Giving Madoff a Run for His Money: Biotech Exec Fakes Cancer

These days, fraud is in. The latest example is a biotech executive who forged documents, lied to his lawyers, and pretended to be his own doctor to fake having cancer as a way of wriggling out of a lawsuit. Howard Richman admitted yesterday that he lied to a federal judge about having stage 3 colorectal cancer in order to avoid a trial being brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for lying about the development of a synthetic blood substitute. In 2003, he stated publicly that the Cambridge, MA-based Biopure Corporation’s development of Hemopure, a synthetic blood made from cow hemoglobin, was progressing smoothly. Too bad it was a big fat lie: In reality, the clinical trials had failed to get FDA approval. The SEC filed a lawsuit two years later against Biopure, Richman, and three other executives. Each settled the claims, paying between $40,000 and $120,000 in fines, ...