Drug Makers’ Feared Enemy Switches Sides, as Their Lawyer

He racked up numerous convictions and mega-settlements in nearly a quarter-century, using whistle-blowers and secret grand juries to pressure major pharmaceutical and health companies into ending illegal practices like kickbacks to doctors and misuse of blockbuster drugs.

Once described as a cross between a firebrand preacher and a charismatic litigator, Mr. Loucks burnished a reputation aptly captured in a Fortune magazine headline: “Why Do Drug Companies Fear This Man? Maybe because he’s declared all-out war on cheats in the drug industry.”

But a year and a half ago, Mr. Loucks, a Republican, left the United States attorney’s office in Boston after he was passed over for the top post and President Obama appointed a Democrat. Instead, Mr. Loucks joined Skadden, Arps last July, and has startled former allies by emerging in recent months as zealous a corporate defender as he was a prosecutor, complete with proposals seeking more lenient treatment for the medical companies he once vilified.

In a six-page memo last month to clients in his portfolio, which may include some of the very same corporations he prosecuted repeatedly, Mr. Loucks bemoaned strategies he had embraced.

“The government and the whistle-blower have an advantage,” he wrote, complaining that federal investigators were now using the law unfairly. “While prosecutors often assert the company has engaged in ‘serious’ misconduct, they keep the company in the dark, often for years, as to the specific allegations.”

Those who have known him are quick to recall that his crowning achievement was a $2.3 billion settlement against Pfizer that capped a four-year secret investigation.

“We’re all disappointed that he’s gone over to the dark side because it seemed that he was a good prosecutor,” said Shelley R. Slade, a whistle-blowers’ lawyer in Washington and a former senior counsel for health care fraud at the Justice Department.

“I looked upon it with sadness,” Patrick Burns, spokesman for the whistle-blower advocacy group Taxpayers Against Fraud, said of Mr. Loucks’ change. “He’s a good and honorable person. He did great work in the Boston office. He’s a good lawyer. It’s just too bad.”

Federal ethics rules prohibited Mr. Loucks from any dealings with the United States attorney’s office in Boston for a year after his resignation, and he can never be involved in cases he investigated directly. But he is not barred from representing clients he once prosecuted on other matters, and his law firm’s roster includes some of the biggest companies he once investigated, including Pfizer, Merck, Schering-Plough, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Medtronic.

He defends his newfound friendship with former foes, and notes that he’s still wearing cowboy boots native to his Oklahoma childhood even though he’s now working in the white-collar division of a prestigious law firm.

“While everyone calls it ‘the other side,’ I’m doing the same thing I’ve always done, which is zealously representing my clients,” he said.

And while he used to call some of those people’s actions “evil,” today he argues that drug and medical device companies are making strides in complying with federal billing, fraud and kickback laws. “They make products that have huge benefits to a number of people,” he said. Skadden, a 2,000-lawyer firm, has made several hires in recent years to amplify its health care practice.

In interviews and a lengthy e-mail exchange, Mr. Loucks said his views on the whistle-blower law had evolved.

The False Claims Act, with its triple damages, has been the government’s most powerful weapon against health care fraud since Congress in 1986 increased the rewards for whistle-blowers. Since then, taxpayers have recovered an estimated $28 billion from medical companies.

As a federal prosecutor in Boston, Mr. Loucks created a health care fraud unit and used the law, as well as the tools of secrecy and surprise, to reap major awards. The unit’s victories are renowned, starting with an $875 million payment in 2001 by TAP Pharmaceuticals. Whistle-blowers shared $95 million in that case, alerting companies and informants to the stakes involved.

For years, Mr. Loucks has argued that whistle-blowers are paid far much in health care fraud cases — bounties up to 30 percent, totaling $650 million in just the last two years, he said. These people would blow the whistle for less, he argued both inside the prosecutor’s office and more recently in a paper titled “the Great American Giveaway.” While that hostility toward what he considers the greed of some whistle-blowers is old news, Mr. Loucks’ views on unsealing their complaints are new.

In his May 12 memo to clients, Mr. Loucks urged some companies to press judges to unseal complaints more quickly. That way, he says, they can learn the scope of complaints sooner, identify witnesses and fight back harder.

“If Mike was still with the Justice Department, he could give you 10 reasons why this is a bad idea,” said Suzanne E. Durrell, a whistle-blowers’ lawyer in Boston who worked with Mr. Loucks when she was chief of the civil division for the United States attorney in Massachusetts.

Mr. Loucks says more openness would let companies clean up their own acts, even if it meant adverse publicity.

He points to new statistics that he says support his argument. The Justice Department reported to Congress that 885 False Claims Act cases involving health care fraud were pending under seal at the beginning of this year, with only about 200 prosecutors to juggle them. On average, a case was sealed for more than a year, and some much longer.

“That the government doesn’t have adequate resources to handle the cases is not a good cause to keep them under seal,” Mr. Loucks said in an interview, comparing it to a sports game where only one team is allowed to try to score. In these cases, that would now be his former team.

“I knew what I was doing on behalf of the government,” he said. “I don’t know if lawyers on the other side felt they were not able to adequately represent their clients while the case was under seal.”

Nicholas C. Theodorou, chairman of Foley Hoag’s business crimes defense group in Boston, said Mr. Loucks’ argument made sense from a corporate defense standpoint, and possibly would sit well with some federal judges who have questioned why cases remain under seal so long.

For his part, Mr. Loucks uses a baseball reference. Johnny Damon left his beloved Boston Red Sox in late 2005 to sign with “the evil empire, the New York Yankees,” Mr. Loucks said. Both teams won World Series with help from Mr. Damon.

Asked whether the “evil empire” analogy fit the Justice Department or Skadden, Mr. Loucks said, “One man’s evil empire is another’s home team.”

View the original article here

Now, to Find a Parking Spot, Drivers Look on Their Phones

It is part sleuthing and part blood sport. Circling, narrowly missing a spot, outmaneuvering other motorists to finally ease into a space only to discover that it is off limits during working hours.

In this city, it is also a vexing traffic problem. Drivers cruising for parking spots generate 30 percent of all downtown congestion, city officials estimate.

Now San Francisco professes to have found a solution — a phone app for spot-seekers that displays information about areas with available spaces.

The system, introduced last month, relies on wireless sensors embedded in streets and city garages that can tell within seconds if a spot has opened up.

Monique Soltami, a TV food and wine reporter, said she and her sister spent 25 minutes on Friday trying to park. “We were praying to the parking god that we’d find a spot,” she said. “If we had the app, we would not have to pray to the parking god.”

But the system could come with serious consequences. Safety advocates say that drivers on the prowl for parking could wind up focusing on their phones, not the road.

“It could be really distracting,” said Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where he studies the science of attention. And, he said, it could also be dangerous: “Most people are looking for parking spaces in places that have a lot of traffic and a lot of pedestrians.”

City officials acknowledge the potential problem. They are urging drivers to pull over before they pull up the city’s iPhone app, or to do so before they leave home. But the spots can disappear quickly, as any circling driver knows, and for plugged-in motorists in the habit of texting or glancing at the GPS, the urge to use the parking app is certain to mount as the frustration does.

Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said safety could actually improve if drivers quickly found a spot instead of circling and getting frustrated. “I get you off the streets as quickly as possible,” he said.

City drivers can testify to the frustration. Ms. Soltami drives into the city several times a week, she said, and spends 20 to 30 minutes searching for a spot each time. “That’s at least an hour I lose every week just looking for parking. It’s very frustrating,” she said.

She said she had heard about the new app, but had not yet downloaded it.

The $20 million parking project here, called SFpark, is backed by the Transportation Department and the Federal Highway Administration, which are looking into how to ease congestion and driver angst by making the most of limited parking.

San Francisco has put sensors into 7,000 metered parking spots and 12,250 spots in city garages. If spaces in an area open up, the sensors communicate wirelessly with computers that in turn make the information available to app users within a minute, said Mr. Ford, of the transportation agency. On the app, a map shows which blocks have lots of places (blue) and which are full (red).

San Francisco’s is by far the most widespread approach that several cities, universities and private parking garages are experimenting with.

Last December, Los Angeles worked with a company called Streetline to introduce a system covering spaces in West Hollywood, and it is expanding the program elsewhere. Streetline has since set up smaller projects on Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River, as well as at the University of Maryland and in Forth Worth, Tex.

More than 12,000 people have downloaded San Francisco’s app, which is available now only for the iPhone but which city officials say they hope to bring to all similar devices.

Eventually officials hope to be able to make regular adjustments to pricing on parking meters — which can be programmed remotely — and at garages so they can spread out demand, raising prices in areas where competition is fiercest and lowering it elsewhere.

Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies parking issues and is serving as an adviser on the San Francisco project, said cities and traffic experts were closely watching the federally funded experiments in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“If it works in San Francisco, the whole world will take notice,” Professor Shoup said.

Research conducted by Professor Shoup found that drivers looking for parking in a particular 15-block district in Los Angeles drove an estimated 950,000 miles a year, equivalent to four trips to the moon.

Those wasted miles are bad for the environment, driver anxiety, the efficiency of bus systems and pedestrian safety, Mr. Ford said. San Francisco has the dubious honor of having the highest rate among big cities for accidents involving pedestrians and cars.

When it is started up, the city’s parking app warns drivers not to use the system while in motion. But safety advocates said that might not be sufficient. After all, they say, texting while driving is illegal in California and in many states, but a number of surveys, including one by the Pew Research Center, show that many Americans do it anyway. .

Elizabeth Stampe, executive director of Walk San Francisco, a pedestrian advocacy group, said she hoped the new parking app would lead to fewer accidents.

“It’s an innovative idea,” she said. “The safe way for people to use the device is for them to pull over, which they know they should do. The question is whether they will.”

But Ms. Soltami, the TV reporter, said using the app would probably join the array of activities already performed by drivers.

“We’re already looking at Google Maps and Facebook on the phone while we drive,” she said. “Aren’t we always looking at something on our phone, or changing the radio, or drinking coffee? You’re always slightly distracted when you’re driving.”

Malia Wollan contributed reporting from San Francisco.

View the original article here

Now, to Find a Parking Spot, Drivers Look on Their Phones

It is part sleuthing and part blood sport. Circling, narrowly missing a spot, outmaneuvering other motorists to finally ease into a space only to discover that it is off limits during working hours.

In this city, it is also a vexing traffic problem. Drivers cruising for parking spots generate 30 percent of all downtown congestion, city officials estimate.

Now San Francisco professes to have found a solution — a phone app for spot-seekers that displays information about areas with available spaces.

The system, introduced last month, relies on wireless sensors embedded in streets and city garages that can tell within seconds if a spot has opened up.

Monique Soltami, a TV food and wine reporter, said she and her sister spent 25 minutes on Friday trying to park. “We were praying to the parking god that we’d find a spot,” she said. “If we had the app, we would not have to pray to the parking god.”

But the system could come with serious consequences. Safety advocates say that drivers on the prowl for parking could wind up focusing on their phones, not the road.

“It could be really distracting,” said Daniel Simons, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, where he studies the science of attention. And, he said, it could also be dangerous: “Most people are looking for parking spaces in places that have a lot of traffic and a lot of pedestrians.”

City officials acknowledge the potential problem. They are urging drivers to pull over before they pull up the city’s iPhone app, or to do so before they leave home. But the spots can disappear quickly, as any circling driver knows, and for plugged-in motorists in the habit of texting or glancing at the GPS, the urge to use the parking app is certain to mount as the frustration does.

Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said safety could actually improve if drivers quickly found a spot instead of circling and getting frustrated. “I get you off the streets as quickly as possible,” he said.

City drivers can testify to the frustration. Ms. Soltami drives into the city several times a week, she said, and spends 20 to 30 minutes searching for a spot each time. “That’s at least an hour I lose every week just looking for parking. It’s very frustrating,” she said.

She said she had heard about the new app, but had not yet downloaded it.

The $20 million parking project here, called SFpark, is backed by the Transportation Department and the Federal Highway Administration, which are looking into how to ease congestion and driver angst by making the most of limited parking.

San Francisco has put sensors into 7,000 metered parking spots and 12,250 spots in city garages. If spaces in an area open up, the sensors communicate wirelessly with computers that in turn make the information available to app users within a minute, said Mr. Ford, of the transportation agency. On the app, a map shows which blocks have lots of places (blue) and which are full (red).

San Francisco’s is by far the most widespread approach that several cities, universities and private parking garages are experimenting with.

Last December, Los Angeles worked with a company called Streetline to introduce a system covering spaces in West Hollywood, and it is expanding the program elsewhere. Streetline has since set up smaller projects on Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River, as well as at the University of Maryland and in Forth Worth, Tex.

More than 12,000 people have downloaded San Francisco’s app, which is available now only for the iPhone but which city officials say they hope to bring to all similar devices.

Eventually officials hope to be able to make regular adjustments to pricing on parking meters — which can be programmed remotely — and at garages so they can spread out demand, raising prices in areas where competition is fiercest and lowering it elsewhere.

Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies parking issues and is serving as an adviser on the San Francisco project, said cities and traffic experts were closely watching the federally funded experiments in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“If it works in San Francisco, the whole world will take notice,” Professor Shoup said.

Research conducted by Professor Shoup found that drivers looking for parking in a particular 15-block district in Los Angeles drove an estimated 950,000 miles a year, equivalent to four trips to the moon.

Those wasted miles are bad for the environment, driver anxiety, the efficiency of bus systems and pedestrian safety, Mr. Ford said. San Francisco has the dubious honor of having the highest rate among big cities for accidents involving pedestrians and cars.

When it is started up, the city’s parking app warns drivers not to use the system while in motion. But safety advocates said that might not be sufficient. After all, they say, texting while driving is illegal in California and in many states, but a number of surveys, including one by the Pew Research Center, show that many Americans do it anyway. .

Elizabeth Stampe, executive director of Walk San Francisco, a pedestrian advocacy group, said she hoped the new parking app would lead to fewer accidents.

“It’s an innovative idea,” she said. “The safe way for people to use the device is for them to pull over, which they know they should do. The question is whether they will.”

But Ms. Soltami, the TV reporter, said using the app would probably join the array of activities already performed by drivers.

“We’re already looking at Google Maps and Facebook on the phone while we drive,” she said. “Aren’t we always looking at something on our phone, or changing the radio, or drinking coffee? You’re always slightly distracted when you’re driving.”

Malia Wollan contributed reporting from San Francisco.

 

Couple Admit To Their Roles In Kidnapping Of 11-Year-Old

 

Ms. Dugard, then 11 years old and now 30, was kidnapped in 1991 and subsequently held and sexually assaulted by Philip Garrido, now 60, and his wife, Nancy, 55, at their home outside Antioch, Calif., a Bay Area suburb. Mr. Garrido, who was on parole for a previous rape conviction, fathered two daughters by Ms. Dugard and built a secret backyard compound to hold her and the children.

That nightmare ended in 2009 when the authorities discovered Ms. Dugard and her children and arrested the Garridos, who had become increasingly open about bringing their captives into the world, sometimes passing them off as their own children and using Ms. Dugard to work in a family printing business.

A lengthy legal tussle followed the couple’s arrest, with a trial tentatively planned for August. But on Thursday, both Mr. Garrido and his wife pleaded guilty, with Mr. Garrido facing a maximum sentence of 431 years in prison, and his wife 36 years to life. Both waived their right to appeal — sentencing is scheduled for June 2 — and are expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Vern Pierson, the district attorney in El Dorado County, which covers South Lake Tahoe, thanked Ms. Dugard for her help in the case, which included testifying to a grand jury in September, adding that the plea deal would spare her “the grief and trauma” of a trial.

“Were it not for Jaycee’s strong cooperation with our office and the prosecution of the Garridos, we would not have been able to firmly stand by our position to take this case to jury trial,” Mr. Pierson said in a statement. “Jaycee’s courage and willingness to confront her abductors in court directly led to the defendants’ plea and life sentences.”

In a statement, Ms. Dugard said she was relieved that the Garridos had “finally acknowledged their guilt and confessed to their crimes against me and my family.”

Outside court, Stephen Tapson, Ms. Garrido’s lawyer, said both defendants agreed to the plea after prosecutors dropped some charges against Ms. Garrido providing Mr. Garrido pleaded guilty to almost the full indictment, The Associated Press reported.

“She obviously committed a serious wrong,” Mr. Tapson said, “but in her view now, she’s made peace with God and wants to get on with life, what’s left of it.”

Susan Gellman, Mr. Garrido’s lawyer, could not be reached for comment.

 

Global Update: Height: Very Poor Women Are Shrinking, as Are Their Chances at a Better Life

The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers.

Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.

“It’s a sobering picture,” said S. V. Subramanian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author. “It tells you the world is not getting to be a better place for women of lower socioeconomic status. For them, it’s getting worse.”

The study, published last week in the online journal PLoS One, analyzed data on 365,000 adult women in 54 poor and middle-income countries from the hundreds of huge Demographic and Health Surveys paid for largely by American foreign aid.

Only women ages 25 to 49 were included to avoid counting those young and growing, or old and shrinking. Women from Senegal and Chad were the tallest, while those from Guatemala and Bangladesh were the shortest.

The study found that the richest 20 percent of women in all the countries surveyed have grown. Those born in the 1940s averaged 5 feet 1 1/2 inches; those born in the 1980s averaged 5-foot-2.

Those in the poorest 20 percent averaged 5-foot-1, no matter what decade they were born in. Guatemala and Honduras had the biggest gaps in height between rich and poor women; Uganda and Ethiopia (above, where women sorted coffee) had the smallest.

 

Global Update: Height: Very Poor Women Are Shrinking, as Are Their Chances at a Better Life

The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers.

Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.

“It’s a sobering picture,” said S. V. Subramanian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author. “It tells you the world is not getting to be a better place for women of lower socioeconomic status. For them, it’s getting worse.”

The study, published last week in the online journal PLoS One, analyzed data on 365,000 adult women in 54 poor and middle-income countries from the hundreds of huge Demographic and Health Surveys paid for largely by American foreign aid.

Only women ages 25 to 49 were included to avoid counting those young and growing, or old and shrinking. Women from Senegal and Chad were the tallest, while those from Guatemala and Bangladesh were the shortest.

The study found that the richest 20 percent of women in all the countries surveyed have grown. Those born in the 1940s averaged 5 feet 1 1/2 inches; those born in the 1980s averaged 5-foot-2.

Those in the poorest 20 percent averaged 5-foot-1, no matter what decade they were born in. Guatemala and Honduras had the biggest gaps in height between rich and poor women; Uganda and Ethiopia (above, where women sorted coffee) had the smallest.

 

Global Update: Height: Very Poor Women Are Shrinking, as Are Their Chances at a Better Life

The average height of very poor women in some developing countries has shrunk in recent decades, according to a new study by Harvard researchers.

Height is a reliable indicator of childhood nutrition, disease and poverty. Average heights have declined among women in 14 African countries, the study found, and stagnated in 21 more in Africa and South America. That suggests, the authors said, that poor women born in the last two decades, especially in Africa, are worse off than their mothers or grandmothers born after World War II.

“It’s a sobering picture,” said S. V. Subramanian, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author. “It tells you the world is not getting to be a better place for women of lower socioeconomic status. For them, it’s getting worse.”

The study, published last week in the online journal PLoS One, analyzed data on 365,000 adult women in 54 poor and middle-income countries from the hundreds of huge Demographic and Health Surveys paid for largely by American foreign aid.

Only women ages 25 to 49 were included to avoid counting those young and growing, or old and shrinking. Women from Senegal and Chad were the tallest, while those from Guatemala and Bangladesh were the shortest.

The study found that the richest 20 percent of women in all the countries surveyed have grown. Those born in the 1940s averaged 5 feet 1 1/2 inches; those born in the 1980s averaged 5-foot-2.

Those in the poorest 20 percent averaged 5-foot-1, no matter what decade they were born in. Guatemala and Honduras had the biggest gaps in height between rich and poor women; Uganda and Ethiopia (above, where women sorted coffee) had the smallest.

 

RV parks offer EV owners respite from the road (and their range anxiety, too)

 By Michael Gorman posted Apr 10th 2011 2:37AM EVs are pretty great for getting around major metropolitan areas, but many still feel some range anxiety when it comes time to leave the city limits. True, purpose-built charging stations are few and far between at the moment, but there's another charging option for those who enjoy going green and crave the open road: campgrounds. Turns out the 50-amp, 240-volt RV hookups found in such places can do double duty as juice dispensers for the depleted batteries in your Volt, Leaf, or Tesla. All electric powered roadwarriors need is an adapter to plug in, a few bucks to pay for current, and a few hours of free time. It's not as fast as fueling up the old fashioned way, but RV parks provide plenty of perks (swimming pools, lakes, and seniors who love poker, for example) not found at your average filling station. So, who's up for an eco-friendly road trip?

View the original article here