Judge Gives Bristol-Myers Exec a Deadline for 75,000-Word Book on His Crimes
Andrew Bodnar, the former svp/strategy at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), had better get writing. The exec, who was convicted in 2009 of lying to the feds about a pharmaceutical patent deal, has been ordered to deliver a 75,000-word book atoning for his crime to a federal judge on Jan. 31.
Bodnar was the architect of a disastrous plot at BMS in which the company assured the FTC that if a rival company, Apotex, produced a generic version of its blockbuster blood-thinning drug Plavix then BMS would compete against it. In fact, Bodnar made an oral deal with Apotex to stay off the market for six months while Apotex made Plavix, in return for a licensing fee. That agreement was illegal, and the FTC discovered it when Apotex and Bodnar failed to get their stories straight.
The book-writing order stems from Bodnar's sentencing, in which the accused and the judge had a lengthy conversation about Bodnar's non-pharmaceutical ambitions. Judge Ricardo Urbina asked him if he'd ever thought about writing a book. Bodnar said he had and the judge asked what it would be about:
THE DEFENDANT: Well, it's changed with time. When I was younger, it was going to be about Jewish guards in Nazi concentration camps who were collaborators and who in later life had to deal with that. I thought that probably has been written since then so I've kind of given up on that. And as I have gotten older, even though I have not yet read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which is the Dickens' novel that I haven't read because I'm kind of saving it for the last thing I do, I have gotten more and more away from fiction as reading and fiction in my fantasies about what I'm going to write to more and more about life, and, although, I will never say that I think that this experience is something that I would have liked to have had I had a choice going in, I actually have given a lot of thought to writing about it.
THE COURT: All right. Thank you. Have a seat.Urbina then sentenced him to write a book about his experience being prosecuted as a condition of his probation, and to make it "useful and instructive, who knows, maybe, possibly, inspirational" so that readers could learn to avoid what Bodnar had done.
That was in June 2009. A year later, the judge received an "update" on the progress of the book. Urbina didn't say how much of it had been written, but apparently it wasn't enough: He ordered a 75,000-word draft to be filed with the court at the end of this month:
Even in white-collar cases, federal judges mean what they say, apparently.
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