“The class began with a video address by Helge H. Wehmeier, who was then in charge of Bayer’s United States operations. Mr. Wehmeier said that Bayer executives were expected to obey ‘not only the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law as well.’ And he urged them to call his office if they learned of violations. Mr. Couto recalled how the room had erupted with laughter.” New York Times, April 15, 2003
Bayer negotiated a deal with a Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care organizations in the United States, whereby it falsified the price of Cipro in order to maintain an artificially high price to Medicare services, which, by law, must receive the lowest price on any pharmaceutical product.
The United States Attorney’s Office in Boston caught Bayer doing this because an honest employee named George J. Couto blew the whistle. He received $34 million in reward money. Except that he died of cancer, so his family got the money.
Bayer had to pay $257 million as a settlement. But the part of this story that I like is the laughter in the room when Mr. Wehmeier asked his employees to report any violations of the law to him, personally. The New York Times doesn’t tell us how Wehmeier reacted. Maybe he was astonished at the laughter. Maybe he laughed with them. Maybe he didn’t even know about the laughter because it was a “video address”.
Either way, you have to think about corporate ethics here, and about California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law. There seem to be different rules of behavior in our society, depending on whether your are rich and powerful, like those Bayer executives, or poor and destitute like Leandro Andrade.
That laughter wasn’t really directed at Wehemeier. It was directed at poor little Leandro Andrade— the poor schmuck who got 50 years in prison for stealing $150 worth of video tapes. [Each of the tapes was treated as a separate crime by prosecutors in order to meet the “three strikes” criteria. What if each Cipro tablet had been treated the same way? Would executives from Bayer be sent to prison for 50 years times several million pills?]
Leandro didn’t get a chance to pay a fine instead of going to prison. And he didn’t get the opportunity of having his employer provide him with a top-notch lawyer, and then pay the fine.
And he didn’t get a chance to sit in a room with any of the dozens of other miserable miscreants who are all serving life sentences for petty theft and laugh as a California policeman warned them all not to commit three felonies.