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BOSTON – A former exotic dancer was hired as regional sales manager in a pharmaceutical company despite her lack of experience in the pharmaceutical field, as she thought she could contribute to the company's plan to bribe doctors to prescribe his powerful painkiller, told the former jurors.
Alec Burlakoff, formerly vice president of sales at Insys Therapeutics Inc., said he met Sunrise Lee at the strip club where she worked and had recruited him because he thought she would have the "ability, willingness and desire to talk to doctors and talk with them about the counterpart".
After hiring Lee, Burlakoff said executives had received an anonymous email on Lee's topless pictures posted online. Burlakoff said Lee had kept his job after agreeing to take the photos.
Lee's lawyer, Peter Horstmann, repeatedly objected to the presentation of the testimony. After the jurors left for the day, Horstmann said he was considering moving to the cancellation of the trial.
The judge banned lawyers on both sides of the case from addressing the media.
Burlakoff is one of the government's leading witnesses in the lawsuit against the founder of Insys, John Kapoor, Lee and three other former leaders of the Chandler, Arizona-based company. They are accused of plotting to pay bribes to doctors in the form of fees for simulated events in exchange for prescriptions from Subsys, a fentanyl spray for cancer patients suffering from severe pain.
They all denied having done wrong.
Burlakoff pleaded guilty in November for plotting the plot and testifies against his former colleagues to give him a chance to get a lighter sentence. Kapoor's attorney tried to describe him as a liar who cut only deals with doctors and who would say anything to defeat Kapoor.
The brawl around Friday's testimony is the last strange moment of the affair that should last several more weeks. The case highlighted the federal government's efforts to attack those it believes have fueled the deadly opioid crisis.
In January, a former employee told the jurors that she had seen Lee do a dance tour in a Chicago nightclub to a doctor that the company had decided to prescribe.
Last month, jurors watched a rap video to encourage employees to convince doctors to prescribe higher doses of the drug. In the video, sales representatives danced around a giant bottle of fentanyl spray, highly addictive, and talked about titling, a process of increasing the power of a patient's prescription. until reaching the proper level.
At the end of the video, it is revealed that Burlakoff was wearing the fentanyl spray suit.
Burlakoff told the jury on Friday that Insys employees had made clear to doctors their expectations of the orders in exchange for the speakers' fees. A doctor who had no ethical problem and who accepted the agreement was called a "whale," he said.
"I knew that every dollar spent was going to be monitored and that the expectations in terms of return on investment, dollars returned to the company, were very high," Burlakoff said.
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Follow Alanna Durkin Richer at http://www.twitter.com/aedurkinricher
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