Fat Chance

During the early 1990s, the diet drugs fen-phen and Redux achieved tremendous popularity. The chemical combination was discovered by chance, marketed with hyperbole, and prescribed to millions. But as the drugs' developer, pharmaceutical giant American Home Products, cashed in on the miracle weight-loss pills, medical researchers revealed that the drugs caused heart valve disease. This scandal was, incredibly, only the beginning of an unbelievable saga of greed and graft.In Fat Chance, Rick Christman recounts a story that a judicial tribunal member later described as "a tale worthy of the pen of Charles Dickens." As class action lawsuits against American Home Products began to be filed, four avaricious attorneys saw an irresistible opportunity. Bill Gallion, Shirley Cunningham, Melbourne Mills, and Stan Chesley contrived to a bring a class action suit to trial in Covington, Kentucky, where their hired trial consultant, Mark Modlin, had a manipulative relationship with the presiding judge, Jay Bamberger. Their efforts were rewarded with a $200 million settlement - a sum that the four lawyers immediately set out to plunder and misappropriate. Ultimately, two of the attorneys received long prison sentences, another was acquitted after claiming to be unaware of the grift due to his alcoholism, and one managed to escape criminal charges; all four were disbarred, and Bamberger was disbarred and disrobed.Recounting a dramatic affair that bears conspicuous similarities to opioid-related class action litigation against the pharmaceutical industry, Christman offers an engaging if occasionally horrifying account of one of America's most prominent product liability cases and the settlement's aftermath.

"An absorbing tale that's sure to hold the interest of those interested in books on corporate crime." -- Library Journal, "In this well-told tale of perfidy, heroes are few and hard to find. The villains are lawyers, judges, political figures, bureaucrats, drug companies, and medical journals, swirling in an existential problem of modern humanity -- we eat too much -- and our eternal search for easy answers to difficult questions, often answered by controlled substances. This scam was the precursor of the opioid epidemic that still ravages Kentucky and rural America." -- Al Cross, professor of journalism and director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky, " Fat Chance is the story of the fen-phen litigation and the prominent lawyers who, blinded by greed and hubris, lied to their clients and the judge, cheated their partners, and tried to keep their clients' money. Rick Christman's book is a well-written and remarkably complete account of fen-phen: the development and marketing of the drugs, the litigation that resulted from side effects, and the generous settlement that led lawyers to unethical and illegal behavior." -- W. H. Fortune, professor of law at the University of Kentucky, "If the civil justice system had been healthy, transparent, and well-policed, it might not have been highjacked, as it was in this case. Everyone should read this book. As Mark Twain said in his book The Gilded Age, 'citizens as a body [must] keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only machinery for its execution, nothing more.'" -- Richard H. Underwood, author of CrimeSong: True Crime Stories from Southern Murder Ballads and professor of law at the University of Kentucky

Rick Christman is CEO of Employment Solutions and a former community columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader.