On a chilly afternoon in February 1991, a daunting new drug hit the streets of New York Metropolis, an artificial narcotic marketed in packets labeled “Tango & Money.” As police scrambled to warn heroin customers of the hazard, the overdose victims started piling up in hospital emergency rooms and county morgues throughout three states.
As a Drug Enforcement Administration agent mentioned on the time, “We don’t know but who’s placing these items on the market, however whoever he’s, he’s an ice-cold son of a bitch.” Fentanyl had come to America.
In 2024, fentanyl is killing almost 200 People each day, a seemingly unstoppable narcotic curse like none ever seen earlier than. However few know that this plague started within the good thoughts of the high-school dropout and chemistry prodigy that the DEA known as “the perfect and most harmful clandestine chemist” it has ever encountered.
The clandestine chemist was George Erik Marquardt. Beginning at simply twelve years previous, Marquardt used his extraordinary skills to make each unlawful drug within the ebook, from bootleg booze to heroin. He brewed LSD for Timothy Leary and the Grateful Lifeless, methamphetamine for outlaw motorbike gangs, nerve gasoline for Idaho Nazis, and even life-saving AZT for AIDS sufferers. However when that ice-cold son of a bitch turned to fentanyl, 1000’s of People would die.
In LETHAL DOSES: The Man Who Gave Fentanyl to America, award-winning writer and former secret agent for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics John Madinger, tells the outstanding story of DEA’s three-year pursuit, the genesis of our fentanyl drawback at the moment, and the uniquely harmful evil genius he spent a whole bunch of hours interviewing.
About John Madinger
I joined the drug warfare in 1974 as a sheriff’s deputy, then served as a narcotics agent, supervisor, and administrator and a particular agent/prison investigator with the U.S. Division of the Treasury earlier than hitting necessary retirement age in 2010. I spent fifteen years of that point in undercover assignments from Florida to Honolulu and labored main fraud and cash laundering circumstances, turning into one of many nation’s main authorities on cash laundering and the writer of a textbook, Cash Laundering: A Information for Felony Investigators (third Version), which is utilized in universities, by the Departments of Justice and Treasury, and overseas governments world wide.
I maintain a bachelor’s diploma in prison justice from Indiana College and a grasp’s diploma in historical past from the College of Hawaii and graduated from the Oklahoma state police academy, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Nationwide Academy, and was the distinction graduate within the Treasury Felony Investigation Coaching Program. I acquired quite a few awards and citations from the Inside Income Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Job Drive program and was licensed to testify in federal courtroom as an knowledgeable witness on cash laundering. As a part of my job, I developed and taught lessons on cash laundering and monetary crime in the US, Asia, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, working abroad in over twenty nations.
On the literary entrance, I additionally wrote one other textbook, Confidential Informant: Regulation Enforcement’s Most Precious Device, and a historical past of the opium commerce, Opium Kings of Previous Hawaii, in addition to two novels, Loss of life on Diamond Head and Pipe Goals, and a memoir, Going Underneath: Kidnapping, Homicide, and a Life Undercover, for WildBlue Press, a finalist for Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion Award. I’ve additionally acquired awards for fiction, non-fiction, quick tales, tutorial writing, and even poetry.
I grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, the place I spent all however three years of my profession, and at present reside in Oklahoma Metropolis, Oklahoma with my spouse and a Portuguese Water Canine named Indy.