Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 17, 1993 TAG: 9302170049
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID ZUCCHINO KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
DEA CLAIMS IT BROKE UP MYSTERY KILLER-DRUG LAB
In August, a rescue crew in Wichita, Kan., answered a 911 emergency call. A man named Joseph Martier had collapsed inside a dingy storage building at an isolated industrial park just outside town.Martier was unconscious from a drug overdose but recovered later at a Wichita hospital. It appeared to be just another drug-abuse episode - except for the drug. It was fentanyl, a lethal "designer drug" that can be hundreds of times more potent than heroin.
The near-death of Martier, 42, a Pittsburgh businessman now being held on drug charges, helped solve a lethal mystery that had vexed federal drug agents for a year. Since 1991, scores of people on the East Coast had dropped dead after shooting up fentanyl, a drug so strong that a fleck the size of a sugar crystal can kill a healthy adult. Agents had no idea where the drug was coming from.
The nondescript building where Martier collapsed proved to be part of the country's only operational fentanyl lab, the government now charges. The Drug Enforcement Administration says it is the only active fentanyl lab DEA agents ever have busted.
On Feb. 3, agents who raided the building found chemicals and equipment used to make fentanyl, a heroin-like drug the DEA calls "the serial killer of the drug world."
The same day, agents arrested two middle-aged Wichita suburbanites, each with an intense interest in science and chemistry.
One man - George Marquardt, 47 - was a chemical "genius" who had won a state science fair award as a teen-ager but was busted in 1978 for trying to mix LSD with methamphetamines. The other - Phillip "Sam" Houston, 45 - was described by friends as an eccentric oil geologist who had built an observatory in his home and unearthed meteorites for a university museum.
Marquardt was charged with manufacturing and distributing fentanyl, and Houston with distributing the drug, sometimes called "China White," on the street.
Between them, the DEA now charges, the work of these two amateur chemists was directly responsible for killing most - if not all - of the 126 East Coast addicts who died from shooting up fentanyl in 1991 and 1992.
"We can say without a doubt that this lab caused the deaths of many, many people in Philadelphia and in other cities on the East Coast," said Michael Pavlick, a DEA special agent in Philadelphia, where 21 people died of fentanyl overdoses from August to October.
Pavlick said the government may seek life sentences for the defendants under a federal law that covers deaths caused by illegal drugs. Prosecutors will try to match the fentanyl seized in Wichita with samples taken from some autopsies of fentanyl overdose victims, Pavlick said.
In New York, according to court documents filed there, a DEA chemist has compared fentanyl from Wichita - provided in December to an undercover agent - with leftover fentanyl found with overdose victims in New York. His conclusion: The two samples are "consistent."
Some of the Philadelphia junkies died so swiftly that syringes were still embedded in their arms. Almost every day in early September, someone in the city was falling over dead, killed by a massive overdose of fentanyl.
The victims probably thought they were buying heroin, drug agents said. The street dealers who sold the drug also probably thought it was heroin, they said.
Like heroin, fentanyl is a white crystalline powder that produces an intense euphoria. But unlike heroin, a grain of fentanyl the size of a pinhead can cause instantaneous respiratory arrest.
One form of fentanyl is 80 times more potent than heroin, DEA chemists say. Another form, allegedly produced in the Wichita lab, is 400 times more potent.
The drugs are chemical clones of the legal anesthetic fentanyl. The clones were first produced in underground labs in the late 1970s as substitutes for heroin.
Both fentanyl and heroin are diluted and sold in $20 street bags weighing roughly 30 milligrams each. But a safe dose of fentanyl is just one-16th to one-80th of a single milligram. To properly dilute a kilogram of pure fentanyl would require 200 kilos of cutting agents, said Anthony Senneca, a DEA special agent in Philadelphia.
"It's very difficult to get the mix just right," Senneca said. "If you get a hot batch that's not diluted properly, a lot of people are going to die."
Up and down the East Coast last summer, heroin junkies were shopping for heroin but buying fentanyl instead - and dying for their error.
The DEA was stumbling across strong batches of fentanyl everywhere. In Baltimore, 28 people overdosed on the drug in 1992. Twenty-three died that year in New York, where fentanyl was sold as "Tango and Cash." The deaths spread north to Connecticut and Boston, south to New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia, and on to South Carolina.
Meanwhile, someone was getting rich from making the fentanyl. Agents say a kilogram of fentanyl sells for $240,000 to $640,000, depending on purity. A kilo of heroin sells for $100,000 to $200,000; cocaine, for $20,000 to $25,000. Except for a $10,000 rotary evaporator to dilute the drug, making fentanyl does not require enormously expensive equipment or chemicals.
As the deaths continued, the DEA had been checking purchases of the dozen or so legal precursor chemicals needed to make fentanyl. The undertaking was a massive one. The chemicals are common. They are ordered for legitimate use hundreds of times a day from chemical-supply firms across the country.
Finally, there was a breakthrough. Agents came across a suspicious purchase by a Boston man named Christopher Moscatiello. From there, they traced more chemical buys in several states from the East Coast to the Midwest.
Late last year, an undercover DEA agent managed to buy fentanyl in Boston from Moscatiello, according to a DEA affidavit filed in Pittsburgh. During the yearlong investigation, agents collected 37 pounds of fentanyl in the city.
But even though agents knew Moscatiello and others were buying chemicals, they did not know where the fentanyl was being cooked. They were able to narrow the list of possible cities to about 20 across the country, one agent said.
Then Moscatiello came through. He mentioned to the undercover agent in Boston that his supplier had nearly died from a fentanyl overdose in Wichita.
Wichita? It was an odd site for a fentanyl overdose. The city had never reported a fentanyl death.
Agents checked with the Wichita rescue squad, which gave them the address of the sheet-metal building where Martier had collapsed.
Agents found out that the building was registered to a company called Prairielabs, owned by Marquardt.
In Boston on Feb. 3, DEA agents prepared to arrest Moscatiello. Police told them that he had been found executed two days before, his hands bound and two shots fired into his skull.