sankyo spokesperson says, “We cannot respond to [Fortune's] questions for legal reasons.”)

As the Ranbaxy story makes vividly clear, generic-drug makers intent on breaking the rules — especially those operating abroad — can easily do so. Drug applications work on the honor system: The FDA relies on data provided by the companies themselves. “We depend on that information to be truthful,” Gary Buehler, who headed the FDA’s office of generic drugs for 10 years, said in December 2009. (Buehler has since taken a position at the U.S. unit of the Israeli generic-drug company Teva.) The approval system “requires the ethical behavior of the applicant,” he said. Otherwise, “the whole house of cards will fall down.”

FDA regulators contend that they responded aggressively to the wrongdoing at Ranbaxy. “Based on the evidence we had at the time,” an agency spokesperson writes in e-mailed answers, “FDA acted appropriately within the scope of its authority to protect the public from drugs that failed to comply with federal quality standards.” In 2008 the agency halted the importation of 30 different drugs from two of Ranbaxy’s manufacturing plants in India and invoked a rare Application Integrity Policy, stopping the review of new drug applications from the Paonta Sahib manufacturing site until Ranbaxy proved their truthfulness.

In January 2012 the Justice Department placed Ranbaxy under a sweeping consent decree, describing the action as “ground breaking in its international reach.” The decree prohibited the company from selling drugs in the U.S. that were made at several of Ranbaxy’s Indian manufacturing plants until the quality could be verified. It also required the company to undergo independent auditing.

For all the actions taken by federal authorities, there is a deeply troubling aspect to the government’s role in the saga of Ranbaxy. Even as ever more details of the company’s long-running misconduct emerged, drug regulators permitted Ranbaxy to keep on selling many of its products.

Indeed, the FDA — charged with protecting the safety and health of Americans — went even further. Despite the agency’s finding of fraud and misconduct, it granted Ranbaxy lucrative rights to sell new generic drugs. In the most high-profile example, in November 2011 the FDA allowed the company to maintain its exclusive first dibs on making the generic version of a medicine taken by tens of millions of Americans: Lipitor. In the first six months, this privilege allowed Ranbaxy to generate $600 million in sales of generic atorvastatin, as nonbranded Lipitor is known.

Should the FDA have been surprised, then, when problems emerged just a year later? In November 2012, Ranbaxy had to recall millions of pills after tiny glass particles were discovered in some of them. Even that, it turns out, was enough for only a temporary suspension, and the FDA permitted the company to resume sales in March.

“The real story is how poorly our government has responded to all of this,” says Vincent Fabiano, Ranbaxy’s former vice president of global licensing. He’s one of a number of former company executives who spoke to FDA or other investigators about the company and then watched in increasing disgust as, for years, nothing seemed to happen. “Still as we sit here today,” Fabiano says, “Ranbaxy is in business in the United States.”

3. Fistfights and fraud

The company that Dinesh Thakur arrived at in June 2003 was bristling with ambition but had a seat-of-the-pants feel. Fistfights erupted at executive meetings. The vice president of clinical research chain-smoked four packs a day. At the New Jersey manufacturing plant, sensitive pharmaceutical ingredients wound up in the employee refrigerator next to the half-and-half.

In India, Thakur’s job, as director of research information and project management, was to impose some order and transparency on the chaotic global pipeline. Even though Ranbaxy lacked polish, Thakur had no reason to doubt that it made safe, effective drugs.

In August 2004, as he confronted his assignment to investigate possible fraud at his own company, Thakur gave each of his project managers a part of the world and asked them to compare Ranbaxy’s manufacturing data against the claims made to regulators. His own efforts began with a visit to a company regulatory official.

It was a depressing conversation. The official explained, Thakur says, that the company culture was for management to dictate the results it wanted and for those beneath to bend the process to achieve it. He described how Ranbaxy took its greatest liberties in markets where regulation was weakest and the risk of discovery was lowest. He acknowledged there was no data supporting some of Ranbaxy’s drug applications in those regions and that management knew that, according to Thakur. After initially discouraging him, the official grudgingly directed him to begin his inquiry with the Africa portfolio. (The official, who has since left, disputes Thakur’s account, asserting that management launched an investigation because it didn’t know about the misconduct. He says Ranbaxy’s conduct was “checked out” internally at that time, and he shared that information with the company.)

The heart of good manufacturing is documentation. Without it, there is no way to verify quality, investigate problems, or know whether your drug will improve health or harm it. Because the most minuscule changes can make the difference between a robust product and one that degrades and becomes toxic, each step must be recorded and validated. Any misrepresentation, mixing of data streams, or deviation from procedure invalidates — and potentially adulterates — the drugs.

To see how the process is supposed to work, Fortune visited a contract laboratory in Edison, N.J., Celsis Analytical Services, now part of AAIPharma, which helps companies assess whether they’ve met appropriate manufacturing standards. At Celsis, nothing goes untested or undocumented, from who has custody of logbooks to the water used to wash laboratory glassware. Results are recorded in black ink, then audited and verified in red ink. Wite-Out is banned to avoid the chance that someone would try to conceal data. No data are ever discarded, and no test results can be invalidated without triggering an inspection. When it comes to quality, says Mary Kubilus, then Celsis’s director of site operations, “there is no 99%.”

But in Gurgaon, as Thakur’s project managers gathered data and interviewed company scientists and executives, he says, they stumbled onto Ranbaxy’s open secret: The company manipulated almost every aspect of its manufacturing process to quickly produce impressive-looking data that would bolster its bottom line. “This was not something that was concealed,” Thakur says. It was “common knowledge among senior managers of the company, heads of research and development, people responsible for formulation to the clinical people.”

Lying to regulators and backdating and forgery were commonplace, he says. The company even forged its own standard operating procedures, which FDA inspectors rely on to assess whether a company is following its own policies. Thakur’s team was told of one instance in which company officials forged and backdated a standard operating procedure related to how patient data are stored, then aged the document in a “steam room” overnight to fool regulators.

Company scientists told Thakur’s staff that they were directed to substitute cheaper, lower-quality ingredients in place of better ingredients, to manipulate test parameters to accommodate higher impurities, and even to substitute brand-name drugs in lieu of their own generics in bioequivalence tests to produce better results.

After just 10 days of intensive research, Thakur’s team had learned enough to send preliminary information on the Latin American, Indian, and the “rest of world” markets to Raj Kumar, who then compiled the findings into a four-page report for then-CEO Brian Tempest.

The confidential report laid bare systemic fraud in Ranbaxy’s worldwide regulatory filings. It found that “the majority of products filed in Brazil, Mexico, Middle East, Russia, Romania, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, African Nations, have data submitted which did not exist or data from different products and from different countries …” The company not only invented data but also fraudulently mixed and matched data, taking the best results from manufacturing in one market and presenting it to regulators elsewhere as data unique to the drugs in their markets.
Sometimes all the data were made up. In India and Latin America, the report noted the “non-availability” of validation methods, stability data, and bio-equivalence reports. In short, Ranbaxy had almost no method whatsoever for validating the content of the drugs in those markets. The drugs for Brazil were particularly troubling. The report showed that of the 163 drug products approved and sold there since 2000, only eight had been fully and accurately tested. The rest had been filed with phony data because they had been only partially tested, or not at all.

For its HIV drugs, the report found that Ranbaxy had used ingredients that failed purity tests and blended them with good ingredients until the resulting mix met requirements. Such a mélange could degrade or become toxic far more quickly than drugs made from the high-quality materials required.

In a “private and confidential” e-mail sent to CEO Tempest along with his report, Kumar noted that “it appears that some of these issues were apparent over a year ago and I can not find any documents which sought to address these concerns or resolve the issues …” Kumar emphasized that he could “not allow any information to be used for any dossier unless fully supported by data.” He made it clear that he planned to follow the law.

5. The race to be first

Just three decades ago, generic drug companies in the U.S. were derided as patent breakers. They had no clear way to gain FDA approval, while brand-name-drug companies had a lock on the market. The 1984 Hatch-Waxman Act changed that. It created a pathway, the Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA), which allowed a generic drug company to simultaneously challenge a patent and demonstrate to the FDA that it could make a drug.
In the late 1980s several generic-drug companies were caught fabricating data and bribing FDA officials to gain approval. In the scandal’s wake, the FDA tightened regulations. It required that a company make three large “exhibit” batches to demonstrate that it could dramatically scale up its manufacturing, undergo inspection, and use an independent company to perform bioequivalence tests before an ANDA was approved. The purpose, says David Nelson, who exposed the 1980s scandal as a senior investigator for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, from which he retired in 2009, was to “prevent the systematic submission of false information” to get FDA approval.

The ANDA offered a lucrative reward for the company that risked almost certain litigation by first challenging a patent. If successful, the company got six months of exclusive sales after the patent lapsed, allowing the generics company to charge up to 80% of the brand-name price during that period. After that, other generics companies could jump in, and the price would drop to about 5% of the original price. Being first was the real jackpot. Consequently, first-to-file status became such an obsession that generic-drug company executives camped out in the FDA parking lot to file their paperwork first.

Ranbaxy learned how to game this system, according to former employees. To hasten the pace of its applications, Ranbaxy sometimes skipped a crucial intermediate step. Instead of making three medium-size exhibit batches and testing those for bioequivalence and stability, as required, Ranbaxy tested earlier and much smaller research-and-development batches that were easier to control and less costly to make. In some FDA applications, it represented these as much larger exhibit batches and presented the data as proof. And then there was the ultimate shortcut: using brand-name drugs as stand-ins for its own in bioequivalence studies.

These deceptions greatly accelerated the pace of the company’s FDA applications. They were also a grave public-health breach. Once Ranbaxy got FDA approval, it leaped straight into making commercial-size batches without any meaningful dry runs. The test results on file with the FDA were meaningless, and the drugs Ranbaxy was actually selling on the U.S. market were an unknown quantity, having never been comprehensively tested before.

6. “Look how good this company is!”

In May 2004, three months before Thakur embarked on his research, Dr. Kathy Spreen joined Ranbaxy’s U.S. office as executive director of clinical medicine and pharmacovigilance. A 15-year veteran of Wyeth and AstraZeneca (AZN), she was there to help launch the company’s brand products division, which planned to create new dosages and formulations of existing drugs. Spreen envisioned her job as that of a regulatory coach, to help guide Ranbaxy through the FDA’s intricate system.

At first, the company’s science seemed to exceed her expectations. She had been on the job a few months and was preparing slides for a presentation about the company’s launch of Riomet, a version of the diabetes drug Metformin, when she noticed something remarkable. The data showing the concentration of Ranbaxy’s drug in the bloodstream appeared to match that of the brand name perfectly. “Look how good this company is,” she remembers thinking. “The bioequivalence data is superimposable on the drugs we are modeling.”

About a month later, while comparing the data for Sotret, the company’s version of the acne drug Isotretinoin, Spreen found it similarly superimposable on the brand-name data. That’s when she began to worry. “If it’s too good to be true,” she recalls thinking, “it’s probably made up.”
By definition, data is tricky. Even two batches of the same drug made by the same company at the same plant under the exact same conditions will have slight variations. Test results for a similar or copycat drug made by a different company with a different formula should look different.
With her suspicions aroused, Spreen began asking her Indian counterparts to send underlying data that supported the test results. They repeatedly promised the information was on the way. When it didn’t arrive, she got excuses: It was a “mess”; they’d be “embarrassed.” She recalls begging, “I don’t care if it’s written on the back of toilet paper. Just send me something.” But it never arrived.

Six other pharma veterans who worked for Ranbaxy in the U.S. as recently as 2010 tell Fortune they found themselves in a corporate culture like nothing they’d ever experienced. Executives approached the regulatory system as an obstacle to be gamed. They bragged about who had most artfully deceived regulators. Until 2005 the company didn’t even have a functioning patient-safety department, and patient complaints piled up in boxes, ignored, uncategorized, and unreported to the FDA as required.

Spreen kept thinking that if only she could explain American regulations more clearly, Ranbaxy’s executives would understand. But no amount of explaining seemed to change how the company did business. When sales of a diabetes drug were sluggish, she says, one executive asked Spreen if she could use her medical license to prescribe the drug to everyone in the company so they could record hundreds of sales. Spreen refused.
When she asked Ranbaxy’s global manufacturing director to send documentation showing that an antibiotic acne gel was made with good manufacturing practices (GMP), he offered to send her an “impressive looking” certificate. To Spreen, it sounded like an offer to have one forged. She tried to explain, “The look of the certificate means nothing to me unless the FDA says it’s GMP.”

On a trip to India in mid-2004 Raj Kumar quietly confirmed to Spreen what she had already come to suspect: that crucial testing data for many of the company’s drugs did not actually exist and submissions to regulators had been forged.

Ultimately, Spreen says she spent more than a year trying in vain to convince senior executives of the vital need to observe regulations before she finally quit in disgust in June 2005. “There was a total lack of understanding,” she says, “of what it meant to be ethical and what it meant to actually protect the patient.” Along with a number of Ranbaxy executives, Spreen was subpoenaed by congressional investigators to provide witness testimony. Reluctantly, she told them her story years ago — but nothing ever came of it.

Ranbaxy lab workers

6. Breaking it to the board

CEO Tempest had assured Kumar that the company would do the right thing. So on an evening in late 2004, several months after assigning Thakur to dig up the truth, Kumar found himself before five members of the scientific committee of the board of directors, including Tempest and the chairman of the board.

Kumar had a PowerPoint presentation of 24 slides. It made clear that Ranbaxy had lied to regulators and falsified data in every country examined in the report. “More than 200 products in more than 40 countries” have “elements of data that were fabricated to support business needs,” the PowerPoint reported. “Business needs,” the report showed, was a euphemism for ways in which Ranbaxy could minimize cost, maximize profit, and dupe regulators into approving substandard drugs.

No market or type of drug was exempt, including antiretrovirals purchased by the U.S. and WHO as part of a program to fight HIV in Africa. In Europe, for example, the company used ingredients from unapproved sources, invented shelf-life data, tested different formulations of the drug than the ones it sold, and made undocumented changes to the manufacturing process.
In entire markets — including Brazil, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Egypt, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Peru, and the Dominican Republic — the company had simply not tested the drugs and had invented all the data. Noting Ranbaxy’s agreement to manufacture brand-name drugs, a slide stated, “We have also put our partners (Bayer & Merck (MRK) in Mexico and in South Africa) at risk by using suspect data.”

Kumar proposed a drastic course: pull all compromised drugs off the market; repeat all suspect tests; inform regulators of every case of switched data; and create a process for linking the right data to the right drugs. As the PowerPoint stated, “A short-term loss of revenue is better than a long-term losing proposition for the entire business.”

Kumar completed the presentation to a silent boardroom. Only one director, a scientist, showed any surprise about the findings. The others appeared more astonished by Kumar’s declaration that if he was not given full authority to fix the problems, he would resign.

The silence told Kumar everything he needed to know.

Within two days of the board meeting, he submitted his resignation: “… given the serious nature of the issues we discussed,” he wrote, his only choice was to withdraw “gracefully but immediately.” He had been at Ranbaxy less than four months.

Kumar confirmed this account of the board meeting and in a statement noted that “support and desire to put things right, from my senior management team, the CEO, the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Board, was not forthcoming. This made my position untenable and I had no option but to resign.” When reached by phone in September 2010, Tempest declined to comment. Citing a busy schedule, he said, “I think it’s best we close the conversation.” (Tempest did not respond to multiple messages in recent weeks.)

On Nov. 9, 2004, just days after the board meeting, it appeared to the outside world that Ranbaxy had made a strong commitment to quality. It withdrew from the WHO prequalified list all seven of its ARV drugs tested by Vimta Labs and pledged to retest and resubmit them. The move even won praise from some AIDS advocates who believed Ranbaxy had tackled the problem of a rogue contractor, Vimta, head on. But inside the company, as events would make clear in the following months, the executives had decided against disclosing any further problems. (In an e-mail, Vimta’s technical director, Harriman Vungal, says the studies it performed for Ranbaxy were “carried out as required” and “were not intended for submission outside India. Ranbaxy, on its own, had submitted to other countries and Vimta was unaware of what was submitted to WHO or others.”)

Thakur remained behind. But with Kumar’s departure, he had lost his protection. Three months after the board presentation, the company’s internal auditors arrived at his department for what they called a routine review. They stayed for 10 weeks, combing through his department’s books and interviewing staff. In late April the company accused him of browsing porn sites from his office computer.

Thakur vehemently denied doing so. Furious, he got his network administrator to pore through the computer records and found that the corporate IT department had logged in to his division’s servers and planted his IP address on several searches, Thakur asserts. On April 24, 2005, Thakur says, he presented Ranbaxy with evidence of computer tampering and submitted his resignation. He was done — or so he thought.

7. “The last thing we want is another inspection …”

By 2005, from a distance, Ranbaxy’s ascent appeared unchecked. But inside the company, the incident of fraud at Vimta was like a teetering domino, threatening to topple hundreds of the company’s drug applications worldwide. Not only had Thakur’s team exhumed fraudulent filings, but goodwill groups and government regulators had become suspicious. They were asking for underlying data for a number of the company’s drugs beyond those tested by Vimta.

The problem confronting Ranbaxy executives was almost unsolvable. Much of the raw data didn’t match what the company had filed with regulators. It either didn’t exist, didn’t make sense, or had been fabricated. A refusal to share it would trigger further suspicion, which left company executives with two bad options: come clean, which could have disastrous consequences, or lie more.

This Catch-22 played out in a torrent of confidential e-mails obtained by Fortune, in which panicked and angry executives scrambled to contain the fallout. They copied Tempest and the future CEO, Malvinder Singh, on many of these e-mails. Now executive chairman of hospital network Fortis Healthcare, Singh declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article. A spokesperson, Raghu Kochar, e-mailed a comment on Singh’s behalf: “All suggestion of impropriety or misconduct in your queries is denied and rejected.”

In February 2005 a Ranbaxy regulatory affairs executive wrote to colleagues regarding the company’s application to sell the antibiotic cefuroxime axetil in Spain: “Please advice [sic] the way forward. This dossier was scheduled to go in Dec., 04. We have been waiting for your response for the last 2 months. We need to conclude this ASAP …”

This e-mail triggered a terse reply from a company scientist. “During our discussion in Gurgaon on 27th Jan., I mentioned clearly that the data in our Archives and that of the filed one is Differing Entirely. So, I cannot send the data.”

By 2005, the applications of 22 high-priority products needed routine updates in at least one country. All had been made at the Dewas manufacturing plant south of New Delhi and none had been tested adequately. “Data is not available for any of the products,” the head of the stability group at Dewas wrote in an e-mail on which he cc’ed Tempest. One executive responsible for Europe objected strenuously to the filing of false data and wrote to colleagues, “I do not intend spending a stint in a European prison …”

As part of the new plan, Ranbaxy decided to move all manufacturing for U.S. drugs and HIV medications for the PEPFAR program from the troubled Dewas plant to the newer Paonta Sahib facility in the hope that by severing links to the past fraudulent manufacturing — and beginning to submit legitimate data on this group of drugs — regulators would not detect the past misbehavior.

Publicly, company executives spun the change as a response to big American demand. “We have changed the site of manufacture of the product from Dewas to Paonta Sahib facility to facilitate handling high business requirements,” a Ranbaxy executive wrote to a Unicef official on Jan. 8, 2005, explaining the shift for an AIDS drug.

But four days later, as the company prepared to resubmit its ARV data to WHO, the company’s HIV project manager reiterated the point of the company’s new strategy in an e-mail, cc’ed to CEO Tempest. “We have been reasonably successful in keeping WHO from looking closely at the stability data in the past,” the manager wrote, adding, “The last thing we want is to have another inspection at Dewas until we fix all the process and validation issues once and for all.”

8. “It’s just blacks dying.”

Throughout the summer of 2005, Thakur tried to convince himself that the company’s medicine was no longer his problem. He was jobless and piecing together haphazard consulting work. He feared for his family’s safety. The company had a “reputation for threatening people, bullying people,” he recalls. Thakur hired a security company, which posted a guard outside his home 24 hours a day.

On fitful nights, he lay awake with a map of the world in his head. It contained each of Ranbaxy’s markets and the substandard drugs the company had made. He mentally reviewed the graphs he had prepared, each spelling out a hazard to patients that was almost certainly continuing. Not only had the FDA approved the company’s PEPFAR drugs. In August, the WHO restored the company’s ARVs to its prequalified list.

Thakur knew the drugs weren’t good. They had high impurities, degraded easily, and would be useless at best in hot, humid conditions. They would be taken by the world’s poorest patients in sub-Saharan Africa, who had almost no medical infrastructure and no recourse for complaints. The injustice made him livid.

Ranbaxy executives didn’t care, says Kathy Spreen, and made little effort to conceal it. In a conference call with a dozen company executives, one brushed aside her fears about the quality of the AIDS medicine Ranbaxy was supplying for Africa. “Who cares?” he said, according to Spreen. “It’s just blacks dying.”

On Aug. 15, four months after resigning from the company, Thakur opened a Yahoo e-mail account and wrote under a pseudonym to top regulators in the U.S., Britain, the WHO, and Brazil. Posing as a company scientist and using broken English, he claimed that Ranbaxy was forcing him to falsify data. He got no reply. The letter was not nearly authoritative or detailed enough to penetrate the system.

Finally he wrote directly to FDA commissioner Lester Crawford and alleged that Ranbaxy was selling “untested, spurious, ineffective medication.” He added, I “plead with you to put a stop to this crime.”
Edwin Rivera-Martinez, then chief of investigations and preapproval compliance in the FDA’s center for drug evaluation and research, wrote back and asked if Thakur would consent to a conference call. Thakur had initially hoped to set regulators on the trail but limit his own involvement. Reluctantly, he agreed.

To Thakur, the wrongdoing was black and white. He had given proof and expected action. But 10 days after the conference call, the FDA announced that it had approved Ranbaxy’s application for the first pediatric-AIDS drug for the U.S. market, Zidovudine. “Given all the data you have in your possession today about the criminal activities of this company in registering ARVs with fabricated data, I am confused how the USFDA could give such an approval,” Thakur wrote to Rivera-Martinez. The bureaucrat wrote back that because the drug had been approved before Thakur made contact, only actual proof of fraud could reverse the decision.
Though Thakur didn’t know it at the time, the FDA had found his information credible and was moving to confirm it. In October 2005, less than two months after his first contact, Rivera-Martinez’s division sent a request to the division of field investigations to perform high-priority inspections at Dewas, Paonta Sahib, and Ranbaxy’s manufacturing division for raw ingredients, Matrix Labs. The memorandum recommended that the inspectors collect any documents on the day they requested them, since the “informant said that the firm has fabricated documents overnight during inspections.”

The agency needed an unvarnished look at the company. But as was standard for an overseas inspection, it notified Ranbaxy almost three months in advance that it was coming. In January 2006, Thakur urgently relayed to Rivera-Martinez what he had learned from former colleagues: The senior leadership of the company was “camped out in the plant locations, both at Paonta Sahib and at Dewas,” he wrote. “There is a massive cover-up effort underway to ‘produce’” documentation that agency inspectors might request.
A team of FDA inspectors arrived at Paonta Sahib on Feb. 20, 2006, and stayed for five days. When they had last visited, in December 2004, without the benefit of inside information, the result had been a clean bill of health. This time, they knew where to look, and what they found was disturbing: Raw data was routinely discarded; the company’s standard operating procedure approved the discarding and disregarding of data; patient complaints went uninvestigated; and stability testing was a shambles.

During stability testing, drugs are placed in chambers that resemble big refrigerators that can replicate different climates, and then they are tested at intervals to see when and how the drugs’ ingredients break down. At Paonta Sahib, inspectors found stability chambers full of stray drug samples but no logbooks identifying the contents or the dates of when they were entered or tested. The inspectors also took and tested samples of Sotret, Ranbaxy’s version of the acne drug Accutane, and found that it degraded far in advance of its expiration date.

The findings were serious. Four months later in a warning letter, the FDA said that it would not consider any new applications for drugs made at the site until the company could demonstrate corrections. But that did nothing to stop all the drugs that were already on the market, drugs that had been approved, or applications submitted from other sites. Rivera-Martinez sounded almost plaintive when he wrote to Thakur that spring: “We are under a lot of pressure to approve Ranbaxy’s generic version of Pravastatin [a cholesterol-lowering drug] when the patent exclusivity runs out this Thursday.”

It had been nine months since Thakur had first contacted the agency. He had watched as Ranbaxy got six new approvals. The FDA agent who had taken charge of his case tried to ease his frustration. “Imagine, if you will, that we were able to prove even half of what you have told us,” she wrote to Thakur. “This would bring down the entire corporation. One of the largest in the world.” She added, “To lose on a technicality would be a crime in itself.”

Thakur wrote back, “It makes me wonder if all my efforts and troubles were worth anything at all.” His FDA handler urged him not to lose hope. “The wheels of justice turn slowly,” she wrote, “but they do turn.”

9. The Great Valentine’s Day Raid

On Feb. 14, 2007, Vincent Fabiano was at his desk at Ranbaxy’s U.S. headquarters in Princeton, N.J., when a man he had never seen before walked into his office. “Who the hell are you?” Fabiano asked. “I’m an FDA criminal investigator,” the man said. Fabiano noticed the gun on the man’s hip and stepped away from his desk as directed.

The building was surrounded by police cars, and panic was spreading. “People were freaking out, crying,” recalls a former employee. “They took every computer. There were people with guns.” Employees called the search warrant the Great Valentines Day Raid.

As the news ricocheted from New Jersey to New Delhi, Ranbaxy issued a statement: “This action has come as a surprise. The company is not aware of any wrongdoing. It is cooperating fully with officials.”

At the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the FDA, senior investigator David Nelson learned of the search warrant and immediately called the legislative office at the FDA. “What’s going on?” he asked. “We can’t tell you,” came the response.

“The hell you can’t,” he snapped. “Your first obligation is to public health.” But after what Nelson says were assurances from an assistant commissioner that the search warrant did not relate to drug quality or manufacturing, he assumed the issue was accounting fraud and put the matter aside.

The criminal investigation was humming. Ranbaxy executives were stopped in transit at American airports and questioned. The U.S. Attorney’s office issued subpoenas, and the FDA tested close to 100 samples of Ranbaxy drugs.
Thakur, too, was immersed. But the deeper he got, the more worried he became about his legal jeopardy and the safety of his wife and children in India. He had no lawyer and little protection. Finally, in March 2007, almost two years after he first contacted the FDA, he learned of an organization that helps secure legal representation for whistleblowers.

Soon afterward, Thakur obtained a lawyer and deepened his level of involvement still further. He legally became a whistleblower — the technical term is “relator” — in the case against Ranbaxy and thus became eligible for up to a third of the government’s financial recovery. “Up until that point,” he says, “I had no idea what a whistleblower was.”

10. Ranbaxy’s new leadership

In January 2006, Malvinder Singh, the founder’s grandson, succeeded Brian Tempest as Ranbaxy’s managing director and CEO. At 33, with an MBA from Duke University, Singh was brash and competitive. The Indian business press dubbed him the Pharaoh of Pharma, and hailed him as an “out-of-the-box decision-maker.”

Others viewed Singh as petulant and immature. “I want profit!” he would yell in meetings, two former employees recall. Among the staff, he was known for being preoccupied with his ranking on the Forbes list of India’s 40 richest people. When he and his brother Shivinder fell from No. 9 in 2004 to No. 19 in 2005, despite $1.6 billion in assets, Singh seemed to blame the decline on a lack of employee loyalty, a former employee recalls.

His biggest problem was the FDA’s decision not to accept new applications from the Paonta Sahib plant. Ranbaxy desperately needed a green light there. So in November 2006, Singh led a delegation to FDA headquarters to try to reverse the decision.

Up to that point, the company had hardly been conciliatory. When FDA inspectors had discovered the standard operating procedures that allowed for the discarding and disregarding of data, Ranbaxy blamed semantics. It wrote to the FDA, “We now understand the negative connotation that these words may have conveyed, but we can assure you” the company had “never thrown away or ignored” any data. Ranbaxy even disparaged the agency’s science, claiming that FDA test results showing that Sotret degraded more quickly than stated were due to the FDA’s inaccurate testing method. (Years later, in its 2013 guilty plea, Ranbaxy would admit that Sotret was one of the adulterated drugs it had sold.)

Singh and his team presented new quality-improvement plans to skeptical regulators. Unmoved, the regulators refused to lift the stay and upped the ante, asking Ranbaxy to turn over audits done by its outside consultant, Parexel, which the company was claiming were confidential. The meeting ended in a standoff.

On June 11, 2008, Singh stunned the Indian business world by announcing that he and his brother were selling their 34% stake in Ranbaxy to the Japanese drugmaker Daiichi Sankyo for $2 billion. Overall, Daiichi Sankyo shelled out $4.6 billion to take control of the company. Singh agreed to stay on for five years as CEO. Some in the Indian press portrayed the sale to a foreign company as a betrayal of national entrepreneurial pride. But it seemed Singh was cashing out at a propitious moment.

Three weeks later, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Baltimore filed a motion in U.S. district court demanding that Ranbaxy hand over the Parexel audit documents. It alleged that the violations at Paonta Sahib “continue to result in the introduction of adulterated and misbranded products into interstate commerce with the intent to defraud or mislead.”

On Capitol Hill, David Nelson was enraged. Despite the FDA’s reassurances to the contrary, the case was all about drug quality. The FDA had “deceived the committee,” he says. Furthermore, if the drugs were an ongoing threat, why hadn’t the FDA stopped Ranbaxy from selling them?

By mid-July, the saga had reached new heights. Congress had begun investigating the FDA. The inquiry, by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, focused on the agency’s alleged inaction. The new FDA commissioner at the time, Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, defended the agency, explaining that the FDA had not stopped the drugs because the samples it had tested met specifications. But that wasn’t exactly true. The agency’s own testing had shown that Sotret degraded far more rapidly than the company claimed.

Everywhere the FDA had looked, its inspectors found fraud. Four months earlier, at a unit of Paonta Sahib, agency investigators discovered that supervisors who had supposedly overseen critical manufacturing steps weren’t even at the plant on the days they signed off on the tests. “The culture of the company was corrupt to its core,” says Nelson.

As congressional investigators turned up the heat, the agency finally cracked down. In September 2008, it announced it was restricting the import of 30 drug products made by Ranbaxy (11 of which had been approved after Thakur’s first contact with the FDA three years earlier). The agency still did nothing to recall the very same drugs on pharmacy shelves all over America, despite finding that Ranbaxy had committed fraud on a massive scale.

Nelson says that under FDA rules, the agency should have required Ranbaxy to recall every one of its drugs and resubmit every application. “Why [should] this company, of all companies, be exempted from normal FDA policies?” he asks. “There’s something here that just reeks.”

As Ranbaxy’s stock fell and questions loomed about the company’s integrity, the deal with Daiichi Sankyo hung in the balance. Two months earlier, Malvinder Singh had gone on the attack. On a conference call with reporters in July, he depicted the company as the victim of corporate saboteurs. “A multinational and a leading Indian company are working in concert to bring our share price down,” he said, without specifying the names. Despite the investigation, he said, “our business in the U.S. continues as normal.” Daiichi Sankyo knew of the issues during its due diligence, he said, adding, “There is no change in the deal, and there is no exit clause in it.”

The deal was on track. Did Ranbaxy level with its acquirer about what was going on? Tsutomo Une, Daiichi Sankyo’s global strategy chief, who declined to address questions about Ranbaxy’s manufacturing problems in a March 2010 interview with Fortune, said he didn’t feel misled by Ranbaxy. As he put it, “I never thought that we were fooled.”

11. What’s in the suitcase?

For years, many of Ranbaxy’s senior executives were expected to do what seemed like a small favor when they traveled to India: carry suitcases full of brand-name drugs that they were told were needed for research and development. At Ranbaxy’s U.S. headquarters, suitcases were kept packed with drugs and waiting for the next traveler to India. To some executives, this seemed like a minor shortcut, possibly to cut shipping costs, avoid quarantine, or speed delivery.

Generic-drug companies often study small amounts of a brand-name product in order to reverse-engineer it or to reference it as a point of comparison in applications. But proper channels for purchasing and transporting such drugs are well established and have become “ironclad” since the 2001 passage of the Patriot Act, according to an independent quality-assurance expert.

At Ranbaxy, top executives skirted these regulations and sometimes oversaw the secretive ferrying of drugs, at the very moment when the company faced deadlines to resubmit data to regulators. Fortune was unable to conclusively determine what the suitcase drugs were used for. Some former employees suspect that the company used the brand-name drugs as a substitute for its own in testing (as employees had seen in previous instances), in order to generate pristine data showing how closely Ranbaxy’s drug matched the brand it was seeking to replicate.

Whatever the purpose, what’s clear is that some Ranbaxy staffers strenuously resisted being used as drug mules. In May 2004 a regulatory project manager refused to take French name-brand samples to India. He protested in an e-mail, “I will NOT be bring [sic] any samples with me, not only I believe is this company policy but I personally do not feel comfortable bringing samples in this manner.”

An executive pushed back: “It is critical that the samples are carried by you. We cannot delay it.” The employee flatly refused.

Malvinder Singh, then the company’s worldwide head of pharmaceuticals, got involved. Through his secretary, he asked who would be taking charge of the samples and when they would reach Gurgaon. This triggered a response from the company’s vice president for Europe: “Dear Malvinder, I need to explain to you how labour laws work within Europe. As taking these samples to India is in principal illegal we cannot force people to do so … Normally however we find our people willing to take the risk.”

So important was this to the company’s business that the European vice president then went on to make an extraordinary suggestion to Singh: that CEO Tempest “and yourself have been passing through the U.K. on a regular basis and I would ask you to in future also make yourself available for carrying samples back.” (Ultimately, another employee was found to carry those particular samples.)

In general, those who carried the drugs for Ranbaxy were given a letter claiming the products were for research and development and had no commercial value. This wasn’t true. In June 2004, one executive got stopped by Indian customs with hundred of packs (worth thousands of dollars) of an antinausea drug, Kytril, that he hadn’t declared. The drugs were seized, according to internal e-mails. In one, a Ranbaxy executive noted that this was “an illegal way of bringing the medicine in to India.”

The illicit drug runs continued well after the company had pledged to the FDA that it would operate squarely within regulations. From 2007 to 2008 alone, 17 executives from the New Jersey office took undeclared drugs through Indian customs, four of them multiple times, according to a document given to the FDA.

In February 2009, a lawyer in the regulatory division at Ranbaxy’s New Jersey headquarters got wind of an even more suspicious incident. Some months before, Ranbaxy had agreed to retest its troubled Sotret formulation and submit new data to the FDA. The executives promised the FDA that Ranbaxy would be entirely transparent in the process. In October 2008 the company purchased 12 boxes of a generic acne drug, isotretinoin, made by a competitor. Because of the drug’s dire potential side effects, including birth defects if taken while pregnant, its sale is highly controlled under an FDA program called iPledge. All sales, expiration, and destruction of the drug must be reported.

The more the lawyer probed, the more concerned he became. He learned that a Ranbaxy senior director had overseen the medicine’s unreported purchase from a pharmacist, who had dropped off the boxes at an employee’s house. Another employee had hand carried the drugs to London, where one of the company’s most senior regulatory executives — whose job involved making sure that the company followed all regulations — brought them to India in a suitcase.

When the lawyer reported the incident to the company’s top U.S. executives, they told him to drop the matter. Remaining deeply uneasy, in March 2009, he wrote a memo to file, which Fortune obtained, documenting the incident. The company had not only violated the iPledge program, he wrote, but also had “likely violated U.S. Export Laws, U.K. Import and Export Laws and possible Indian Import Laws.”

Not long after Ranbaxy purchased the isotretinoin, the company submitted its new data to the FDA, which approved it. Within a year the company was forced to start recalling its Sotret again because the drug was degrading faster than it was supposed to — the very problem that had been occurring before.

12. Ranbaxy today: A reformed company?

In February 2009 the FDA punished Ranbaxy anew, labeling the company with the drug regulator’s version of a scarlet “A”: The agency imposed a so-called Application Integrity Policy. That meant a dramatic shift in the regulatory dynamic. No longer would the FDA have the burden of proving fraud if it wanted to block a Ranbaxy product. The onus had flipped, and now the company would have to prove its products weren’t fraudulent in order to get them approved.

The AIP, which had previously been brought against drug companies only a handful of times in FDA history, covered all products manufactured at Ranbaxy’s Paonta Sahib facility. The action left no doubt as to the depth and extent of the problem. The stock market responded accordingly. Ranbaxy shares fell 18% and took Daiichi Sankyo’s down 9% with them. Facing a market disaster in the U.S., the corporate parents were clearly no longer sanguine about Ranbaxy’s management. Within three months, Malvinder Singh stepped down as CEO. A Daiichi Sankyo spokesperson told the press at the time that the leadership change “strengthens Daiichi Sankyo’s part” in Ranbaxy’s management.

At its U.S. headquarters, the warning letters kept coming. In December 2009 the FDA issued one for a manufacturing plant in Gloversville, N.Y., with alarming findings like unexplained black particles in drugs that the company released into the market. “It is apparent that Ranbaxy’s attempts to make global corrections after past regulatory actions by the FDA have been inadequate,” the agency wrote.

Ranbaxy and the government had begun legal haggling to resolve the company’s misdeeds. Inside Ranbaxy, with the generic-Lipitor launch in potential jeopardy, nervous executives mapped out different scenarios that could result from various FDA decisions.

The government seemingly had a trump card in the negotiations — the final approval for Ranbaxy to sell generic Lipitor. Yet it seemed unable to bring a swift resolution to the process, as the company appeared to play for time. The FDA first sent a draft of the consent decree to Ranbaxy in August 2010, according to a document sent by an FDA lawyer. Six months later, Ranbaxy’s lawyers responded, asking for revisions. In a letter to Ranbaxy’s lawyers three months after that, an FDA attorney sent further revisions and tried to bring an end to the process, stating, “We believe this response reflects FDA’s final position and look forward to Ranbaxy’s prompt response which, in our view, should suggest only minor proposed revisions.”

It would be eight more months, until January 2012, before the Justice Department announced the consent decree — and then another 17 months of wrangling between armies of lawyers before the case ended on May 13.
Well before the final resolution, in November 2011, the FDA gave its final blessing for Ranbaxy’s version of Lipitor. Asked about the decision to allow Ranbaxy to make Lipitor after its misconduct at two plants was revealed, an FDA spokesman asserts that the agency is required to evaluate a drug application on a “facility-specific basis.” The company’s “data integrity problems,” he says, occurred at facilities different from where its generic Lipitor is manufactured. That’s true — but it leaves out the fact that Ranbaxy originally applied to make Lipitor at one of its Indian facilities, which was then blacklisted by the FDA. The agency permitted the company to make a significant shift in its application: to switch the plant at which it would make the generic Lipitor. Ranbaxy now proposed making the drug in the U.S. at a facility that was not under FDA investigation.
Last November, Ranbaxy was back in the headlines with some very unwelcome news — the company had detected tiny glass particles in its Lipitor. It had to recall millions of pills and temporarily halt production. Says the FDA spokesperson, “The fact that there were some quality problems that led to a limited recall of the generic product was not a result of the approval process or how it was handled.”

Throughout this time, Thakur — who had initially gotten impatient when the FDA didn’t take action within days — watched in agony as years ticked by. He had launched his own consulting firm, which grew to 300 employees. As always, he tried to lose himself in his work, but he was in a perpetual state of anxiety, with thoughts of the case never far away. There was “a lot of hardship” is all he’ll say about it today.

Remarkably, Ranbaxy is in a stronger position now in the U.S. than it was before its entanglement with the FDA. By the end of 2012, it was the fourth-fastest-growing pharmaceutical company in the U.S., both by sales and number of prescriptions. Much of this growth can be attributed to sales of its generic Lipitor. (That momentum stalled after the recall and the entry of new competitors selling that medication.) Ranbaxy has survived one disaster and punishment after another. As one incredulous employee put it, “We don’t know why we’re still in business.”

The congressional inquiry into the FDA petered out over the years. But under the direction of David Nelson, investigators interviewed the FDA inspectors who went to Paonta Sahib and asked them a simple question: Would they feel comfortable taking Ranbaxy drugs? “Every single inspector that went to India said they would never take a Ranbaxy drug,” says Nelson, “like eight out of eight.”

They were not alone. One by one, each of the former Ranbaxy executives Fortune interviewed had determined, while still at the company, to stop taking Ranbaxy drugs.

In April 2010, Ranbaxy issued another in a mounting series of recalls, this time for a pediatric antibiotic of amoxicillin and clavulanate potassium. In a statement, a Ranbaxy spokesman said that while the company’s own testing found the drug to be within specification, “the company has decided to recall all the lots in question as a matter of caution, given its commitment to the health and safety of patients.” The oral suspension turned brown, instead of white, on being mixed. It was the same drug that Thakur had given his feverish young son, with no effect, seven years earlier.

Reporter associates: Doris Burke and Frederik Joelving

For our latest mission, we converted a New York City subway car into a late night talk show set. Host Pat Cassels (CollegeHumor) interviewed random commuters from his desk as bandleader Evan Gregory (The Gregory Brothers) kept the car rocking.

Created and Directed by Charlie Todd / Music by Tyler Walker

For photos and more info click here.

Related links

Long before the autopsy, London police could guess what killed Yuri Gadyukin. When they pulled his body from the river beneath the Hammersmith Bridge on July 26, 1960, they saw a bullet-sized hole that had ripped apart his skull.

Authorities had been searching for the Russian director for weeks. By the time they yanked him from the Thames, they’d surely heard rumors percolating down through country’s film community of catastrophic arguments on the set of his latest film, The Graven Idol, between Gadyukin and the film’s star, Harry Weathers. Others whispered that Gadyukin owed money to a local gangster—cash he’d used to finance the film.

Perhaps you’ve heard of Gadyukin? He was a star of early Soviet cinema before fleeing to England. You can read about his life on a fansite and a Facebook group. You can watch him melt down in a British television interview, storming off stage in spittle-spewing rage. For nearly four years, there were Wikipedia and Internet Movie Database articles about him, brimming with citations from authoritative Russian sources.

Those entries are now gone. Yuri Gadyukin did not owe money to a gangster. His final film was not swirling out of control. Weathers did not kill him. His body was not found beneath the Hammersmith Bridge.

Gadyukin never died, in fact, because he never existed.

Read the rest of this article here.

The Mind of a Con Man
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee
New York Times
April 26, 2013

One summer night in 2011, a tall, 40-something professor named Diederik Stapel stepped out of his elegant brick house in the Dutch city of Tilburg to visit a friend around the corner. It was close to midnight, but his colleague Marcel Zeelenberg had called and texted Stapel that evening to say that he wanted to see him about an urgent matter. The two had known each other since the early ’90s, when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Amsterdam; now both were psychologists at Tilburg University. In 2010, Stapel became dean of the university’s School of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Zeelenberg head of the social psychology department. Stapel and his wife, Marcelle, had supported Zeelenberg through a difficult divorce a few years earlier. As he approached Zeelenberg’s door, Stapel wondered if his colleague was having problems with his new girlfriend.

Zeelenberg, a stocky man with a shaved head, led Stapel into his living room. “What’s up?” Stapel asked, settling onto a couch. Two graduate students had made an accusation, Zeelenberg explained. His eyes began to fill with tears. “They suspect you have been committing research fraud.”

Stapel was an academic star in the Netherlands and abroad, the author of several well-regarded studies on human attitudes and behavior. That spring, he published a widely publicized study in Science about an experiment done at the Utrecht train station showing that a trash-filled environment tended to bring out racist tendencies in individuals. And just days earlier, he received more media attention for a study indicating that eating meat made people selfish and less social.

His enemies were targeting him because of changes he initiated as dean, Stapel replied, quoting a Dutch proverb about high trees catching a lot of wind. When Zeelenberg challenged him with specifics — to explain why certain facts and figures he reported in different studies appeared to be identical — Stapel promised to be more careful in the future. As Zeelenberg pressed him, Stapel grew increasingly agitated.

Finally, Zeelenberg said: “I have to ask you if you’re faking data.”

“No, that’s ridiculous,” Stapel replied. “Of course not.”

That weekend, Zeelenberg relayed the allegations to the university rector, a law professor named Philip Eijlander, who often played tennis with Stapel. After a brief meeting on Sunday, Eijlander invited Stapel to come by his house on Tuesday morning. Sitting in Eijlander’s living room, Stapel mounted what Eijlander described to me as a spirited defense, highlighting his work as dean and characterizing his research methods as unusual. The conversation lasted about five hours. Then Eijlander politely escorted Stapel to the door but made it plain that he was not convinced of Stapel’s innocence.

That same day, Stapel drove to the University of Groningen, nearly three hours away, where he was a professor from 2000 to 2006. The campus there was one of the places where he claimed to have collected experimental data for several of his studies; to defend himself, he would need details from the place. But when he arrived that afternoon, the school looked very different from the way he remembered it being five years earlier. Stapel started to despair when he realized that he didn’t know what buildings had been around at the time of his study. Then he saw a structure that he recognized, a computer center. “That’s where it happened,” he said to himself; that’s where he did his experiments with undergraduate volunteers. “This is going to work.”

On his return trip to Tilburg, Stapel stopped at the train station in Utrecht. This was the site of his study linking racism to environmental untidiness, supposedly conducted during a strike by sanitation workers. In the experiment described in the Science paper, white volunteers were invited to fill out a questionnaire in a seat among a row of six chairs; the row was empty except for the first chair, which was taken by a black occupant or a white one. Stapel and his co-author claimed that white volunteers tended to sit farther away from the black person when the surrounding area was strewn with garbage. Now, looking around during rush hour, as people streamed on and off the platforms, Stapel could not find a location that matched the conditions described in his experiment.

“No, Diederik, this is ridiculous,” he told himself at last. “You really need to give it up.”

After he got home that night, he confessed to his wife. A week later, the university suspended him from his job and held a news conference to announce his fraud. It became the lead story in the Netherlands and would dominate headlines for months. Overnight, Stapel went from being a respected professor to perhaps the biggest con man in academic science.

I first met Stapel in the summer of 2012, nearly a year after his dismissal from Tilburg. I’d read about his fraud in various places, including the pages of Science magazine, where I work as a writer covering mostly astronomy and space science. Before seeing the news accounts, I was unaware of the study Stapel published in Science; the news writers there have no involvement with the research papers published in the magazine.

When Stapel and I met for lunch in Antwerp, about a 50-mile drive from Tilburg, investigating committees at the three universities where he had worked — Amsterdam, Groningen and Tilburg — were in the process of combing through his several dozen research papers to determine which ones were fraudulent. The scrutiny was meant not only to clean up the scientific record but also to establish whether any of Stapel’s co-authors, including more than 20 Ph.D. students he supervised, shared any of the blame. It was already evident that many of the doctoral dissertations he oversaw were based on his fabricated data.

Right away Stapel expressed what sounded like heartfelt remorse for what he did to his students. “I have fallen from my throne — I am on the floor,” he said, waving at the ground. “I am in therapy every week. I hate myself.” That afternoon and in later conversations, he referred to himself several times as tall, charming or handsome, less out of arrogance, it seemed, than what I took to be an anxious desire to focus on positive aspects of himself that were demonstrably not false.

Stapel’s fraud may shine a spotlight on dishonesty in science, but scientific fraud is hardly new. The rogues’ gallery of academic liars and cheats features scientific celebrities who have enjoyed similar prominence. The once-celebrated South Korean stem-cell researcher Hwang Woo Suk stunned scientists in his field a few years ago after it was discovered that almost all of the work for which he was known was fraudulent. The prominent Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser resigned in 2011 during an investigation by the Office of Research Integrity at the Department of Health and Human Services that would end up determining that some of his papers contained fabricated data.

Every year, the Office of Research Integrity uncovers numerous instances­ of bad behavior by scientists, ranging from lying on grant applications to using fake images in publications. A blog called Retraction Watch publishes a steady stream of posts about papers being retracted by journals because of allegations or evidence of misconduct.

Each case of research fraud that’s uncovered triggers a similar response from scientists. First disbelief, then anger, then a tendency to dismiss the perpetrator as one rotten egg in an otherwise-honest enterprise. But the scientific misconduct that has come to light in recent years suggests at the very least that the number of bad actors in science isn’t as insignificant as many would like to believe. And considered from a more cynical point of view, figures like Hwang and Hauser are not outliers so much as one end on a continuum of dishonest behaviors that extend from the cherry-picking of data to fit a chosen hypothesis — which many researchers admit is commonplace — to outright fabrication. Still, the nature and scale of Stapel’s fraud sets him apart from most other cheating academics. “The extent to which I did it, the longevity of it, makes it extreme,” he told me. “Because it is not one paper or 10 but many more.”

Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.

When I asked Stapel if he had told me the truth, he looked offended. He didn’t have any reason to lie anymore, he said. For more than a decade, he ran an experiment in deceit, and now he was finally ready for the truth — to understand how and why he ended up in this place. “When you live your life and suddenly something extreme happens,” he said, “your whole life becomes a bag of possible explanations for why you are here now.”

Stapel lives in a picturesque tree-lined neighborhood in Tilburg, a quiet city of 200,000 in the south of the Netherlands. One afternoon last November, he sat in his kitchen eating a quickly assembled lunch of cheese, bread and chocolate sprinkles, running his fingers through his hair and mulling the future. The universities investigating him were preparing to come out with a final report a week later, which Stapel hoped would bring an end to the incessant flogging he had received in the Dutch media since the beginning of the scandal. The report’s publication would also allow him to release a book he had written in Dutch titled “Ontsporing” — “derailment” in English — for which he was paid a modest advance. The book is an examination of his life based on a personal diary he started after his fraud was made public. Stapel wanted it to bring both redemption and profit, and he seemed not to have given much thought to whether it would help or hurt him in his narrower quest to seek forgiveness from the students and colleagues he duped.

Stapel brought out individually wrapped chocolate bars for us to share. As we ate them, I watched him neatly fold up his wrappers into perfectly rectangular shapes. Later, I got used to his reminding me not to leave doors ajar when we walked in or out of a room. When I pointed this out, he admitted to a lifelong obsession with order and symmetry.

Several times in our conversation, Stapel alluded to having a fuzzy, postmodernist relationship with the truth, which he agreed served as a convenient fog for his wrongdoings. “It’s hard to know the truth,” he said. “When somebody says, ‘I love you,’ how do I know what it really means?” At the time, the Netherlands would soon be celebrating the arrival of St. Nicholas, and the younger of his two daughters sat down by the fireplace to sing a traditional Dutch song welcoming St. Nick. Stapel remarked to me that children her age, which was 10, knew that St. Nick wasn’t really going to come down the chimney. “But they like to believe it anyway, because it assures them of presents,” he told me with a wink.

In his early years of research — when he supposedly collected real experimental data — Stapel wrote papers laying out complicated and messy relationships between multiple variables. He soon realized that journal editors preferred simplicity. “They are actually telling you: ‘Leave out this stuff. Make it simpler,’ ” Stapel told me. Before long, he was striving to write elegant articles.

On a Sunday morning, as we drove to a village near Maastricht to see his parents, Stapel reflected on why his behavior had sparked such outrage in the Netherlands. “People think of scientists as monks in a monastery looking out for the truth,” he said. “People have lost faith in the church, but they haven’t lost faith in science. My behavior shows that science is not holy.”

What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.” He named two psychologists he admired — John Cacioppo and Daniel Gilbert — neither of whom has been accused of fraud. “They give a talk in Berlin, two days later they give the same talk in Amsterdam, then they go to London. They are traveling salesmen selling their story.”

The car let out a warning beep to indicate that we had exceeded the speed limit. Stapel slowed down. I asked him if he wished there had been some sort of alarm system for his career before it unraveled. “That would have been helpful, sure,” he said. “I think I need shocks, though. This is not enough.” Some friends, he said, asked him what could have made him stop. “I am not sure,” he told me. “I don’t think there was going to be an end. There was no stop button. My brain was stuck. It had to explode. This was the only way.”

Stapel’s father, Rob, who is in his 80s, walked out to greet us when we arrived. Stapel’s mother, Dirkje, also in her mid-80s and a foot shorter than Stapel, made him tilt his head so that she could check out a rash on his forehead, which he said was due to stress. He gave them a copy of his book. His mother thumbed through the pages. “I never knew Diederik was so unhappy all these years,” she told me, referring to the guilt and shame that Stapel described having lived with through his academic career.

Stapel was the youngest of four children. The family lived near Amsterdam, where Rob, a civil engineer, worked as a senior manager of the Schiphol Airport. Stapel told me that his father’s devotion to his career led him to grow up thinking that individuals were defined by what they accomplished professionally. “That’s what my parents’ generation was like,” he said. “You are what you achieve.”

In high school, where Stapel says he excelled in his studies and at sports, he wrote and acted in plays. One of his friends was a student named Marcelle, a fellow actor who would later become his wife. After school, Stapel briefly studied acting at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania before deciding his acting talents were mediocre and returning to the Netherlands to get an undergraduate degree in psychology.

He eventually applied to the University of Amsterdam to do a Ph.D. on how people judge others. He didn’t get that slot — it went to a young applicant from Leiden named Marcel Zeelenberg. But a year later, Stapel joined the university to pursue a doctorate on a different topic, assimilation and contrast, under a respected psychologist named Willem Koomen.

Assimilation and contrast are both established psychological effects. When people are primed with, or made to deliberate on, an abstract concept — honesty, say, or arrogance — they can be more likely to see it elsewhere. That’s assimilation. Contrast can occur when people compare something to a concrete example, comparing themselves, for instance, to the image of a supermodel.

For his dissertation, Stapel did a series of experiments showing that whether people assimilate or contrast depends on context. In doing these studies, Stapel had to go through the tedium and messiness that are the essence of empirical science. To prime subjects, he designed word puzzles that, when solved, led his undergraduate volunteer subjects to words like “intelligence” or “Einstein.” Then he asked them to read a story about a character and score the character on a numerical scale for intelligence, friendliness and other traits. Stapel found that when subjects were primed with something in the abstract, like the word “intelligence,” they tended to find that trait more readily in themselves and in others, judging, for instance, a story character as more intelligent than they otherwise would have. Yet when they were primed with an example of the trait — the word “Einstein” — they tended to make a comparison, judging the story character as less intelligent.

Stapel got his Ph.D. in 1997. Koomen, who is still a professor at Amsterdam, does not doubt the integrity of Stapel’s experiments for the doctorate. “Stapel was an extraordinarily gifted, enthusiastic and diligent Ph.D. student,” Koomen told me via e-mail. “It was a privilege to work with him.”

At Amsterdam, Stapel and Zeelenberg became close friends, working at two opposite corners on the same floor of the department. Zeelenberg was from a blue-collar family; Stapel came from a more privileged background. Unlike most graduate students, he wore suits on occasion. Zeelenberg recalls him as being obnoxious and cocky at times, but only because “he did know things better.” He was also a “friendly, supportive warm guy,” Zeelenberg said. When Stapel and Marcelle decided to marry in 1997, Zeelenberg attended Stapel’s bachelor party on a boat ride along Amsterdam’s canals.

Stapel stayed in Amsterdam for three years after his Ph.D., writing papers that he says got little attention. Nonetheless, his peers viewed him as having made a solid beginning as a researcher, and he won an award from the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. In 2000, he became a professor at Groningen University.

While there, Stapel began testing the idea that priming could affect people without their being aware of it. He devised several experiments in which subjects sat in front of a computer screen on which a word or an image was flashed for one-tenth of a second — making it difficult for the participants to register the images in their conscious minds. The subjects were then tested on a task to determine if the priming had an effect.

In one experiment conducted with undergraduates recruited from his class, Stapel asked subjects to rate their individual attractiveness after they were flashed an image of either an attractive female face or a very unattractive one. The hypothesis was that subjects exposed to the attractive image would — through an automatic comparison — rate themselves as less attractive than subjects exposed to the other image.

The experiment — and others like it — didn’t give Stapel the desired results, he said. He had the choice of abandoning the work or redoing the experiment. But he had already spent a lot of time on the research and was convinced his hypothesis was valid. “I said — you know what, I am going to create the data set,” he told me.

Sitting at his kitchen table in Groningen, he began typing numbers into his laptop that would give him the outcome he wanted. He knew that the effect he was looking for had to be small in order to be believable; even the most successful psychology experiments rarely yield significant results. The math had to be done in reverse order: the individual attractiveness scores that subjects gave themselves on a 0-7 scale needed to be such that Stapel would get a small but significant difference in the average scores for each of the two conditions he was comparing. He made up individual scores like 4, 5, 3, 3 for subjects who were shown the attractive face. “I tried to make it random, which of course was very hard to do,” Stapel told me.

Doing the analysis, Stapel at first ended up getting a bigger difference between the two conditions than was ideal. He went back and tweaked the numbers again. It took a few hours of trial and error, spread out over a few days, to get the data just right.

He said he felt both terrible and relieved. The results were published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2004. “I realized — hey, we can do this,” he told me.

Stapel’s career took off. He published more than two dozen studies while at Groningen, many of them written with his doctoral students. They don’t appear to have questioned why their supervisor was running many of the experiments for them. Nor did his colleagues inquire about this unusual practice.

In 2006, Stapel moved to Tilburg, joining Zeelenberg. Students flocked to his lab, and he quickly rose in influence. In September 2010, he became dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He could have retreated from active research to focus on administration, but, he told me, he couldn’t resist the allure of fabricating new results. He had already made up the data for the Utrecht train-station study and was working on the paper that would appear in Science the following year. Colleagues sought him out to take part in new collaborations.

Stapel designed one such study to test whether individuals are inclined to consume more when primed with the idea of capitalism. He and his research partner developed a questionnaire that subjects would have to fill out under two subtly different conditions. In one, an M&M-filled mug with the word “kapitalisme” printed on it would sit on the table in front of the subject; in the other, the mug’s word would be different, a jumble of the letters in “kapitalisme.” Although the questionnaire included questions relating to capitalism and consumption, like whether big cars are preferable to small ones, the study’s key measure was the amount of M&M’s eaten by the subject while answering these questions. (The experimental approach wasn’t novel; similar M&M studies had been done by others.) Stapel and his colleague hypothesized that subjects facing a mug printed with “kapitalisme” would end up eating more M&M’s.

Stapel had a student arrange to get the mugs and M&M’s and later load them into his car along with a box of questionnaires. He then drove off, saying he was going to run the study at a high school in Rotterdam where a friend worked as a teacher.

Stapel dumped most of the questionnaires into a trash bin outside campus. At home, using his own scale, he weighed a mug filled with M&M’s and sat down to simulate the experiment. While filling out the questionnaire, he ate the M&M’s at what he believed was a reasonable rate and then weighed the mug again to estimate the amount a subject could be expected to eat. He built the rest of the data set around that number. He told me he gave away some of the M&M stash and ate a lot of it himself. “I was the only subject in these studies,” he said.

Around the same time that Stapel was planning this study — which would not end up being published — he was approached by another colleague of his at Tilburg, Ad Vingerhoets, who asked Stapel to help him design a study to understand whether exposure to someone crying affects empathy. Stapel came up with what Vingerhoets told me was an “excellent idea.” They would give elementary-school children a coloring task in which half the kids would be asked to color an inexpressive cartoon character, while the other half would have to color the same character shown shedding a tear. Upon completing the task, the children would receive candy and then be asked if they were willing to share the candy with other children — a measure of pro-social behavior.

Stapel and Vingerhoets worked together with a research assistant to prepare the coloring pages and the questionnaires. Stapel told Vingerhoets that he would collect the data from a school where he had contacts. A few weeks later, he called Vingerhoets to his office and showed him the results, scribbled on a sheet of paper. Vingerhoets was delighted to see a significant difference between the two conditions, indicating that children exposed to a teary-eyed picture were much more willing to share candy. It was sure to result in a high-profile publication. “I said, ‘This is so fantastic, so incredible,’ ” Vingerhoets told me.

He began writing the paper, but then he wondered if the data had shown any difference between girls and boys. “What about gender differences?” he asked Stapel, requesting to see the data. Stapel told him the data hadn’t been entered into a computer yet.

Vingerhoets was stumped. Stapel had shown him means and standard deviations and even a statistical index attesting to the reliability of the questionnaire, which would have seemed to require a computer to produce. Vingerhoets wondered if Stapel, as dean, was somehow testing him. Suspecting fraud, he consulted a retired professor to figure out what to do. “Do you really believe that someone with [Stapel’s] status faked data?” the professor asked him.

“At that moment,” Vingerhoets told me, “I decided that I would not report it to the rector.”

If Stapel’s status served as a shield, his confidence fortified him further. His presentations at conferences were slick and peppered with humor. He viewed himself as giving his audience what they craved: “structure, simplicity, a beautiful story.” Stapel glossed over experimental details, projecting the air of a thinker who has no patience for methods. The tone of his talks, he said, was “Let’s not talk about the plumbing, the nuts and bolts — that’s for plumbers, for statisticians.” If somebody asked a question — on the possible effect of changing a condition in the experiment, for example — he made things up on the spot. “I would often say, ‘Well, I have thought about this, we did another experiment which I haven’t reported here in which we tried that and it didn’t work.’ ”

And yet as part of a graduate seminar he taught on research ethics, Stapel would ask his students to dig back into their own research and look for things that might have been unethical. “They got back with terrible lapses­,” he told me. “No informed consent, no debriefing of subjects, then of course in data analysis, looking only at some data and not all the data.” He didn’t see the same problems in his own work, he said, because there were no real data to contend with.

Rumors of fraud trailed Stapel from Groningen to Tilburg, but none raised enough suspicion to prompt investigation. Stapel’s atypical practice of collecting data for his graduate students wasn’t questioned, either. Then, in the spring of 2010, a graduate student noticed anomalies in three experiments Stapel had run for him. When asked for the raw data, Stapel initially said he no longer had it. Later that year, shortly after Stapel became dean, the student mentioned his concerns to a young professor at the university gym. Each of them spoke to me but requested anonymity because they worried their careers would be damaged if they were identified.

The professor, who had been hired recently, began attending Stapel’s lab meetings. He was struck by how great the data looked, no matter the experiment. “I don’t know that I ever saw that a study failed, which is highly unusual,” he told me. “Even the best people, in my experience, have studies that fail constantly. Usually, half don’t work.”

The professor approached Stapel to team up on a research project, with the intent of getting a closer look at how he worked. “I wanted to kind of play around with one of these amazing data sets,” he told me. The two of them designed studies to test the premise that reminding people of the financial crisis makes them more likely to act generously.

In early February, Stapel claimed he had run the studies. “Everything worked really well,” the professor told me wryly. Stapel claimed there was a statistical relationship between awareness of the financial crisis and generosity. But when the professor looked at the data, he discovered inconsistencies confirming his suspicions that Stapel was engaging in fraud.

The professor consulted a senior colleague in the United States, who told him he shouldn’t feel any obligation to report the matter. But the person who alerted the young professor, along with another graduate student, refused to let it go. That spring, the other graduate student examined a number of data sets that Stapel had supplied to students and postdocs in recent years, many of which led to papers and dissertations. She found a host of anomalies, the smoking gun being a data set in which Stapel appeared to have done a copy-paste job, leaving two rows of data nearly identical to each other.

The two students decided to report the charges to the department head, Marcel Zeelenberg. But they worried that Zeelenberg, Stapel’s friend, might come to his defense. To sound him out, one of the students made up a scenario about a professor who committed academic fraud, and asked Zeelenberg what he thought about the situation, without telling him it was hypothetical. “They should hang him from the highest tree” if the allegations were true, was Zeelenberg’s response, according to the student.

The students waited till the end of summer, when they would be at a conference with Zeelenberg in London. “We decided we should tell Marcel at the conference so that he couldn’t storm out and go to Diederik right away,” one of the students told me.

In London, the students met with Zeelenberg after dinner in the dorm where they were staying. As the night wore on, his initial skepticism turned into shock. It was nearly 3 when Zeelenberg finished his last beer and walked back to his room in a daze. In Tilburg that weekend, he confronted Stapel.

After his visit to the Utrecht train station on the day he was questioned by the rector, Stapel got home around midnight. His wife, Marcelle, was waiting for him in the living room, but he didn’t tell the whole truth until the next day. “Eight or 10 years of my life suddenly had another color,” Marcelle told me one evening in November, when Stapel left us alone to talk.

The following week, as university officials were preparing to make the charges public, the couple sat down to explain matters to their daughters. “Are you going to die?” the girls asked, followed by questions about two other issues fundamental to their lives: “Are you getting divorced?” “Are we going to move?” “No,” Marcelle answered. The girls were relieved. “Well, Daddy,” their younger daughter said. “You always say that you can make mistakes, but you have to learn from it.”

Marcelle described to me how she placed Stapel inside an integrity scanner in her mind. “I sort of scanned his life in terms of being a father, being my husband, being my best friend, being the son of his parents, the friend of his friends, being a human being that is part of society, being a neighbor — and being a scientist and teacher,” she told me. “Then I found out for myself that all of these other parts were really O.K. I thought — Wow, it must be Diederik and science which is a poisoned combination.”

Nonetheless, she experienced waves of anger. She was furious thinking about the nights when Stapel wouldn’t come to bed because he was working on his research. “I said, ‘It’s for science,’ ” she told me. “But it’s not.” She struggled to understand why he had plied his students with fake data. She explained it to herself as a twisted effort by Stapel to give his students a perfect research life, similar to the one he built for himself. In doing so, of course, “he made their worlds really unhappy and imperfect,” she said.

In late October, nearly two months after the scandal broke, the university issued an interim report portraying Stapel as an arrogant bully who cozied up to students in order to manipulate them. Stapel broke down after reading the personality assessment. “He was calling for his mother, he was freaking out,” Marcelle told me. “He was trying to get out of the window.” Stapel’s psychiatrist prescribed extra medication, and a friend made him promise Marcelle that he would not kill himself. To escape the media’s glare, he went to spend a few days with his brother in Budapest.

Back in Tilburg, Stapel sank into a deep depression. Through the winter he filled a series of Moleskine diaries with reflections on his life. It was an accounting exercise encouraged by his therapist. Forgiven by his wife, Stapel wondered if he would ever be forgiven by those he had damaged the most — his students and postdocs.

A few reached out. One day in December 2011, Saskia Schwinghammer, a former student and now a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht, visited him at his home. Stapel wept as he apologized. He reminded her that she and other students were in no way to blame, that they did not have to feel they should have been more discerning when accepting data from him. “You came up with these ideas,” Stapel told her. “You designed the studies. I took away one little thing from the process. Don’t let people think that you’re worthless because you worked with me.”

Schwinghammer left teary-eyed. “It was good to have seen you,” she said. A year later, she told me she had forgiven the man but not his actions. “There are good people doing bad things,” she said, “there are bad people doing good things.” She put Stapel in the former category.

At the end of November, the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.” If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees identified several practices as “sloppy science” — misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be.

The adjective “sloppy” seems charitable. Several psychologists I spoke to admitted that each of these more common practices was as deliberate as any of Stapel’s wholesale fabrications. Each was a choice made by the scientist every time he or she came to a fork in the road of experimental research — one way pointing to the truth, however dull and unsatisfying, and the other beckoning the researcher toward a rosier and more notable result that could be patently false or only partly true. What may be most troubling about the research culture the committees describe in their report are the plentiful opportunities and incentives for fraud. “The cookie jar was on the table without a lid” is how Stapel put it to me once. Those who suspect a colleague of fraud may be inclined to keep mum because of the potential costs of whistle-blowing.

The key to why Stapel got away with his fabrications for so long lies in his keen understanding of the sociology of his field. “I didn’t do strange stuff, I never said let’s do an experiment to show that the earth is flat,” he said. “I always checked — this may be by a cunning manipulative mind — that the experiment was reasonable, that it followed from the research that had come before, that it was just this extra step that everybody was waiting for.” He always read the research literature extensively to generate his hypotheses. “So that it was believable and could be argued that this was the only logical thing you would find,” he said. “Everybody wants you to be novel and creative, but you also need to be truthful and likely. You need to be able to say that this is completely new and exciting, but it’s very likely given what we know so far.”

Fraud like Stapel’s — brazen and careless in hindsight — might represent a lesser threat to the integrity of science than the massaging of data and selective reporting of experiments. The young professor who backed the two student whistle-blowers told me that tweaking results — like stopping data collection once the results confirm a hypothesis — is a common practice. “I could certainly see that if you do it in more subtle ways, it’s more difficult to detect,” Ap Dijksterhuis, one of the Netherlands’ best known psychologists, told me. He added that the field was making a sustained effort to remedy the problems that have been brought to light by Stapel’s fraud.

When Stapel’s book came out, it got a mixed reception from critics, and it angered many in the Netherlands who thought it dishonorable of him to try to profit from his misdeeds. Within days of its release, the book appeared online in the form of PDFs, posted by those who wanted to damage his chances of making money. Unlike Schwinghammer and a few others, most of his former students have not responded to his apologies. Late last year, the Dutch government said it was investigating whether Stapel misused public funds in the form of research grants.

I asked Zeelenberg how he felt toward Stapel a year and a half after reporting him to the rector. He told me that he found himself wanting to take a longer route to the grocery store to avoid walking past Stapel’s house, lest he run into him. “When this is all over, I would like to talk to him,” Zeelenberg said. “Then I’ll find out if he and I are capable of having a friendship. I miss him, but there are equal amounts of instances when I want to punch him in the face.”

The unspooling of Stapel’s career has given him what he managed to avoid for much of his life: the experience of failure. On our visit to Stapel’s parents, I watched his discomfort as Rob and Dirkje tried to defend him. “I blame the system,” his father said, steadfast. His argument was that Stapel’s university managers and journal editors should have been watching him more closely.

Stapel shook his head. “Accept that this happened,” he said. He seemed to be talking as much to himself as to his parents. “You cannot say it is because of the system. It is what it is, and you need to accept it.” When Rob and Dirkje kept up their defense, he gave them a weak smile. “You are trying to make the pain go away by saying this is not part of me,” he said. “But what we need to learn is that this happened. I did it. There were many circumstantial things, but I did it.”

This flashmob recreates Rembrandt’s Night Watch, one of the most famous paintings in the world.

The slogan ‘Our Heroes are Back’ is used to announce that, after an absence of one decade, all major pieces in the Rijksmuseum’s collection are back where they belong. This is what happens when they suddenly emerge in an unsuspecting shopping mall somewhere in The Netherlands.

13 april gaat het Rijksmuseum open en komen Het melkmeisje, Jan Steen, De Nachtwacht en alle andere helden weer terug. Dit is wat er gebeurt als ze plotseling opduiken in een nietsvermoedend winkelcentrum. Ga naar http://www.ing.nl/rijksmuseum.

On April 2, 2013, I received an email from my friend Peter Maloney, director, writer, actor and a co-conspirator in my hoaxes, pointing me to a New York Times article about a fake kidnapping. He said,

“It reminds me of the night that you and your cohorts kidnapped Sam Shepard from the Astor Place Theatre on the opening night performance of his plays ‘The Unseen Hand’ and ‘Forensic and the Navigator’ (in which I played ‘Forensic’). I also remember that actor Beeson Carroll wore as his costume in ‘The Unseen Hand’, your Buffalo skin coat.”

I had caught the news story about the kidnapping on TV a day earlier. I immediately thought it was a prank. A video taken from a surveillance camera showed an abduction with people being thrown into a van on the street. But local police could not find evidence of anyone missing. As it turned out, it was a joke played by friends as a birthday prank.

Stories like this sometimes make it into the Art of the Prank blog, and I considered it. But, being under the weather I wasn’t highly motivated to do anything with it. Later, thinking about it, I realized how lucky these pranksters were. They could have been shot. They could have been arrested. Any number of bad things potentially could have happened because of this relatively harmless joke.

Peter’s email and this story inspired me to tell the story of my attempt to kidnap Sam Shepard, a version of which appears in a book by Ellen Ounamo called Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer (1986, St. Martins Press).

I can’t find my copy of the book, so I called my friend Tony Barsha in LA. Tony, a director and writer and also frequent co-conspirator, has a vivid recollection of the night. He accompanied me as one of the gangster-kidnappers. Tony found his copy of the book and said that beginning on page 83, producer Albert Poland tells the story. Poland describes me and the incident but leaves out many of the details.

Poland says there were six guys in double-breasted suits carrying violin cases who took part in the abduction scheme. Tony says it was Scot Kelman, Ray Johnson, Victor Eschbach, Bernie Warkentin, himself and me. They were mostly artists, directors and actors living on the Lower East Side in New York. My girlfriend Alexa Ginsburg had made a one-way ticket to AZUSA for me to use as a prop. AZUSA was where “The Unseen Hand” takes place.

I’d known Sam since the 60s. The times were intense. We were all passionate about what we believed in and there was much to be outraged about. Some of my writer and actor friends were part of Theater Genesis, which operated in St. Marks Church, a progressive church led by Father Michael Allen. I had met Father Allen in 1965 when he visited my studio at 199 Avenue B while I was constructing a ten foot tall, 200+ pound Crucifixion sculpture. Father Allen had heard that I intended to drag the sculpture through the streets up to Hoving’s Hill, a mound of construction dirt piled up in Tompkins Square Park, as a protest against the hypocrisy of the church, the war in Vietnam and man’s inhumanity to man. Father Allen graciously offered sanctuary at the church for both the sculpture and me in case something bad happened, which he and I both expected. We were both right.

Sam’s two plays were premiering on April 1, 1970 at the Astor Place Theater. Sam had asked me to exhibit my paintings-imaginary abstract landscapes-in the lobby. I was happy to do it. At the time, I was both a fine arts painter and a performance artist. The latter was garnering far more attention as the media were always looking for colorful stories. I apparently had a knack for giving them what they wanted.

I owned a 1937 4-door black Pontiac sedan with running boards, giant fenders and torpedo headlights. It looked like a stereotypical mobster car of the period. I was also into British motorcycles (Matchless, Triumph, BSA) and had a school bus I had gutted and converted into an elegant live-in camper. The latter had been photographed and written up in Penthouse magazine. Back then, it was possible to be a young artist and thrive with very little money. I lived part-time on an old 100 foot x 30 foot former Pennsylvania Railroad barge on the Hudson River-my floating (although it rarely floated) studio. I had acquired it and some other barges very inexpensively with a grand plan to turn the New York waterfront into an East Coast version of Sausalito, with a floating colony of artists. The old barges had been used for hauling cargo and produce up and down the Hudson. After acquiring the first barge, I visited the 79th Street Boat Basin. I pulled up to the office on my motorcycle, dressed in full leathers and told them I had a barge I’d like to moor. They very impolitely told me to get the fuck out. Pretty much the same thing happened at the East Side Boat Basin in the 20s. Being a downtown snob and never wanting to go north of 14th Street anyway, the notion of parking my barge on Staten Island, which I found out would be possible, and commuting to Manhattan, was out of the question. So I pursued a mooring space on the Jersey side of the Hudson River, still a major compromise.

I found a dilapidated marina operated by Audrey Boyer, a New York real estate manager, who had the lease for the riparian rights within the boundaries of the Township of North Bergen in New Jersey. To get there, you had to go down a dirt road flanked by sumac trees, cross a railroad track and wind through an other worldly experience of trash, derelict boats and crumbling piers leading to the acre of waterfront land. She and some older boat captains who lived there were happy for me to bring the barges and move in. I could also park my school bus and motorcycles. One grisly Dutch captain lived on a barge that had been a speakeasy with a bar and jukebox that played 78 RPM records. He and I often played chess as he told me stories of days gone by. He taught me how to maintain my barge. Across the river was the majestic skyline of Manhattan. Back then, you could take a small motorboat across to the 79th Street boat basin or you could drive through the Lincoln tunnel and get to the city in about 15 minutes.

The Hudson River, which was carved out by glaciers millions of years ago, travels at two speeds–faster on the Manhattan side and slower on the New Jersey side where sediment is deposited. This was convenient for us living on barges and old boats, as they often leaked and would settle on the bottom of the river. Our living and workspace would still be above the high tide level. If we had to move a barge to accommodate another one coming in, since the community grew after I promoted it in the Village Voice (in hindsight bringing unwanted attention to the whole thing), we would start the bilge pumps as the tide was going out and start caulking the seams. These boats were made of giant wooden timbers. Hopefully, when the tide came back in, you’d have sealed enough leaks and pumped enough water out, that the incoming tide would literally pop the barge off the Hudson’s muddy bottom and you’d be floating again. Then you could attach a motorboat to the barge and pull or push it around to make space. It was a dangerous maneuver as you had to fight the currents and hope the powerboat was strong enough to do it. This was reckless and primitive living, but so was illegal loft living south of Houston at the time. I had grown tired of taking a raw space, installing a bathroom and kitchen, sanding the floor, painting everything, and making the building secure only to become vulnerable to inspectors and duplicitous landlords looking to jack up the rent.

This idyllic waterfront scenario didn’t last as long as I wanted it to because the then mayor of the town, Angelo Sarrubi had other plans for the waterfront. Sarrubi, who also owned a construction company, had his office up on the hill above the derelict marina. One day he looked down and discovered that “hippies”, as we were called in the local newspaper, had invaded the township. On December 19, 1969, the front page of the Hudson Dispatch ran an article saying, “Hippie or Artist – you’ve got to go. That’s the message from the North Bergen township ‘establishment…’” Sarrubi didn’t admit it at the time, but he had plans to build a multi-million dollar marina. Problem was he didn’t have the lease on the land or the water rights and we were in his way. He was determined to get rid of us and he did.

Mayor Sarrubi was later indicted on a number of corruption charges. But, I and numerous other houseboat owners had had enough harassment and we moved. Some moved their barges further south and some moved to Staten Island. I eventually moved to a rural farm in Upstate New York and bought an old abandoned Opera House, which I donated to a group of community organizers who agreed to bring it back to life. But these are other tales for another time.

Back to kidnapping Sam Shepard. Love and romance can mean different things at different stages of one’s life. Looking back, it was total carnage. A war zone. There were bloody and dismembered emotions everywhere, the results of non-committed sex during and in between committed relationships. We treated relationships as if we were juggling balls. You would walk into a bar like St. Adrian’s, look around, and see those you had had sex with and those who were new to the scene. It was impossible to put notches on your belt because there would be nothing left to hold up your pants. As part of the radical, fuck-the-establishment, testosterone driven art scene, I cut an imposing figure decked out in a full length buffalo coat, southwest Indian hat, long hair and cowboy boots. I wasn’t looking for love in all the wrong places. I wasn’t looking for love at all. And, I wasn’t alone. Back then, my doctor would just automatically pull out the Penicillin when I or my friends went to see him. It was either a non-specific urinary infection or gonorrhea. He would top off the visit with a shot of B12.

It was surreal and heady for my friends and I to experience media attention resulting from our notoriety. My thinking, shared by my fellow kidnappers, was that all of Sam’s recent publicity was inflating his ego. We believed he was buying into the accolades of the status quo (i.e., he was becoming marketable and successful), and we wanted to “rescue” him. The idea was that we would kidnap Sam, take him up to the Port Authority and let him go with a one-way ticket to AZUSA. Why we thought this was funny or would work without any negative consequences is probably the same reason the recent ill-fated fake kidnapping idea was hatched. We didn’t give a shit about consequences.

At the opening night party in the lobby of the theater, Sam was playing drums with the Holy Modal Rounders band, Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber. I, wearing a zoot suit and carrying a violin case, supposedly with a Tomy gun inside, burst into the theater with my friends carrying fake guns. Sam saw us coming. O-lan Jones, his girlfriend, started screaming. Tony Barsha thought the plan was backfiring because Sam was paranoid believing Tony was really out to cause him harm. O-lan had recently been with Tony but was now with Sam.

As we went to grab him, Sam started throwing fists, swinging wildly and yelling. The crowd erupted. We decided this isn’t working, we’d better get out of here. So, we made a hasty retreat, jumped into the waiting car and took off, laughing our asses off. Sam and everyone else did not think it was funny. In retrospect, can you blame them? The cosmic and probably unintentional payback was that Sam, Albert Poland and the costume department had taken the gorgeous buffalo coat I had lent them as a prop for Beeson Carroll to wear, ripped out the inner lining and shredded the skin to make it look like it was tattered. They returned it to me when the play’s run was over.

I’m sure Sam and O-lan got over it quicker than I did. I really loved that buffalo coat. There’s a long story behind that as well.

Back to the barges. During my brief investigation of the history of the Hudson River while I was buying the barges, I thought I would do an environmental art piece. I found a company called Gusmer Coatings in Woodbridge, New Jersey that did liquid spray infusion of foam. Using two hoses with one connecting nozzle, they would spray two chemicals simultaneously and create hardened foam. It was like a liquid spray urethane foam that solidified in seconds. I wanted to build a gigantic armature out of wood on top of a barge, cover it with canvas and spray that with this white foam. It would be hollow on the inside but appear from the outside to be the tip of a giant iceberg. I figured I could do it fairly inexpensively. I could have a party inside as it was towed down the Hudson, let everyone off, and then have it towed out to sea and set adrift. I imagined it would be reported as a drifting iceberg and would get some media attention. Of course, I didn’t take into consideration that another boat might crash into it or that I’d most likely get arrested. Those would have been minor details.

I’d heard of an art collector by the name of Scull, a multi-millionaire who owned a fleet of taxicabs in New York. Andy Warhol had done a portrait of his wife. He was a Pop art collector and an art patron. So I figured, here’s my sponsor. I miraculously reached him and he agreed to meet me for dinner and listen to my pitch. I wish I had a film of his reaction when I told him my plans. Needless to say, Mr. Scull was extremely hesitant to get involved. That was undoubtedly lucky for me.

I share these stories not only because they are close to my heart, but also because they’re obviously still pertinent, as illustrated by the recent fake attempted kidnapping. The lesson here, as always, is that there are consequences for one’s actions. And, sometimes failing is your saving grace, the luckiest thing that could have happened to you.

GMAIL Blue:

From TechCrunch: The hits just keep coming for The Googs. Next stop on the April Fools Google Train? “Gmail Blue.” That should explain itself, but just in case, it took Google “six years to develop the technology” to turn Gmail blue. Google turns nine tomorrow, and it might as well just go for it.

A poke at Facebook? Who’s to say?

Bing goes Google:

From ZDNet: If you wander down over to Bing today, you’re surely in for a surprise. Microsoft is swiping a jibe at Google by changing how it looks if you search for “google” in the rival search engine. It’s still regular Bing under the surface, though. And just for extra heart-ripping measure, you can either “Search” or hit the soon-to-be infamous “I’m Feeling Confused” button instead.

More on what’s happening – check these links throughout the day for more:

For some people, April Fools’ Day is a day to say, “whoopie” — as in cushion.

Celebrated since medieval times, the humorous holiday is perfect for those people who want to get a rise out of friends, family — or even authoritarian figures who have tortured them the other 364 days of the year.

“It’s an excuse to vent frustrations, and be playful and harmless,” according to prank artist Joey Skaggs, whose specializes in fooling the media into printing outrageous stories.

One year, Skaggs convinced major New York newspapers that he’d created a “cathouse for dogs,” where pooches could get sexually gratified by a “savory” assortment of “hot bitches”; another time, he was a guest on Good Morning America, where he posed as the leader of a group of ex military commandos who were now helping dieters as the “Fat Squad,” a team that would physically restrain fat people, to keep them from breaking their diets.

But while pranksters like Skaggs spend months planning a stunt, most of us prank by impulse.

For those budding jokesters, there are novelty products like joy buzzers, fake ice cubes with bugs, and fart bombs to help them tease, annoy or fool their friends.

HuffPost Weird News has collected some of the classic prank novelties, as well as some new ones, to give you some ideas of what — or what not — to do on April 1.

We hold no responsibility for the consequences you may suffer for your attempts at humor (especially the fart bombs) but James Murray, one of the stars of the TruTV series “Impractical Jokers,” believes you’re less likely to get in trouble for any pranks you pull on April 1.

“Really, it’s the perfect day to do a prank because you don’t have to apologize to anyone,” Murray told HuffPost. “I wish we could do every episode on that day.”

Whatever prank you decide to do, be it an “I’m A Douche” coffee mug, a squirting ring or a nail through your head, Skaggs has some important advice: “All pranksters have to suspend any empathy, even momentarily, for the person being pranked.”

For more photos and info, visit here.

For three decades, New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade has offered the public an opportunity to express, in a comical way, its outrage against the foolishness of mankind. Thousands of participants in look-alike costumes with satirical floats creatively mock the thoughtless, corrupt and selfish acts of the past year. Kicking off at noon on Monday, April 1, the parade will march down 5th Avenue from 59th Street to Washington Square Park where revelers will party like there’s no tomorrow. It will conclude with the annual crowning of the King of Fools.

PRESS RELEASE:

New York, New York — The 28th Annual April Fools’ Day Parade will begin at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street at 12 noon, Monday, April 1, 2013. Rain or shine, the parade will march down Fifth Avenue to Washington Square Park for the climactic selection of the King or Queen of Fools from the costumed marching look-alikes.

The New York April Fools’ Day Parade was created in 1986 to remedy a glaring omission in the long list of New York’s ethnic and holiday parades. These events fail to recognize the importance of April 1st, the day designated to commemorate the folly of mankind. In an attempt to bridge this gap and bring people back in touch with their inherent foolishness, the parade annually crowns a King or Queen of Fools from parading look-alikes.

The theme for this year’s parade is “Forget the Big Bang Theory, Let’s Just Go Out With a Big Bang.” The parade blasts off with John Lee Hooker’s hit “Boom Boom Boom Boom.” Grand Marshall Gen. David Petraeus plays lead kazoo with the Up Your Wazoo Marching Band and is joined by N. Korean, Russian, Syrian, Iranian, Israeli and Chinese military processions showing off their big-bang bombs.

Setting the pace for the floats will be Lance Armstrong and his U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, which will be much slower this year as the team is no longer using performance enhancing drugs. The first float will be the Room Temperature IQ float featuring medical doctor, Rep. Paul Collins Broun, Jr. (R-GA), who says that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang Theory are “lies straight from the pit of Hell;” Arkansas Republican State Legislator John Hubbard, who believes slavery “may actually have been a blessing in disguise” for blacks; Arkansas legislative candidate Charlie Fuqua, who wants to deport all Muslims and establish the death penalty for rebellious children; Televangelist Pat Robertson, who encourages men to become Muslim and relocate to Saudi Arabia so they can legally beat their wives; and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who believes “the more you drink, the better you’re able to cope in Washington.” Demand to be on this float was so great this year that participation had to be limited. Next up is the Boy-Scout-Pedophile-Troup-Leaders-Against-Homosexuality protest float, followed by the Zumba Brothel Dance float featuring Alexus Wright and her johns, the GOP sponsored Clint Eastwood Empty Chair float, and the Viagra sponsored Hugh Hefner Marriage float.

Trojan Pleasure Carts will weave through the crowd handing out 10,000 vibrating sex toys. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Vendors will follow in their footsteps handing out eye glasses that blur vision so attendees won’t have to look at anything they consider immodest.

The marching celebrity look-alikes will include John Sununu and Lil Wayne spewing racial slurs; former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg threatening to sue the government for its generosity; Chuck Norris ushering in 1,000 years of darkness after Obama was re-elected; wannabe senator Geraldo Rivera pleading “Vote for me!”; and biographer Paula Broadwell scoping out anyone who appears at all interested in General Petraeus. Bringing up the rear, and making his final exit, will be the 2012 King of Fools Mitt Romney, triumphant with an overwhelming 47% of the vote from last year’s parade attendees. He’ll be followed by adoring throngs of self-deporting immigrants.

As the parade enters Washington Square Park, the festivities will begin. Food concessions will sell Pink Slime, Horsemeat and Desinewed Meat Burgers; there will be an Artificial Fiscal Cliff where patrons can line up to jump off; a booth offering Free Amish Haircuts and Shaves; a Papal Confessional booth where Pope Benedict XVI will confess to the public about predator priests, BBC presenter Jimmy Savile’s Papal Knighthood, and the Vatican butler, before his sequestration and eternal silence begins; a Demonstration of Fracking in Public Parks will show how the government plans to use wasted open spaces to support energy independence while searching for Jimmy Hoffa’s body. A Celebrity Auction booth will offer a virtual date with Manti Te’o and will sell the Reverend Jessie Jackson Jr’s personal bling collection to help pay back squandered campaign contributions. There will be a XXX Screening of Hulk Hogan having sex with his friend’s wife. And finally, an Ask-a-Scientific-Genius booth where Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) will discuss his belief that dinosaur flatulence might explain historic warming patterns; Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), current chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who describes environmentalists who warn about the seriousness of climate change “global warming alarmists”; Todd Akin, former Missouri GOP Representative, who believes “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Volunteers will circulate waiting lists for personal surveillance drones and semi automatic assault rifles as well as petitions to make it harder for the elderly, disabled and poor to vote. At sunset, carrying on the theme of the parade, there will be a Ted Nugent Patriotic Fireworks Display.

This year’s parade will be televised by Al Jazeera with guest commentator former Florida Tea Party Congressman Allen West who will amaze the crowd with his talent as an anal ventriloquist. The public is encouraged to participate, in or out of costume, with or without floats, and may join the procession at any point along the parade route. Floats can be no wider than 10′ and no longer than 30′. They can be self-propelled, towed, pushed or pulled. Customized bicycles, tricycles, baby carriages and aerial balloons are welcome. All participants are costumed look-alikes, and the Parade Committee assumes no liability for damages caused by satire. Parade floats and marchers must be at 59th Street and Fifth Ave no later than 11:30 a.m..

We are grateful for the generous support of Goldman Sachs which wishes to express appreciation for having gotten off scot-free after ripping off the public. Other proud sponsors include the Government Services Administration (GSA) offering free champaigne and caviar throughout the park; Chick-fil-A offering free food to gay couples who refuse to patronize the anti-gay restaurant chain; Pizza Hut redeeming themselves after their misguided dare to customers to ask debating presidential candidates if they prefer sausage or pepperoni; and the international cruiseship industry hoping to entice patrons to take their new less toxic and more sanitary virtual cruises.

The King of Fools will be chosen based on the loudest cheers at Washington Square Park. The winner will reign through March 31, 2014.

CONTACT:
Joey Skaggs, Committee Chair
212-254-7878, info@joeyskaggs.com
aprilfoolsdayparade.com

Just back from Paris and Cologne, where the BREAD ARMY conquered the streets with bread tanks in a peaceful invasion. The tanks were airdropped by parachutes made of tents. Passers-by were surprised getting confronted with them in the shopping malls and tourist hot spots. The BREAD ARMY critizises the waste of food by the wealthy nations, also water trading and the monopoly of food management causing millions of lives in the poor regions of our planet.



Related links: