Bad Blood

(Axel Boer) #1

T


| ELEVEN |

Lighting a Fuisz


he doorbell at 1238 Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills
rang at 10:15 a.m. on Saturday, October 29, 2011. The gated
one-story Italian villa shrouded by palm trees belonged to
Richard and Lorraine Fuisz. The couple had purchased it two years
earlier to live closer to their children, who had both moved from
Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles after graduating from Georgetown
University.


When Richard Fuisz opened the door, a process server tried to hand
him a stack of legal papers.


“I’m here to serve a lawsuit on Fuisz Technologies,” the man said.
Fuisz told him he couldn’t accept service because the company,
though it bore his name, was no longer his. He had sold it more than a
decade earlier. It was now part of Canadian drugmaker Valeant
Pharmaceuticals, he explained. The man placed a call and repeated
what Fuisz had said. The response, conveyed by someone shouting on
the other end of the line, was that he was at the right address and to
just serve the papers. But Fuisz continued to refuse to take them.
Losing his patience, the process server threw them at his feet and left.
Fuisz took out his cell phone and snapped a photo of the pile scattered
across the sidewalk. He knew very well what this was about. As a
codefendant in the lawsuit, he’d been personally served with a similar
set of papers two days earlier. After mulling things over for a minute,
he crouched down and picked up the mess. He decided he didn’t want
the neighbors to see it.

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