The Ninth Man Out: A Fired U.S. Attorney Tells His Story

The first sign that crimes may have been committed was when the victims no longer felt nauseous and their hair stopped falling out. Also, it wasn't cold going deep into the vein the way it was before. They needed that hurt. And when it was too long in coming, they grew anxious. Their discomfort after all was their comfort. That was the only way they knew that the chemotherapy was working.

When the FBI believed that they had enough to make a case, they brought the file to Todd Graves, the then-U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Missouri. Ultimately, Robert Courtney, a local pharmacist would be sentenced to 30 years in prison without parole for watering down chemotherapy prescriptions for thousands of cancer patients.

When the Bush administration ordered Graves to resign as U.S. attorney in Jan. 2006, the prosecutor wondered if it might have something to do with the Courtney case. Graves was the first of nine U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration for reasons that still are not entirely clear.

On Tuesday morning, Graves testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about his firing.

At the time of his dismissal, Graves had had relatively few conflicts with his superiors at Main Justice in Washington. But one of them involved the Courtney matter.

This can't be over the Courtney case, Graves thought.

Diluting drugs for at-risk patients had proved to be lucrative business for pharmacist Robert Courtney. At the time of his arrest, Courtney was worth $18.7 million. He owned two mansions in the small exurban enclave of Kansas City known as Tremont Manor and was considering the purchase of a condominium in St. Croix.

Main Justice wanted Courtney's seized assets to be deposited in the U.S. treasury. But Graves had his own ideas: Why not give over the money to compensate the cancer patients and their families?

"Nobody wanted it," Graves told me recently, "The FBI was leaning on me. My own assistants were telling me no."

Eventually, Graves told everyone involved that if he heard from the DAG -- the Deputy Attorney General, his boss -- that he couldn't do it, he wouldn't. But the call from the DAG never came. The money went to Courtney's victims.

While discussing possible plea-bargains with Graves, Courtney's attorneys put forth the argument that those who had been given the diluted chemotherapy were going to die anyway. It was as if the dark place from which his crime was committed was being rationalized from a place even darker and farther back in the drawer.

Michael Ketchmark, a Kansas City, Mo. attorney who has represented more than 200 of Courtney's victims in civil suits, says: "That argument went nowhere with Todd ... because Todd knew personally that wasn't always the case."

When Todd Graves was twenty one, he discovered a lump in his groin. It turned out he had a rare form of lymphoma. And the prognosis was not very good: He was told to put his affairs in order, because it was unlikely that he would survive very long.

For a full 18 years afterwards, he could not bring himself to touch -- even for a single moment -- the same place in his groin where the original lump was discovered out of fear that he might discover a new one.

In the end what likely saved his life was the chemotherapy.

A year of chemotherapy.

A cycle every three weeks.

At regular 20-minute intervals for 26 hours straight, like clockwork, the nausea and the retching and the severe pain became overwhelming. Short reprieves, then more pain.

"I would lay up in my room for 26 hours straight."

At the time, he was attending the University of Missouri, and throughout it all, lived in a fraternity house.

"I had an open wound for a while that wouldn't heal," he recalled, "The chemotherapy didn't allow it to heal. ... I think some of the people in the house worried that I might just expire right there."