Illicit innovator brought meth to the masses
In 1990s, Missouri man transformed drug trade
After seven years with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Agent John Cornille thought he knew what a meth lab looked like.
What he found in a house here in late 1992 didn’t match what he’d been taught. Instead of beakers, flasks or Bunsen burners, Cornille saw black trash bags stuffed with empty boxes of cold medicine, a Mason jar full of kerosene, starter fluid and a cookie sheet in the oven with a yellowish cake on it.
An informant said he had been forced at gunpoint to use methamphetamine produced at the house. He didn’t regret his experience.
“Best dope I ever had,” the informant told Cornille.
A DEA chemist confirmed that the seemingly random mix of ingredients could be used to manufacture the drug.
Over the course of the next decade, the scene in Reeds Spring, a hamlet of fewer than a thousand people in southwest Missouri between Springfield and Branson, would be replicated thousands of times across much of the country as a new way to make meth caught on. It was dubbed the Nazi method and shifted production of the drug from rural “superlabs” to smallscale mom-and-pop operations in homes, storage units and hotel rooms.
The man authorities said is responsible for spawning a generation of cooks? His name is Bob Paillet.
Paillet was arrested in February 1993 in Battlefield, Mo., within months of the discovery of the Reeds Spring lab. Authorities said Paillet essentially transformed the process of producing meth from a complex formula — one that required the “cook” to have a chemistry background — to a simple recipe that the masses could follow.
A textbook released in 2014, citing evidence that Paillet taught his recipe to others, called him “arguably the Johnny Appleseed for the spread of local meth production throughout the Midwest.” He’s the reason customers since 2006 have had to ask their pharmacists for a box of pseudoephedrine when they have stuffy noses.
Paillet died at age 72 in January 2016 in Texas. Court documents and interviews with family members and an associate paint a picture of a man with an obsession who left public officials scrambling to respond for years.
His daughter Lisa, who asked for her first name to be changed out of concern it could affect job searches, said her father returned from deployment during the Vietnam War with “debilitating migraines and a jaundiced view of the world.”
Around 1970, she said, Paillet reconnected with a friend in California’s Bay Area who was using meth.
When that friend became sick because of a bad batch, Bob Paillet began researching chemistry at local libraries, his daughter said. Bob wanted his friend “to have clean drugs.”
“That’s my father’s logic,” she said. “Not get him off the drugs — but make them better.”
Libraries play a prominent role in the Nazi meth saga. DEA agent Cornille said Bob Paillet told him he learned the Nazi method by researching at the library of then-Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield.
“Bob claims … in a research manual, he found this method of converting pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine using sodium metal as one of the catalysts,” Cornille said. “He claimed at the top of the page was a swastika.”
That purported swastika prompted the Nazi-method name.
In the mid-1990s, Terry Dal Cason, a now-retired DEA forensic chemist, tried to find the document Paillet cited.
He came up short, detailing a theory in a DEA newsletter in 1997. Nazi troopers during World War II consumed meth in pill form under the brand name Per- vitin. No known evidence directly connects the Third Reich with Paillet’s recipe, which produces a powder form of the drug.
Paillet made a deal with prosecutors and pleaded guilty in late 1993 to conspiring to manufacture and distribute meth.
Though sentencing guidelines suggested he be sentenced to nine to 11 years in prison, Paillet received probation because he cooperated with authorities.
He detailed specifics of the Nazi method to the Drug Enforcement Administration and helped gather evidence on those who had learned it from him.
The day after his arrest, Paillet wore a wire to a Springfield Waffle House, where he bought meth from a friend named Mike Poplawski.
Poplawski ended up with a sixyear prison sentence.
Interviewed recently, he expressed incredulity that the DEA worked with Paillet, who he said “experimented on people.”
Paillet and Poplawski were sentenced in early 1994 alongside several others linked to the new method.
Paillet moved from Missouri to Texas not long after he was sentenced, and he apparently did not get into trouble with the law the rest of his life.
In 1998, in his only comments to the media, Paillet expressed regret.
“I never thought it would spread like this,” Paillet told the
Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader that year.
The number of annual meth lab incidents in the USA peaked at nearly 25,000 in 2004. The Nazi method was never the only way meth consumed in America was produced, but authorities described it as a key development leading to this country’s meth epidemic.
“I really believe that his method, here in Springfield, was the bounce to get meth spread throughout the rest of Missouri and the United States,” said Nick Console, who ran the DEA’s Springfield office from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s.
To read more, see the Springfield News-Leader’s seven-part series “The Man Who Reinvented Meth” at www.news-leader.com.
Paillet essentially transformed the process of producing meth from a complex formula — one that required the “cook” to have a chemistry background — to a simple recipe.