By Lukas I. Alpert
Prosecutors say William Merlino also tried to fake a cancer diagnosis to delay his trial for selling DNP, a herbicide banned for human consumption.
William Merlino, a retired New Jersey physician, spent his golden years selling weight-loss drugs online.
But the problem was that the pills he was selling were made from DNP, or dinitrophenol, a chemical used as a herbicide or wood preservative that was toxic for human consumption, federal prosecutors said.
He compounded and squeezed the pills himself at his Mays Landing home and when he took them to a shipping agent to send to customers, who found him on eBay and Twitter, his hands and face were covered in a fine yellow dust from the chemical he was working with, according to testimony given at trial.
Store employees said they started calling Merlino “the yellow man.”
Merlino’s weight loss venture had tragic consequences, federal prosecutors said. In 2018, they say he sent a batch of pills to a 21-year-old man in the UK who was about to die from an overdose of the toxic drug.
Correspondence uncovered by UK authorities revealed that while Merlino had advertised the drug as an agricultural product, he had given detailed instructions to the victim on how to use it for weight loss.
“Merlino knew his business was illegal and his product was dangerous,” prosecutors wrote in a filing in federal court in Philadelphia.
Federal prosecutors say Merlino sold the drugs online from late 2017 to early 2019, when he was arrested following the death of the 21-year-old customer in the UK. During this period, he had earned approximately $54,000 selling the pills to hundreds of people. in the United States, Canada and England.
In 2021, when his case was almost ready to go to trial, prosecutors say Merlino submitted false documents showing he had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer and asking for a delay. The judge agreed and Merlino’s trial was postponed for over a year before the ruse was discovered.
Merlino, 85, was sentenced to 33 months in jail on Wednesday after being found guilty in a trial of selling mislabeled drugs online and obstructing justice, of lying about being diagnosed with cancer.
Merlino’s attorney, Robert Gamburg, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment, but in court filings he argued that his client, who had been a doctor in and around Philadelphia for more 40 years until his retirement in 2005, had not sold the drug. purely for profit.
“Defendant’s position is that he thought it was a good product,” Gamburg wrote. “Mr. Merlino made extremely bad decisions that cost him dearly.”
Prosecutors say the drug, DNP, was used as a weight loss aid in the 1930s before the Food and Drug Administration was established to regulate the use of drugs and chemicals for human consumption. .
Although DNP has been effective in helping patients lose weight, it has also caused serious side effects, such as dehydration, cataracts, liver damage and even death. Therefore, it has never been approved by the FDA for human use.
To fake his cancer diagnosis, prosecutors said Merlino used medical records provided to him by a longtime friend whose spouse had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and asked for his opinion.
Merlino then doctored the records to make them look like his own, then provided fake letters allegedly from an oncologist saying he needed serious treatment and a postponement of the trial was needed.
-Lukas I. Alpert
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06-03-23 1507ET
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