violations of HIPAA, the federal health privacy law, on the grounds
that some of the emails he had forwarded to his Gmail account before
resigning contained patient information. His new lawyer had to fend
them off from London, where he was on vacation with his wife.
Balwani was also beginning to harass some of the patients I had talked
to, insisting that they get on the phone with him and giving them the
third degree when they did.
I had filed a draft of my story a week earlier and decided to walk
over to my editor’s office to see where he stood with his edit. Once he
was done with it, the story would be sent to the paper’s page-one
editor, who would assign it to someone on his team for a second,
closer edit. Then the standards editor and the lawyers would comb
through it line by line. It was a slow process that often took weeks and
sometimes months. I wanted to speed it up. The longer we took to
publish, the more time we gave Theranos to turn my sources.
Mike Siconolfi was his usual cheerful self when I popped my head
into his office. He motioned for me to sit down. I told him I felt we
should move faster. There was no telling what Theranos and Boies
would try next. I pointed out Holmes’s op-ed and Biden’s ballyhooed
visit to Theranos’s Newark facility a few days earlier.
Mike cautioned patience. This story was a bombshell and we needed
to make sure it was bulletproof when we went to press with it, he said.
Mike was of Italian American heritage and he loved using Italian
metaphors. I had heard him tell the story of his ancestor Prince
Siconulf, who ruled the region surrounding the Amalfi Coast in the
ninth century, about ten times.
“Did I ever tell you about la mattanza?” he asked. Oh boy, here we
go again, I thought.
He explained that la mattanza was an ancient Sicilian ritual in
which fishermen waded into the Mediterranean Sea up to their waist
with clubs and spears and then stood still for hours on end until the
fish no longer noticed their presence. Eventually, when enough fish
had gathered around them, someone gave an imperceptible signal and
in a split second the scene went from preternatural quiet to gory
bloodbath as the fishermen struck viciously at their unsuspecting