Crime of the Century –

MAY 2, 2018 – Selling drugs is a relationship business. It’s best to do it in person. That is why, on a summer evening in 2012, Alec Burlakoff was out for dinner with Steven Chun, the owner of Sarasota Pain Associates. Burlakoff was a sales manager for Insys Therapeutics, an Arizona-based pharmaceutical company with only one branded product, a new and highly potent opioid painkiller called Subsys. Chun was a doctor who prescribed a lot of opioids.

The location was a moderately expensive seafood restaurant in Sarasota, Fla., with linen tablecloths and large windows overlooking the bay. The sun was still high in the sky. Gleaming powerboats lined the docks outside, and a warm breeze rippled the water. On one side of the table were Burlakoff and Tracy Krane, an Insys sales representative. Krane was a newcomer to the industry, tall with dark brown hair in a bob. Burlakoff, then 38, with a slight frame and a boyish restlessness, was her new boss. He had years of experience in the opioid market. Colleagues marveled over his shameless push to make the sale, but he had a charisma that was hard to resist. Even people who didn’t trust him couldn’t help liking him.

Krane was there to learn the business, and the meeting made a vivid impression. Chun, then 49 and stout, had impeccable credentials: He was trained at the University of Washington, Cornell Medical College and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He had been married at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, to a Juilliard-trained violinist who is the daughter of a former chief executive of Korean Air, but had since divorced. At Burlakoff’s invitation, he had brought his girlfriend at the time, a woman in her mid-20s, to dinner.

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