Another Whistleblower Movie: A True Story, But Is It Real?

September 22nd, 2009. By Hunter West

The whistleblower has come to the big screen yet again, although the movie starring Matt Damon that debuted Friday—The Informant—was hardly the same story as whistleblower John Kopchinski, whose six-year battle with Pfizer recently ended with a “qui tam” lawsuit settlement of $51.5 million for him.

 

For all his trouble in blowing the whistle on Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Mark Whitacre got 9 years in prison. But that’s not just because he worked with the FBI for three years, wearing wires and employing other surveillance devices in an attempt to expose alleged price-fixing of lysine, a food additive. Where Whitacre went wrong was losing his trust in the FBI, and going off the bipolar deep end by abandoning his quest to bring down the company, instead drifting down the embezzlement sinkhole, defrauding  $9 million from his own employer.

 

In the end, the whistleblower did more time for his own misdeeds, than the price-fixing executives he initially sought to expose.

 

In contrast, John Kopchinski had a slightly easier time, and a much bigger reward at the end of his struggle. The former soldier was earning $125,000 a year at Pfizer when he was fired in 2003 after he complained to his superiors about the underhanded marketing tactics the pharmaceutical giant was using to vend its drug Bextra.

 

He wound up getting an insurance job that paid him less than a third what he had been making at Pfizer. At the same time, his wife was pregnant with twins and the couple already had a baby son.

 

Life was tough. But Kopchinski was also young and fired up—and his Army training in tandem with his conscience would not allow him to stand idly by while a major corporation attempted to pull the wool over the eyes.

 

“In the Army I was expected to protect people at all costs,” Kopchinski said in a statement. “At Pfizer I was expected to increase profits at all costs, even when sales meant endangering lives.

 

“I couldn’t do that.”

 

Instead he filed a ‘qui tam’ lawsuit on behalf of federal and state governments and served as the lead plaintiff during a six-year battle to hold Pfizer accountable. Qui Tam plaintiffs earn a percentage of the overall award once the matter goes to trial.

 

In the Pfizer case, a $2.3 billion penalty leveled at the Pharma giant will earn Gulf War veteran Kopchinski and other plaintiffs a combined settlement in excess of $102 million in payments from the federal government under the False Claims Act. Kopchinski gets about half that amount.

 

A grand payday to be sure, but a long road to get there. Kopchinski was forced to dip into his retirement savings and nearly depleted his 401(k) after he has fired. His insurance job barely kept the family going at a time when the family was growing.

 

Whitacre, on the other hand, missed such a payday. He got a prison term instead, by his own hand. However he may be in for some better luck now that he is out of prison and back working, this time at a company in Fresno called Cypress Systems Inc. The lead researcher in the quest to find a cure for cancer, it’s Dr. Mark Whitacre now, having earned his PH.D. And the movie, together with the book on his life that spawned the Hollywood production, will serve to put Cypress Systems—as well as himself—on the global stage. That’s not a bad thing.

 

But if he had to do it all over again, he wouldn’t. The real Dr. Mark Whitacre—not the movie persona of him portrayed by Matt Damon—tells a reporter for CBS 47 in Fresno that he would have simply left the company rather than go through what he did. And even with the FBI coming out in support of him, hailing Whitacre as a national hero and seeking a Presidential Pardon for their one-time informant, Whitacre wishes he had never taken that route.

 

It’s hard to deny your conscience—or your wife, for that matter. Whitacre’s wife Ginger was the one who implored her husband to expose his employer’s wrongdoing. And whistleblowers-to-be may have dollar signs in their eyes and grand illusions of book and movie deals down the road.

 

Movies like The Insider, the Russell Crowe film that exposed corruption in the tobacco industry, and The Informant that is out now can combine with a settlement the size of Pfizer’s liability to get the phones humming at Taxpayers Against Fraud, a US not-for-profit organization that helps connect whistleblowers with attorneys on False Claims Act cases. Spokesperson Patrick Burns calls the Pfizer settlement of $2.3 billion “a jaw-dropping amount of money.”

 

Dean Zerbe, senior counsel for the National Whistleblower Center is seeing first hand the impact such a sizeable settlement is having. The day the Pfizer settlement was announced, Zerbe was approached by an employee of a hospital who claimed that it was overbilling the government, charging for products it had received for free.

 

But not every whistleblower case becomes the subject of a book, or a movie. Most settlement shares are a lot less than Mr. Kopchinski got.

 

“If this was so easy everyone would be a millionaire,” Burns said.

 

That said, if you’re up for a fight and you have the balls to stay with it through thick and thin to the bitter end, there are laws and statutes available to protect the whistleblower. And companies who thumb their nose at moral, legal and corporate responsibility need to be held accountable by somebody.

 

Maybe that somebody might be you. Just be prepared, have realistic expectations, prepare for the worst, and go in with your eyes open. Musing over dollar signs, and who will play you in the movie, means you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.       

Tags: John Kopchinski, Pfizer, Whistleblowers

This was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Employment . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.