Miami Herald - August 10, 2003

The crimes attributed to Michael Carlow, who lived so lavishly on Windmill Ranch Road until he and 17 of his cohorts were busted last month, included elements that would shame more mundane criminals. Carlow and company, including his wife, brother-in-law and mother-in-law, are charged with running a drug wholesale operation that peddled supposed life-saving and life-extending pharmaceuticals that, instead, were stolen, expired, relabeled, diluted or outright fakes. Some of these costly "drugs" had been fashioned from chalk dust and water, investigators said.

These schemers, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement charges, infiltrated the nation's pharmaceutical network with their lousy drugs, knowing they would be used to fill the prescriptions of the desperately ill trying to fend off the effects of cancer or HIV or to sustain an organ transplant.

Many of the crimes of hardened convicts in maximum-security prisons were spontaneous, foolish acts, conceived by diminished minds. A third of the residents on Death Row suffer mental illness. Ten percent are mentally retarded. Others were muddle-brained drug addicts.

UTTER DISREGARD

In terms of loathsome premeditation, their crimes pale against those listed by the statewide grand jury that indicted Carlow and his 17 cohorts and a 19th defendant, a Jose Grillo of Miami. These were cold well-planned conspiracies of pure greed, carried out over these past two years with utter disregard for their sick and feeble and unwitting victims.

Street-corner drug dealers deserve a higher rank in the moral hierarchy.

"People on crack have no expectations of quality control," said Michael Mann, chief of investigations for the FDLE. "They know they're buying illegal contraband drugs. They choose to do it to themselves.

"The people who were taking these drugs are true victims," Mann said. "They were reaching out for lifesaving medications and in some instances getting nothing more than placebos."

Fake pills likely contributed to the deaths of some victims, Mann said, although the families of gravely ill patients probably never suspected why relatives failed to respond to their medicine.

Grillo, 46, was charged with relabeling 11,000 boxes of Epogen, an expensive blood booster prescribed for cancer and HIV patients, to make the drugs seem 20 times more potent -- making thousands in illicit profits on each box. Grillo's operation, the FDLE said, turned a $46 million profit.

LAVISH LIFESTYLE

Carlow lived in a million-dollar-plus home in Weston and owned exotic cars, a fancy guitar collection, a yacht, two motorcycles.

His digs reminded Mann of the cocaine cowboys of the 1980s, who similarly "lived this lavish lifestyle, purchasing all these nonessential, superfluous toys with money they never earned."

Charged under racketeering statutes, most of those arrested in the scheme face up to 30 years in prison. It hardly seems enough for what Mann called the "lowest of the low."

Florida has toughened up laws and penalties for drug counterfeiters. But a statewide grand jury would have gone further, recommending in February that the Legislature enact a life sentence, even the death penalty, for distributing adulterated drugs that cause bodily harm or death.

I'm no fan of the death penalty, but capital punishment for such oblique and cowardly killers would finally lend truth to an old claim.

Then Death Row would really include the "worst of the worst."

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