racketeering lawsuit in which he’d accused the man and three of his
gardeners of conspiracy, fraud, extortion, and—last but not least—
violating antitrust law. After a judge in Miami dismissed the suit,
Boies appealed the verdict to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. Only after that appeal failed did he drop
the case.
Boies’s law firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, had gained a reputation
for aggressive tactics. It didn’t take the Fuiszes long to find out why. In
the weeks before Theranos sued, all three had picked up clues that
they were under surveillance. Richard Fuisz noticed a car tailing him
when he drove to Van Nuys Airport to board a flight to Las Vegas. Joe,
who lived in Miami, was warned by his neighbor, a retired cop who
acted like his block’s self-appointed captain, that someone was
watching his house. John and his wife spotted a man taking pictures of
their home in Georgetown. The Fuiszes now felt sure those had been
private investigators hired by Boies.
The surveillance continued after the suit was filed and unnerved
Fuisz’s wife, Lorraine. Cars were frequently parked across the street
from their Beverly Hills house, a driver sitting idle inside. One day,
Lorraine noticed that the person behind the wheel was a blond woman
and became convinced that it was her old friend, Noel Holmes. Fuisz
thought that was unlikely but grabbed his camera and a telephoto lens
and took a picture of the car, a gray Toyota Camry, from inside the
house. He then walked outside to confront the driver. As he
approached the car, it sped off. When he later took a closer look at the
photo, he couldn’t make out the woman’s face well enough to rule Noel
out. That upset Lorraine even more. She felt sure the Holmeses were
out to bankrupt them and take possession of their house. She became
nearly hysterical.
Boies’s use of private investigators wasn’t just an intimidation tactic,
it was the product of a singular paranoia that shaped Elizabeth and
Sunny’s view of the world. That paranoia centered on the belief that
the lab industry’s two dominant players, Quest Diagnostics and
Laboratory Corporation of America, would stop at nothing to
undermine Theranos and its technology. When Boies had first been