The Great Prostate Hoax by Richard J. Ablin

Author:Richard J. Ablin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2014-01-14T00:00:00+00:00

Five

Unintended Consequences

We have it. The smoking gun. The evidence. The potential weapon of mass destruction we have been looking for as our pretext of invading Iraq. There’s just one problem—it’s in North Korea.

—Jon Stewart

I want you to stonewall it.

—Richard Nixon, Presidential Transcript,

March 22, 1973

The American Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in our history. The chaos and killing and political rancor were also marked by massive fraud, particularly within the meaty target of Union war contracts. Most agree that the fraudulent sale of sick mules to the Union army was, in part, the catalyst for the federal False Claims Act, also known as the Informer’s Law or the Lincoln Law.

The False Claims Act empowers private citizens with knowledge of fraud against the government to file a whistle-blower or qui tam action on behalf of the government. Naturally, there’s financial, personal, and professional risk involved. So to encourage whistle-blowers, the False Claims Act originally awarded 50 percent of the amount recovered to the relator (the person who brings the action and provides the facts on which it is based). Today the relator’s share is less, approximately 30 percent, and the action must recover at least $1 million.

The lone maverick who blows the whistle on a greedy entity bilking the government and harming innocent citizens has been the dramatic model for scores of books and movies. For instance, the risk of whistle-blowing was documented in the Academy Award-nominated film Silkwood, based on the life of activist Karen Silkwood, who raised concerns about corporate practices related to the safety and health of workers in a nuclear facility. Silkwood, armed with documents, was on her way to meet a reporter for the New York Times when she was killed in a mysterious car accident. The documents, which were the smoking gun, were missing from her car. Another award-winning film, The Insider, starring Russell Crowe, was based on a true story aired in a 60 Minutes segment about Big Tobacco whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand. In a nutshell, internal documents leaked from Big Tobacco revealed that the companies knew that the chemical properties of nicotine made it highly addictive, in direct contrast to their executives’ testimony before Congress in 1994. To prove that the CEOs from Big Tobacco perjured themselves, Wigand and the government set up a qui tam action that opened the floodgates for class-action lawsuits.

The central component to any False Claims Act action is called the smoking gun—the object or fact serving as evidence that fraud or a crime was committed. The phrase traces its roots to a Sherlock Holmes story, “The Gloria Scott,” in which Arthur Conan Doyle described a murder scene: “We rushed into the captain’s cabin . . . there he lay with his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic . . . while the Chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand.”

The original 60 Minutes story on the Big Tobacco cover-up was aired in 1995. However, much to the distress of the whistle-blower, Jeffrey Wigand, who

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