The Tylenol Mafia (20 page)

*****

Zahn Drug served 1,400 drugstores in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana. The company had formed a network of 50 independent charter pharmacies in 1974 called Family Drug Centers. The Family Drug Center (FDC) stores were located throughout the Greater Chicago area from the Illinois-Wisconsin border to Logansport, Indiana, and had grown to 75 members in 1982, ten of which were located in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago.

The communications between McNeil officials and the Zahn Drug FDC affiliate, Kesling Drug, further indicate that Zahn Drug handled some or all of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules delivered to Chicago area outlets.

Kesling Drug was located in Logansport, Indiana, about 144 miles southeast of Zahn Drug’s headquarters and warehouse in Melrose Park. The interaction between McNeil executives and the owner of Kesling Drug on the day after the Tylenol murders was extensive and well outside the norm. The vast majority of Chicago area pharmacies never received a single call regarding the Tylenol tamperings from J&J or McNeil officials. Kesling Drug, however, received a great deal of attention from McNeil - an inordinate amount of attention in fact.

On the morning Johnson & Johnson learned about the Tylenol poisonings, a McNeil official called Kesling Drug and told the store’s owner to remove all of the bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from the store’s shelves. Yet, on that same day, J&J executives told the general public that the tampering problem was local, affecting only a few stores in the Chicago area. So it was certainly odd, even suspicious, that J&J was so concerned about getting the Tylenol capsules out of the Kesling Drug store located all the way down in the small rural town of Logansport, Indiana.

On Friday, October 1
^st
, David
Maroney
, from the Logansport
Pharos-Tribune
, interviewed
Estel
Kesling, the owner of Kesling Drug.
Estel
described the urgent calls she had received from McNeil executives the previous morning. “People started calling yesterday (Thursday), and we took it (Tylenol) all off the shelf,” she said. “McNeil already has called us twice on this. They made us go out and personally check all the lot numbers while they waited on the telephone. They called us twice, then said they would have a representative in here today (Friday),” recalled Kesling. These calls, because of the insistence, appear to have been emergency calls. They were followed the next day by a visit from a McNeil representative who then removed the Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from the Kesling Drug store.

J&J was especially concerned about the lot numbers on Kesling’s Tylenol bottles. The McNeil official who first called
Estel
Kesling told her to check the lot numbers on her Tylenol bottles while he waited on the phone. Surely, J&J’s madman had not gone all the way down to Logansport, Indiana to plant cyanide-laced capsules in Tylenol bottles specifically from Lot MC2880 at Kesling Drug.
 
J&J executives would have been concerned about the lot numbers
only
if they believed that the Tylenol from specific lots had been poisoned in a warehouse in the channel of distribution. The attention that McNeil officials paid to Kesling was inconsistent with the statements of J&J executives who assured consumers that the tamperings were a local issue only.

J&J Vice President, Larry Foster, told reporters, “It’s our strong belief that the contaminated product was limited to the Chicago area.” Logansport, Indiana is 130 miles southeast of Chicago. By no measure is Logansport in the Chicago area. Kesling Drug received its Tylenol from the Zahn Drug warehouse in Melrose Park. Johnson & Johnson officials were obviously very worried about Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in drugstores that had received shipments of Tylenol from Zahn Drug.

The official line is that Zahn Drug did not distribute any of the bottles of cyanide-laced Tylenol. The calls from McNeil executives to Kesling Drug suggest otherwise.
Those calls were not made out of an overabundance of caution either. Rather, they were targeted emergency calls. Two drugstores located just down the road from Kesling Drug - the Hook’s and the Haag drugstores - received no such calls from J&J or McNeil. That makes sense, because the Hook’s and Haag stores did not receive their Tylenol from Zahn Drug. The vast majority of retail stores in the Chicago area also never received calls or visits like the ones from McNeil representatives to Kesling Drug.

Chicago pharmacist, Robert
Wijas
, from the
Dinet
&
Delfosse
Pharmacy in Chicago, was interviewed by ABC-News six days after McNeil had made those urgent calls to Kesling.
Wijas
said a representative from Johnson & Johnson had been out that day [October 6
^th
] to pick up the pharmacy’s inventory of Tylenol capsules. The
Dinet
&
Delfosse
Pharmacy was located on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, just two miles south of the Walgreens store where Paula Prince had purchased a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol. Yet no J&J representative visited the
Dinet
&
Delfosse
Pharmacy until after J&J announced the recall of all Tylenol capsules.
J&J officials were obviously far more concerned about the source of a store’s Tylenol than its proximity to Chicago.

In addition to the close attention paid to Kesling Drug in Indiana, Johnson & Johnson was also extraordinarily concerned about the Extra Strength Tylenol capsules at a distributor’s warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania. On Friday, the day after the angst-ridden calls from McNeil executives to Kesling Drug, Jeff Montgomery, of the
Altoona Mirror
, contacted the owner of the “Altoona-area’s only pharmaceutical warehouse.” In 1982, the only pharmaceutical warehouse in the Altoona area was Value Drug, founded in 1934 by a cooperative of 19 local independent pharmacists to consolidate their purchasing power. Its products included pharmaceuticals and non-prescription medications, hospital equipment, health and beauty aids, nutritional supplies, and other healthcare-related products. Like Zahn Drug, Value Drug had a network of affiliated independent drugstores, and was the area’s largest independent drug distributor.

During a short period of time on Friday morning, October 1
^st
, the owner of Value Drug had three intense conversations with McNeil representatives. “They [McNeil] checked us three times within an hour this morning [Friday],” the owner told
the
Altoona Mirror
. “Naturally, we heard it all on television late last night, and the first thing this morning, McNeil was on the phone giving us the two lot numbers to check,” he said. “At 8:30 a.m.
a
McNeil pharmaceutical salesman checked our stock, and at 9 a.m.
a
McNeil consumer products man from Pittsburgh came and checked it again.”

“I think they bent over backwards,” said the owner of Value Drug, referring to the intense, rapid communication from McNeil officials and the speed with which they checked his stock of Tylenol capsules.

McNeil executives were obviously very concerned that Value Drug might have received a shipment of cyanide-laced Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. Once again, the actions of McNeil officials conflicted with Johnson & Johnson’s assertion that the tamperings had occurred at the Chicago area retail stores. Obviously, a madman, supposedly sabotaging Tylenol bottles in retail stores in Illinois, did not go to the Value Drug warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, 563 miles east of the Tylenol murders crime scene, to sabotage bottles in that warehouse.

While McNeil representatives were rushing out to check the potentially poisoned Tylenol capsules at Value Drug, Larry Foster was telling reporters that the poisoned Tylenol capsules came from two different plants, which “leads us to believe strongly that the problem rests in Chicago.” But on that very same morning, a McNeil official called the owner of Value Drug in Altoona, Pennsylvania to make sure he did not deliver any Extra Strength Tylenol capsules to any of his customers. Then at 8:30 a.m., a McNeil representative went to the Value Drug warehouse in Altoona to “check” the Tylenol in the company’s warehouse. Thirty minutes later, at 9:00 a.m., a McNeil “product man” from Pittsburgh showed up at Value Drug to “check” the Tylenol inventory again. Pittsburgh is 96 miles west of Altoona, so this McNeil “product man” must have hit the road early in the morning to get out to Value Drug by 9:00 a.m.

On that same morning, J&J spokesperson, Marshall Malloy, said the company was not issuing a recall for Tylenol from Lot 1910MD. But J&J executives then reversed that decision soon after two McNeil representatives visited the Value Drug warehouse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and checked that distributor’s stock of Tylenol capsules from Lots MC2880 and 1910MD. J&J executives evidently understood that the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules from those lots had been poisoned in a warehouse in the channel of distribution.

Around the same time J&J officials were checking the Tylenol capsules at the Value Drug warehouse on Friday, October 1
^st
, officials from the FBI, FDA, and IDLE initiated a series of visits to the Zahn Drug warehouse in Melrose Park and questioned the company’s employees about the Tylenol recently distributed from that warehouse. These officials had obviously traced at least some of the cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules back to Zahn Drug.

The Tylenol killer may have used Zahn Drug as an unwitting partner in his murderous plot. This company had a history of security problems dating all the way back to an infamous heist involving the notorious mob-connected Chicago lawman, Dick Cain.
In October 1963, a truck loaded with $250,000 worth of drugs was stolen from Zahn Drug’s warehouse in Melrose Park. Four months later Dick Cain, then chief of inspectors for the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, received a tip from mobster, Guy Mendola, that some of the stolen drugs were stored at the
Caravelle
Motel in Rosemont. Cain, along with Lieutenant James Donnelly and Sergeant John
Chaconas
, raided the motel and recovered $43,000 of the stolen drugs.

Cain’s story sounded suspicious to State’s Attorney Daniel P. Ward, so he launched an investigation into Cain’s dealings with Mendola. The details of the scheme were never proven, but Ward maintained that Cain and Mendola had stolen the drugs. When they were unable to find a buyer for some of the drugs, Cain and his deputies conducted a fake raid to create the impression that their superb investigative work had led to the recovery of some of the stolen drugs, when in reality they were involved in the theft. Cain was fired and convicted of perjury for lying about the robbery to a Grand Jury. Cain’s sentence was later suspended.

Another puzzling crime involving Zahn Drug occurred in 1973 when
Melvyn Zahn, the president of Zahn Drug at the time, was kidnapped. Melvyn had left the Zahn Drug warehouse at 6:15 p.m. on June 27, 1973, and told the guard to call his wife and let her know that he’d be home in 25 minutes. While driving home, Zahn was pulled over in Franklin Park by a dark car with a flashing red light. Witnesses reported seeing Zahn gesturing with his arms and apparently arguing with two men standing alongside both cars. One of the men then pulled a gun and forced Zahn into the back seat of the dark car.

Zahn’s kidnappers moved him several times between places in Chicago, its suburbs, and a house in Michigan City, Indiana. In a $1.5 million ransom note that his kidnappers forced him to write to his father, Melvyn wrote in part, “As long as you cooperate with their demands, I’ll see you soon... [
but
] the first police officer who shows on the scene means instant death for me... please believe me when I say they are serious...” However, the kidnappers never told Louis Zahn where to deliver the ransom money.

The next day, even though the kidnappers had told Louis Zahn not to go to the police, newspapers across the country reported the kidnapping. They even quoted Melvyn Zahn’s attorney, who said, “The family is only interested in Mel’s well-being, safety, and immediate return ... The family has informed authorities that they wish to be allowed without any interference to meet any instructions and demands that will ensure Mel’s safe return.”

Stranger still is the public statement released by Richard G. Held Sr., special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office. “Of course we will stand aside,” Held said. “Our big concern is getting him [Zahn] back if he has been kidnapped.”

Zahn said that on Friday morning he gained the trust of his abductors who allowed him to use the bathroom un-shackled and un-watched. Zahn jumped from the first-floor bathroom window of the Michigan City house where he was being held and then fled from the house and waved down the first car he saw. As luck would have it, the car being driven by Michigan City Police Officer, Edward
Wojasinski
. The captain of the Michigan City police, Ralph
Stormer
, quickly organized a posse of police officers. Zahn then directed them back to the house where he had been held. As they approached the house, the suspects fled the scene in separate cars. Police immediately curbed one of the cars and grabbed the driver. As the other kidnapper sped away in the second car, police fired multiple “warning” shots at the car, and it rammed into several parked automobiles and stopped.

George Edward Ferris, age 53, and William Robert Calhoun, age 47, both from Chicago, were held on federal kidnapping charges. Investigators said the kidnappers had tracked Zahn for more than a year before abducting him. The FBI and federal sources would only say that the mysterious connection between Zahn and the two arrested kidnapers “is integral to the case,” but they never revealed what that mysterious connection was. Ferris and Calhoun pled guilty to charges of conspiracy and kidnapping, and they received prison terms of 12 and 15 years, respectively.