From Filth & Mud Read Online Free PDF Page A

labs, where it made its money, were located upstate, just outside of Syracuse. The labs occupied a sprawling 100 acre complex that was surrounded by a dense, deciduous forest. Some well-known pharmaceuticals had been birthed here, though nearly eighty percent of BioSyn’s product line had been purchased for less than reasonable sums. BioSyn’s investors lauded its hard negotiation skills while its competitors despised what some described as its bullying tactics, others still, suspected criminal collusion with Chinese generic pharmaceutical manufacturers. In all cases, under Eckert’s leadership, BioSyn quickly turned these modest investments into windfalls by marking up the retail price by some 300 to 500 percent. Eckert had also led the charge to transition manufacturing from the United States to mainland China, and when China became too expensive, he threatened to offshore production to Vietnam. The Chinese capitulated and granted BioSyn a ten-year agreement to manufacture their products at steep discounts.
     
    With most of its steady income safely offshore, BioSyn had the luxury of working on purely proprietary projects within the walls of the state of the art complex. These were the high-risk, high-reward projects that, if successful, would revolutionize medicine, and more importantly, add billions to the balance sheets. However, the reality of pharmaceutical development was that most of the projects flamed out almost as quickly as they were conceived and that cost money.
     
    Over the last five years, BioSyn had purchased most of the uninhabited land near the original laboratory building. It immediately began the frenzied construction of the complex, the likes of which, had been unseen in the county. The county commissioners praised BioSyn for bringing hundreds of middle-class jobs and families to Onondaga, which had collapsed economically during the “Great Recession” a decade earlier, and from which it had yet to recover. BioSyn promised to hire local workers for the construction phase of the project and gave priority to Onondaga County residents in hiring for the high-tech laboratory positions, one of Eckert’s masterful strokes. Eckert was a great businessman and a greater politician. His coup de grace was instructing the legal department to include residency restrictions in every employment contract from janitor to engineer.
     
    But the project had its hiccups, usually stubborn property owners who did not appreciate the kind of Manhattan progress that BioSyn was bringing up north to Onondaga. Eckert led the charge for BioSyn once again, partnering with Onondaga County to use imminent domain to uproot some of the more recalcitrant landowners in the area who had held out against BioSyn’s buyout offers. Eckert had earned notoriety and respect for the methods. He’d charmed most and strong-armed a few holdouts into giving up their properties, some of which had been owned for generations. But there had been one couple who had managed to resist: the Belinskis. They were octogenarians who had survived the Second World War. They had fled into the woods when the Nazis had overrun their Russian village during the summer of 1941. The next couple of years found them fighting alongside the Krasnaya Armiya as partisans. They were proud Russian Jews, and years of persecution had toughened them up. Years of living under Soviet rule had made them tougher still. Their life was basic, fulfilling, mostly living off of the land, making their own clothes and food. Boris had suffered from infertility because of his exposure to radiation during his service in the Soviet Navy. And though she wanted children, Marina eventually came to terms with her lot.
     
    Boris and Marina made their way to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union. Boris saved the little money that he had made during his years of selling hand-carved picture frames out of his shop on Brighton Beach. Marina saved what she could from her years making