Retired N.J. doctor who touted toxic chemicals as weight loss drugs sentenced to prison

A retired New Jersey physician who marketed an industrial-grade herbicide as a fast-track diet pill and later faked a cancer diagnosis in an attempt to avoid trial was sentenced Wednesday to nearly three years in federal prison.

William Merlino, 85, of Mays Landing, sold the toxic chemical — 2,4-Dinitrophenol, better known by the name DNP — over the internet to hundreds of customers seeking to quickly shed pounds.

Federal agents shut down his operation in 2019 after one of his clients in the United Kingdom overdosed on the drug and died.

“This is an area where we can’t have people freelancing — people saying I know better than the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration], I know better than public health officials,” U.S. District Judge Gerald A. McHugh told the doctor as he imposed a sentence of two years and nine months behind bars.

But despite expressing remorse Wednesday for the death his pills caused, Merlino stood by using DNP to lose weight and suggested the real reason for his prosecution was that it was taking money away from large pharmaceutical companies looking to cash in on other weight loss drugs.

“I wasn’t trying to run a business,” he said. “I was trying to help people. I’ve been trying to help people for the 45 years I was in practice.”

As for his attempt to delay his 2021 trial by forging medical records that said he’d been recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Merlino chalked it up to a misunderstanding and blamed his then-attorney for submitting them to the court — an excuse McHugh dismissed out of hand.

“It’s truly unfortunate that at this stage in life that you find yourself in this position,” the judge said. “But I feel compelled to say that it was arrogance that got you into this position and it’s the same arrogance that was on display in this court today.”

The FDA has banned DNP — an industrial chemical with commercial uses as an herbicide, dye, and explosive — for human consumption in the United States since the late 1930s, when it became clear it led to cataracts, liver damage, organ failure, and death in patients who were taking it as a weight loss therapy and to treat other maladies.

Previously, forms of DNP had been sold over the counter. And during World War II, the Russian military supplied thousands of its soldiers with the drug to increase their metabolism and body temperature during the harsh winter conditions of the siege of Leningrad.

Although it is now illegal to sell DNP as a drug in most countries, it remains readily available in certain corners of the internet where patients swear by its ability to increase metabolism and quickly torch fat.

Merlino — who spent Wednesday’s proceedings dressed in a green prison jumpsuit and handcuffed to a wheelchair positioned at the defense table — told the judge that he conducted “extensive research” into the chemical’s potential uses in human patients after he retired from actively practicing medicine in 2005. He took it himself, he said, for eight months — and lost roughly 80 pounds.

But prosecutors maintained that despite Merlino’s claims to have been acting in good faith, he knew that selling DNP as a drug was illegal.

For instance, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joan E. Burnes noted, when Merlino first began selling DNP on eBay, he shipped it to his customers across the globe using several fake return addresses. And when the auction website pulled his listings in 2018, he continued to sell the chemical on Twitter and on his own website.

But despite adding disclaimers to his communications with customers noting that DNP was intended for agricultural use, he still included information on how it had been used for weight loss before it had been banned — a message Burnes characterized as a knowing wink to the real reason his customers were willing to pay for access to the drug.

Merlino, she said, made more than $54,000 in sales between 2017 and 2019.

“This is a man who knew the law and decided he was not going to conform with the law,” Burnes said. “And doing so had tragic consequences.”

The death of one of Merlino’s customers — a 21-year-old British bodybuilder whose name prosecutors have withheld from public court — caught the attention of the United Kingdom’s National Food Crime Unit, which, after tracing the source of the drugs back to Merlino, notified the FDA.

Federal agents raided Merlino’s home in 2019, effectively shutting down his business. And though a jury convicted him three years later on one count of introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce, Merlino suggested Wednesday that the medical records that linked the bodybuilder’s death to DNP consumption and were later used against him at his trial had been forged.

“To overdose, you have to take nearly 10 times the therapeutic dose,” he insisted.

But Merlino’s own attempts to forge medical records led to his subsequent conviction last year on obstruction of justice charges.

While awaiting trial for the charges tied to his DNP sales, a close friend sought the retired doctor’s advice after his wife had been diagnosed with a terminal case of pancreatic cancer. But rather than review the woman’s medical records, as he initially told his friend he would do, Merlino forged his own name onto the documents and passed them along to his then-lawyer, Edward F. Borden Jr.

The attorney submitted them to the court in a request to delay Merlino’s trial for months. Both the court and prosecutors agreed — until they discovered the records were fakes.

Burnes said Wednesday that Borden was not aware of Merlino’s deception when he argued for the trial postponement.

His new lawyer, Robert Gamburg, said Wednesday that while his client had made mistakes, he still believed the man was redeemable.

“It definitely was a poor, poor choice — words can’t describe how poor a choice it was,” he said. But “he still has a lot to offer society, he still has a lot to accomplish. He still has the ability to help people.”