Society: Another Scandal in Gladwyne

“When I was a kid, they used to give me a piece of cotton and some alcohol, and you would wipe off the word ‘sample’ from the capsule,” said Howard Dall in mid-January, sitting in the offices of Gladwyne Concierge, recalling college jobs in pharmacies in the 1960s. “Or drug reps would come in and say, ‘Give me a big order, and I’ll give you some stuff out of my trunk.’ It was a sort of barter system.” That system went out of fashion as FDA investigators and special prosecutors began to enforce fines like the $875 million levied on TAP Pharmaceuticals in 2001 amid charges that it bribed doctors with free samples, which the doctors allegedly were billing Medicare for and prescribing to their patients. It seems incredible, considering the checks and balances drug companies have instituted to combat kickbacks and monitor distribution of samples, but the old-fashioned practice of “punching out” samples is still in play. “It’s the neighborhood pharmacies,” says assistant prosecutor David Hoffman of the Philadelphia U.S. Attorney’s office, “who get squeezed and have competition from the chains who buy in bulk.”

From the beginning, Dall saw Gladwyne as a sort of untapped cash geyser, a frontier of vast wealth where millions lurked behind every hedge and iron gate. He bought the Delaware Market in 1997 — “They didn’t have any prepared foods, any chefs,” he says, “they had all these estates around here, and they never set foot in the market” — added a gifty annex of preppy Vera Bradley handbags and candles to the pharmacy, and, in January of 2003, launched Gladwyne Concierge. The concierge game made sense — it promised everything from dog-walking to butler-procuring to town-car services — so it seems strange that Dall would need to resell discounted pills. But though the market and drugstore chugged along, the conciergerie wasn’t thriving, and Dall was in the middle of a marital separation, had a second home in Florida, and had contributions to make to his synagogue and the Gladwyne Fire Department.

In 2001, he was approached by FDA investigators and soon quietly began cooperating with them. “I’ve been aware that this day will come for four or five years now,” he said in January. “You can’t talk about it, you don’t get support. It’s good that there will be some finality to this.” (Dall will be sentenced in April by U.S. District Court Judge J. Curtis Joyner, he hopes with leniency for his cooperation.)

Perhaps money and madness stir up the Prada-wearing devils of acquisitiveness in all who enter Gladwyne’s limits. Dall’s offices below the pharmacy were once occupied by realtor Kurt Davidyan, who was arrested last year after many of his Main Line acquaintances complained that he had borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars from them without repayment. He is currently facing 160 charges, including theft by deception and receiving stolen property.

Dall didn’t get much financial reward for his Prilosec efforts, at least over the past five years. He says his two pharmacies (he also owned one, until recently, in Conshohocken) ordered $12 million in wholesale prescription drugs per year, and sample pills made up less than one percent of what was sold, yielding perhaps an extra $20,000 annually. Perry Koffer at the pharmacy says, “We were as shocked as anyone else when this came out.” Dall confirms that none of his employees knew what he was doing, and that he would never have involved them. Connie Barker (he and Dall, naturally, don’t speak) hears that Dall is gamely saving face, is “bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and quipping about” his upcoming sentencing, but Dall tells a different story. “Something like this happens, it’s like everything you’ve ever done in life, you throw out the window,” he says sadly. “I would never hurt anybody. It breaks your heart.”