NECC EXEC’S WIFE BEGS FOR $$
Victims’ families call move ‘reprehensible’
The wife of Barry Cadden, the convicted pharmacy mogul behind the deadly fungal meningitis outbreak, wants to block the feds from seizing their $1.4 million mansion in Wrentham, a $1.5 million trust fund, $26,000 in diamonds and other assets — in a move one victim’s mother called “reprehensible.”
Lisa Cadden, 50, and her three children have filed petitions asking U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns to hear arguments on what they contend is their legal right to the assets Stearns has preliminarily ordered be forfeited in a $7.5 million restitution judgment to help the New England Compounding Center’s victims recoup medical and funeral expenses. Stearns is staying his final order pending the outcome of Barry Cadden’s appeal.
Kathy Pugh of Michigan, whose mother, Evelyn BatesMarch, 86, died Feb. 28 of respiratory failure nearly five years after developing an abscess on her spine from an NECC shot, told the Herald yesterday, “It may not be Christian of me, but as far as I’m concerned, Barry Cadden, his wife and children can end up in a trailer park . ... This doesn’t surprise me. It’s always been about the money.”
“I think it’s reprehensible,” Marion O’Brien, 88, of Nashville, Tenn., whose son Dennis was severely sickened with meningitis and died three weeks ago of a stroke, said of Lisa Cadden’s effort to shield the assets. “Her husband took part of my son’s life — the best part. His family (her son’s) deserves anything they can get.”
A federal jury earlier this year convicted NECC co-founder Barry Cadden, 51, of racketeering, fraud and conspiracy, but acquitted him of 25 counts of seconddegree murder. He is serving a nine-year sentence at a low-security penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
Among the assets Cadden’s wife of 24 years is fighting to keep are the family’s $1.4 million mansion in Wrentham, a $1.5 million trust fund, an oceanfront vacation home in North Kingston, R.I., assessed at $594,300, a red BMW M3 purchased for $86,662 and $26,000 in diamonds bought from DeScenza days before Christmas in 2010 and 2011.
In addition, Lisa Cadden and her children have petitioned to hold onto the Barry J. Cadden Irrevocable Trust established in 2007 and worth nearly $1.5 million, court records state. They are the sole beneficiaries.
Bates-March and Dennis O’Brien were among the 753 patients in 20 states sickened with fungal meningitis during the 2012 outbreak prosecutors attributed to squalid conditions at the pharmacy Lisa Cadden had a 17.5-percent ownership interest in, according to her filing. The deaths of 64 patients were attributed to the outbreak. The U.S. Department of Justice called the tragedy “the largest public health crisis ever caused by a pharmaceutical product.”
Pugh said her mother also suffered terrifying hallucinations from antifungal medication. She said the illness “just destroyed her body. Her lungs gave out. She went from sitting up in a recliner to being almost completely bedridden.”
Dennis O’Brien, 64, a retired elementary school teacher, contracted fungal meningitis in 2012 from tainted steroid shots for back pain that were manufactured by Cadden’s former Framingham-based company. He was repeatedly hospitalized then, and died suddenly of an unrelated stroke three weeks ago while awaiting triple-bypass surgery.
“I’m just not doing Christmas at all this year. There’s just no reason,” Marion O’Brien said. “He suffered greatly. He had no immune system left. It cost him a fortune he didn’t have. It ruined his life.”