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CHAPTER 1

NAZI DOPE HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this
story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.
ohn Cornille had been with the Drug Enforcement Admini-

J
THOMAS GOUNLEY The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his
TGOUNLEY@ stration for seven years. Yet he couldn’t wrap his head around co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records.
NEWS-LEADER.COM what his informant was describing. Additional information regarding Paillet was obtained
It was November 1992, and the man was talking about a vis- from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a
it to a home in Reeds Spring, Missouri. He said he’d been Freedom of Information Act request.
CHAPTER 2 forced at gunpoint to use methamphetamine manufactured there. But Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-
COMING something was off. The informant didn’t mention beakers, flasks, time associates, along with current and retired law
Bunsen burners — none of the complex glassware Cornille was taught enforcement personnel, were conducted between
THURSDAY were part of meth labs. August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters,
Instead, the informant reported an unusual scene: Black trash bags citing concerns regarding how this story could affect
stuffed with empty boxes of cold medicine. A mason jar full of kero- future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed on the
ONLINE sene, with something resembling a hockey puck settled at the bottom. condition that her first name be replaced with a pseud-
Starter fluid. And a cookie sheet in the oven, with a yellowish cake on it. onym. Editors agreed to that request.
Subscribers can read the full
Cornille, like other DEA agents, had made meth himself, under The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided
series online now. Just go to
controlled circumstances, as part of his official duties. It was stan- by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted
News-Leader.com/insider.
dard practice; the agency knew it meant he’d have more credibility alongside Paillet were obtained from the Greene Coun-
Not a subscriber? Go online when he asked a court for a search warrant or filled out a probable ty Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they
to offers.news-leader.com/ cause statement recommending criminal charges. It was important did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.
EWJ for a special digital
subscription offer. See METH, Page 6A USA TODAY NETWORK ILLUSTRATION BY MARK MARTURELLO

OZARKS HEALTH CARE

Gifts
Managed care expansion creates anxiety of joy
Missouri will pay flat fees to private insurance companies cover.
Republican lawmakers Wish I May
have bemoaned Missouri’s brings birthday
WILL SCHMITT closure of all our Springfield Medicaid pa- ballooning Medicaid spending
WSCHMITT@NEWS-LEADER.COM area clinics, if not our entire tients. Starting (more than a third of the wishes to
organization,” Ozarks Com- May 1, that sys- state’s $27 billion budget) and low-income
As a new system of Medi- munity Hospital Health Sys- tem was re- considered adopting a block- children
caid expands into southwest tem CEO Paul Taylor wrote to placed by a grant system this year as a
Missouri, the administrator of a state lawmaker in April as managed care means to control costs. The Page
clinics serving Springfield part of a failed attempt to halt model, in switch to managed care, also 1C
and Nixa is alarmed about the the change. Paul Taylor which the state intended as a cost-saving mea-
implications of the health in- Under the previous sys- pays flat fees sure, was written into the state
surance switch. tem, hospitals and doctors to private insurance compa- budget in 2015.
“There is a very real prob- billed the state directly for the nies, which oversee clients
ability that it will result in the treatments they provided to and decide what treatment to See SYSTEM, Page 4A

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6A May 21, 2017
TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 1
“I really believe that his method, here in Springfield, was the bounce
to get meth spread throughout the rest of Missouri and the United States.”
NICK CONSOLE, RAN THE DEA’S SPRINGFIELD OFFICE FROM THE MID-1990S THROUGH THE EARLY 2000S
Undercover officers from the Greene County Sheriff's Office remove hazardous items from a house where a meth lab was discovered.
Meth
Continued from Page 1A
that prosecutors see him and other agents as ex-
perts on the manufacturing of illegal drugs.
As Cornille sat down to request a warrant for
the Reeds Spring home, he couldn’t be that au-
thoritative. He needed another source, someone
who could credibly link common household
items with the production of meth, a highly ad-
dictive substance known for its energy boost. He
called a chemist working for the DEA in Chicago.
“I still remember what he said, because I
wrote it down word for word,” Cornille recalled
in a recent interview. “He said, ‘There’s a basis
for such a formula in literature, but it’s not been
seen in the United States.’”
It’s been nearly 25 years since the investiga-
tion, but that’s not the only comment that re-
mains lodged in Cornille’s memory.
At some point, as the informant was describ-
ing the unusual lab in Reeds Spring, Cornille
asked him if the meth was any good. If the an-
swer was no, he figured, the situation might not
be that big a deal. Low-quality stuff was unlike-
ly to spread.
The informant, however, had five words for
him:
“Best dope I ever had.”
Three months later, in Springfield, Cornille
sat across from a recently arrested 49-year-old
man.
With a voice recorder rolling, Cornille intro-
duced himself for the record, then moved on to
his guest.
“With me today is Mr. Bob Paillet,” Cornille
said, according to a transcript. “Mr. Paillet has
agreed to talk to me and explain to me different
methods of manufacturing methamphetamine.
One using the sodium metal and anhydrous am-
monia and then a couple others.”
Cornille told Paillet — pronounced “Pie-ay”
— that he wanted “just to sit down and talk to
you about those different methods.”
“How you discovered them, and so forth,”
Cornille said.
Paillet began by saying he’d always been in-
terested in chemistry and physics and that he’d
“just played around with my chemistry set.”
Then he got detailed. He talked about molecules,
replacement reactions and acetic acid, about ca-
talysts, synthesis and hydroxyl groups. Scientif-
ic terms flowed with minimal prompting.
About halfway through the conversation,
Paillet made a remark that fell somewhere be-
tween a suggestion and a prediction.
“You’re gonna have to send all your agents
back to school and learn chemistry ... There’s
people out there that are going to great lengths
to avoid getting caught,” he said.
Cornille responded. “Well, see I went to
school to learn how to manufacture metham-
phetamine and to ...”
Paillet cut him off.
“All the old ways,” he said.
Cornille joined the DEA in 1985 after serving
on the local police force in Washington, D.C. He
spent the remainder of the decade in the nation’s
capital, fighting the crack epidemic. In 1990, he
was transferred to southwest Missouri. At that
point, Cornille recalls now, meth ranked about
third on the agency’s local priority list. Cocaine
and marijuana were much more prevalent.
In the mid- to late 1990s, however, the num-
ber of meth labs seized by the authorities dras-
tically increased, first in Missouri, and gradual-
ly in other communities around the country. Be-
fore the decade was out, as the public and the
media sought answers as to how the drug shift-
ed from a problem to a crisis — how it grew
powerful enough to ravage entire communities
— law enforcement would point to Paillet by
name.
“He brought it to life for this area,” Spring-
field police Cpl. Dan Schrader told the News-
Leader in 1998.
Paillet essentially converted the process of
producing meth from a complex formula — one
that required the so-called “cook” to have a
chemistry background — to a simple recipe
that could be followed by the masses. DEA and
court records indicate Paillet taught his method
to others, who in turn taught it within their own
respective circles. The man behind the unusual
meth lab in Reeds Spring learned the method
from one of Paillet’s friends, Cornille said.
Paillet wasn’t a drug lord; he didn’t control a
network of associates. In fact, he did the oppo-
site, spawning a generation of cooks by uninten-
tionally democratizing an illegal industry. One
textbook released in 2014 called Paillet “argu-
ably the Johnny Appleseed for the spread of lo-
cal meth production throughout the Midwest.”
Journalist Frank Owen, in his book released in
2007, wrote that Paillet “effectively decentral-
ized the local meth trade ... broadening the ap-
peal of the drug.”
In other words, Bob Paillet reinvented meth.
How did he do it? The story he told law en-
forcement revolves around the Springfield
campus of Missouri State University, which at
the time was known as Southwest Missouri
State.
“Bob claims he went to SMS’ library, and in a
research manual he found this method of con-
verting pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine
using sodium metal as one of the catalysts,”
Cornille said. “He claimed that at the top of the
page was a swastika.”
Thus the moniker: The new process was the
“Nazi method.” The new stuff, “Nazi dope.”
“I really believe that his method, here in
Springfield, was the bounce to get meth spread
throughout the rest of Missouri and the United
States,” said Nick Console, who ran the DEA’s
SUNDAY NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com
NEWS-LEADER FILE PHOTO, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO
Springfield office from the mid-1990s through
the early 2000s.
Despite Paillet’s pioneering role in an Amer-
ican drug epidemic, relatively little has been
known about him. In the later years of his life,
he appears to have avoided public scrutiny, as
well as further trouble with the law. He died in
Texas, age 72, on Jan. 1, 2016.
Paillet’s death and the passage of time have
obscured some details. Other key elements —
like his recipe’s alleged connection to the Third
Reich — have taken on the characteristics of ur-
ban legend.
Court documents obtained by the News-
Leader shed light on his arrest and the early
spread of the Nazi method. Interviews with
family members and a key associate, none of
whom have previously spoken publicly, paint a
picture of a man with an obsession who left pub-
lic officials scrambling to respond for years.
The probable cause statement used to
charge Paillet, written by Cornille, traces his
arrival on law enforcement’s radar to Jan. 24,
1993 — just over a week before he was arrested.
That day, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office ar-
rested two Springfield residents, Christopher
Fricks and Kimberly Lee Duncan, for posses-
sion of a controlled substance and possession of
a short-barreled shotgun.
It’s not clear from court documents how or
why Paillet’s name came up as the two were tak-
en into custody. What is clear is that they told
deputies of two places where Paillet stored ma-
terials he used to make meth.
The first was a room in a house Fricks was
renting in Joplin. Authorities searched it on
Jan. 28. The second was a property near the
small town of Morrisville, where Paillet previ-
ously lived. One of his ex-wives allowed law en-
forcement on the property on Feb. 1. Both tips
were substantiated.
Then, on Feb. 2, a Missouri State Highway
Patrol trooper and Polk County deputies headed
to Paillet’s apartment on West 3rd Street in Bat-
tlefield. Paillet wasn’t home, but his current
wife was, and she began speaking to the men.
She mentioned her husband would sometimes
disappear for up to three weeks at a time, telling
her he was working in Kansas City.
Midway through the conversation, Paillet
drove up in a tan 1983 Chevy Cavalier. He walked
inside, and set an unzipped black duffel bag on
the floor. The grip of a pistol stuck out from the
top, and the trooper quickly moved to secure the
gun. It was loaded: 19 rounds, one in the cham-
ber. Paillet said he’d traded for it.
The trooper and the deputies asked Paillet to
talk outside. He said sure.
They walked out and the officers read Paillet
his Miranda rights. According to court docu-
ments, Paillet “stated he was glad to see them
and glad that it was over.”
Then he began to talk.

BEFORE THE BUST
THOMAS GOUNLEY
TGOUNLEY@
NEWS-LEADER.COM
CHAPTER 3
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CHAPTER 2
USA TODAY
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ILLUSTRATION
BY MARK
MARTURELLO
tanding outside his Battlefield, Missouri, home with a
S
HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY
state trooper and several sheriff’s deputies, Bob Paillet
gave the men consent to search his vehicle. Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in
He knew why they were there. Before they could open the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.
the door of his Chevy Cavalier, he told them what they’d The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspir-
find: methamphetamine, inside a small white pill bottle in the ators are detailed in federal court records. Additional informa-
trunk. Once the drugs were retrieved, Paillet led the officers back tion regarding Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement
Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.
inside and pointed out the two sawed-off shotguns under a bed.
The same day — Feb. 2, 1993 — the trooper and the Polk County Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time
deputies drove Paillet to the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s re- associates, along with current and retired law enforcement
gional headquarters on Kearney Street. There they were joined personnel, were conducted between August 2016 and May
by John Cornille, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how
this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be in-
based in Springfield.
Authorities found a note in Paillet’s pocket, with a chemical terviewed on the condition that her first name be replaced with
a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.
formula written out. They also found two receipts, from trips to
Walmart. The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his
Shortly before dusk, after speaking with investigators, Paillet daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet
led the men to Room 431 of the American Inn Hotel in northeast were obtained from the Greene County Archives and Records
Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of
See METH, Page 4A Paillet himself.
WHEELS TO WORK
Pilot program gets mixed reactions
surer, Aetna, announced earlier City-led Springfield’s new plan to help They hope to start in early June.
this month that it will completely connect panhandlers to job oppor- Springfield resident David Kes-
leave the exchanges for 2018. program tunities and other resources is tak- terson attended two informational
Blue KC President and CEO ing shape, two months after the idea meetings for volunteers Monday.
Danette Wilson said in a state- seeks to was first introduced to city leaders. Kesterson told the News-Leader
ment that the company had lost connect The eight-week pilot program, he would like to drive one of the two
more than $100 million on the called Wheels To Work, was created retired City Utilities buses that
exchanges through 2016 and de- panhandlers in response to an increased number were donated to the effort, to pick
scribed the losses as “unsus- of complaints about people who panhandlers up from busy Spring-
tainable.” The exchanges began with jobs stand by busy roads to ask for food field intersections.
operating in 2014. or money. Kesterson said he attended the
The release said about 67,000 ALISSA ZHU The city, along with partner or- meeting about Wheels To Work “be-
members in western Missouri DZHU@NEWS-LEADER.COM ganizations such as the Council of cause, like me, it’s here to help
and eastern Kansas would be Churches, Crosslines and One
affected. Door, is recruiting volunteers. See WHEELS, Page 4A
Index Classified 1F Deaths 6A Merchandise 1F Outdoors 1C Sports 1D $1.50 daily
VOL. 127, NO. 145
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4A Thursday, May 25, 2017
“My father is a classic case of what PTSD does to a brilliant mind.”
Meth
Continued from Page 1A
Springfield, where he showed them the
meth-making materials he had stashed
there. Then they all drove across town to
a storage facility in Battlefield, where he
kept a second stash.
The News-Leader reported the bust
two days later, with the headline “Police
nail ‘Nazi Dope’ laboratory in Battle-
field.” The authorities said chemical dis-
posal workers wearing special suits and
protective gloves spent about three
hours clearing the storage unit. They es-
timated disposing of the chemicals
would cost the federal government
$35,000.
The story noted that, nationwide, the
number of meth lab busts had declined in
recent years. But it also quoted the head
of a local drug task force, with a premo-
nition that would turn out to be spot on.
“This Nazi dope is definitely new to
this area, and it could be the first in the
U.S.,” said Steve Whitney, also the sher-
iff in nearby Christian County. “I still
think we may see this more and more.”
Although credited with pioneering
the so-called “Nazi method” of produc-
ing meth — and opening the door to an
era of amateur meth labs across the Mid-
west — Paillet himself has remained
something of a mystery.
News stories and a handful of books
published in the decades since his 1993
arrest have presented scant detail: He
moved from California to Missouri in the
1980s and, upon finding meth was more
expensive than he was used to out west,
set out to make it himself. He researched
chemistry at the library at Southwest
Missouri State University in Springfield.
He was arrested. He moved to Texas.
That narrative covers just a portion of
his life.
Born on March 4, 1943, Robert Paillet
was 72 when he died Jan. 1, 2016.
He left behind two daughters. In an
email to the News-Leader, the oldest of-
fered a theme for his biography:
“My father is a classic case of what
PTSD does to a brilliant mind.”
Speed. Crank. Dope. Ice. Zip. The poor
man’s cocaine.
Whatever you call it, meth is a stim-
ulant that affects the central nervous
system.
It’s odorless, typically white and can
be found in powder and crystal forms. In
the United States, it has for decades been
a schedule II substance, which means it
has some very limited accepted medical
Wheels
Continued from Page 1A
make the city a safer, cleaner, more prof-
itable place.”
Gazing out of the window after the
meeting, he appeared to say to no one in
particular, “Some progress is being
made at least.”
“They’re making some effort,” said
Kesterson, who used to be homeless in
Springfield for many years. “More than
they have in the past.”
Describing the program to volunteers
Monday afternoon, Mark Struckhoff
with the Council of Churches of the
Ozarks emphasized that specific aspects
of the plan will probably adapt to fit the
needs of program participants along the
way.
The buses have been re-branded with
a “Wheels To Work” logo and will be
leased from the city of Springfield to the
Council of Churches for $1 a year.
The Council of Churches is the organi-
zation that has taken the lead in many as-
pects of the program. All volunteers are
required to register with the Council of
Churches, consent to a background
check and abide by anti-discrimination
and confidentiality policies. Vehicles
and volunteers will be covered by the
Council of Churches’ insurance policy.
The Wheels To Work program will tar-
get six intersections, narrowed down
from a list of 12 originally identified by
Springfield police as those that frequent-
ly have panhandling activity.
Every Monday and Tuesday, starting
at 10 a.m., both buses will embark on a
fixed route, stopping at three intersec-
tions each.
At each intersection, the bus will sit in
a nearby parking lot for 15 to 30 minutes
while volunteers dodge traffic to talk to
TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 2
LISA PAILLET, BOB PAILLET’S OLDEST DAUGHTER
A photo of Bob Paillet, believed to have been taken in the 1960s.
ABOVE: Paillet poses in his U.S. Navy uniform during the
1960s. LEFT: Paillet at age 16. He graduated from Exeter High
School in Exeter, Missouri, before enlisting in the U.S. Navy.
uses — for conditions like attention def-
icit disorder and obesity, under the trade
name Desoxyn — but also a high poten-
tial for abuse, as well as psychological or
physical dependence.
One of the things that sets meth apart
from other illegal substances is its
means of production.
“Unlike other major drugs of abuse,
methamphetamine is a synthetic drug,
and as such, is manufactured in a labora-
tory,” the DEA wrote in a 2016 report.
“Methamphetamine does not rely on a
plant as its main source and is not affect-
ed by drought, flooding, growth cycles,
or other natural elements that affect pro-
duction. Instead, methamphetamine
production relies on the ability of traf-
fickers to obtain precursors and other
essential chemicals.”
Meth is most commonly smoked,
snorted or injected. Its use causes an in-
crease in energy and alertness and a de-
crease in appetite. Meth also produces
an intense euphoric rush, and can make
users hypersexual. Cornille said the high
from crack cocaine lasts for a matter for
minutes. With meth, the high lasts for
hours.
Meth can cause increased heart rate
and blood pressure, tremors and convul-
sions and — particularly with repeated
use — depression and motor and cogni-
panhandlers standing at medians.
Once the driver has visited all the in-
tersections, any panhandlers who want
to participate in Wheels To Work will be
first given a ride to Victory Mission.
There, they can shower, eat a hot meal
and launder their clothing.
The Missouri Career Center and Vic-
tory Mission can also provide profes-
sional clothes to anyone who needs them.
Program participants will be asked to
fill out a needs assessment form that
asks questions such as: Where have you
been living this past week? Do you cur-
rently have a valid photo ID? What are
your barriers to employment?
Depending on the individuals’ needs,
they may then be transported to One
Door, where they can be connected to
more resources.
Or, they could proceed directly to
seeking work through temporary em-
ployment agency People Ready.
People Ready will ask the panhan-
dlers to take an employment readiness
test as well as drug and alcohol screen-
ing tests.
Rand Henslee with People Ready pre-
viously told City Council that most, but
not all, jobs require drug tests and back-
ground checks.
If a person does not clear People
Ready’s intake process, they will work
with the Career Center to find day-labor
jobs.
The buses are scheduled to stop oper-
ating at 3 p.m.
City spokesperson Cora Scott told the
News-Leader that people are not likely to
work the same day they are picked up by
Wheels To Work buses, but they could be
ready to start a new job the next morn-
ing.
Wes Buchholz with Crosslines said if
someone goes through One Door with the
Wheels To Work program, he or she will
receive a one-day bus pass.
If someone finds work through Peo-
PHOTOS SUBMITTED BY FAMILY
tive failure. Users also tend to not sleep
for extended periods, which leads to ad-
ditional detrimental effects.
Bob Paillet’s death certificate lists his
birthplace as San Diego. His oldest
daughter, now 48, said her father was ac-
tually born on Canada’s Vancouver Is-
land, although his parents had previous-
ly lived in California.
Lisa Paillet — who spoke to the News-
Leader on the condition that her real
first name not be used — said Bob’s fa-
ther, Francis “Fred” Paillet, was a Ver-
mont native and worked as a carpenter
and master gardener. His mother, Que-
bec native Louise Marie Paillet, was a
maid and cook.
The family moved to Fort Smith, Ar-
kansas, when Bob was in junior high, then
ple Ready or the Career Center, Buch-
holz said, he or she will receive a one-
week bus pass.
Adam Bodendieck with One Door
coached prospective volunteers on how
to safely and appropriately approach
people at intersections.
Look both ways before you cross the
street, Bodendieck said. Dress casually.
Start out with simple conversation.
Smile and be engaging. Don’t be sur-
prised if someone appears to be drunk or
on drugs.
“Human kindness 101 is what this is,”
Bodendieck said.
Bodendieck said Wheels To Work is a
“work-readiness program” and hopes
that it has the potential to lead people to
more long-term employment options.
People who attended the information-
al meetings on Monday had mixed reac-
tions to the plan.
Katie Webb, who does not plan to vol-
unteer, told the News-Leader she’s “du-
bious” the program will be effective.
Webb said she was disappointed be-
cause she believes the city is not really
offering anything new to panhandlers.
“In my opinion, there is no incentive
for panhandlers to get on the bus and
waste half a day at these three different
places that they are already aware of,”
Webb said.
Webb said the city-led plan does not
go far enough and is little more than a
hyped-up bus service.
“If you want to say, ‘We’re offering
rides to people who want it,’ great,”
Webb said. “Don’t say it’s a great way for
them to earn money and get them off the
corner.”
Webb said she wishes Springfield had
a work program that more closely emu-
lated programs in Denver or Albuquer-
que, New Mexico, where city funds are
used to employ panhandlers to do land-
scaping or pick up trash.
“I’m not about reinventing the
NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com
to the small town of Exeter, Missouri,
about 60 miles southwest of Springfield,
several years later. After graduating from
Exeter High School in 1961, Bob enlisted in
the Navy and was sent to California’s Bay
Area. He was taking forestry classes at
the University of California-Berkeley
when, in 1964, he was deployed to Vietnam
on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger.
Lisa said her father returned to the
United States with “debilitating mi-
graines and a jaundiced view of the
world,” after a commanding officer
“rode one of his crew members so hard”
that he committed suicide. She believes
Bob had post-traumatic stress disorder,
although he was never formally diag-
nosed. For the most part, Lisa said, her fa-
ther avoiding talking about his time at
war.
Upon his return home in 1965, Bob
Paillet married Lisa’s mother, whom he
met in Berkeley prior to his deployment.
They briefly lived in Oakland before em-
barking on a year-long trip around the
United States, ultimately ending in Kan-
sas City. Over the next five years, Bob
and his wife bounced back and forth be-
tween there and the Bay Area. Bob never
returned to college.
Lisa was born in California in 1968.
She said her father had an assortment of
jobs over the years. Sometimes he
flipped houses, or built new ones. He
liked to purchase and restore antique
cars, a lifelong passion of his, for resale.
He wasn’t always self-employed, howev-
er. When Lisa was born, he worked as a
lineman for the phone company.
Around 1970, the family of three was
living in Kansas City, where Bob worked
for a fiberglass company. One day, he
saw a friend and co-worker get electro-
cuted. It’s a moment that “damaged” her
father, Lisa said.
The family moved back to California,
where Bob reconnected with a friend
who was using meth. At some point, Lisa
said, the friend got hold of a bad batch
and became sick.
“So my father went to the Berkeley
public library and the university library
and started researching chemistry
books,” Lisa said.
Why chemistry books? Bob “wanted
him to have clean drugs.”
“That’s my father’s logic,” she said.
“Not get him off the drugs — but make
them better.”
Within a few years, Lisa said, Bob be-
came “really flaky and moody.” Around
1973, at Bob’s request, Lisa’s mother
gave her husband a year to travel and
find himself. He took two. When Bob
came back, the couple divorced.
“After that, I saw him off and on for
camping trips, hiking, or things like roll-
er skating,” Lisa said. “It was a good
compromise. I got to see him when he
was in the mood to play. If he was not, he
was not around. This basic relationship
carried us through life.”
The extent to which Bob used or pro-
duced meth in the ensuing years is un-
clear. Sometime during the two-year
break, Lisa said, Bob met the woman who
would become his second wife. His
youngest daughter, Gena Paillet, was
born in the Springfield area in 1978.
“I can remember I grew up terrified
of him, because he would be one happy
person one minute and literally in a sec-
ond go to this terrifying person,” Gena
said.
wheel,” Webb said. “If it’s worked in oth-
er places, let’s try it here.”
Scott said the idea for Wheels To Work
was originally inspired by Albuquer-
que’s job program, but Springfield has
gone a different route for a few reasons.
Scott said the city is required by the
federal government to drug test all of its
employees.
“We wanted to provide a job opportu-
nity that would allow people to forgo hav-
ing a drug test or background check,”
Scott said.
Many organizations, including People
Ready, stepped up eager to help, Scott
said, so the city decided to make it a col-
laborative effort.
The city is leading an educational as-
pect of the program as well.
Scott said the city will put up signs
that will direct people looking for help or
wanting to donate to call “211” to reach
the United Way of the Ozarks.
There, they can ask questions about
resources for panhandlers or request to
donate to Wheels To Work, Scott said.
Bob Samuels, who signed up to be a
bus driver for Wheels To Work, said he
left Monday’s meeting feeling good.
“This is a great program and one we
should have been doing previously,” said
Samuels.
He said he’s been told that the only
way to decrease the number of panhan-
dlers in Springfield is to stop giving
them money.
That doesn’t really solve the problem,
though, Samuels said.
“(Wheels To Work) is actually giving
people a chance at something they
need,” he said.
Samuels said he’s interested in learn-
ing more about panhandlers, their back-
grounds, and what drives them to ask for
money.
“Is it an easy way out or is it their only
way out?” Samuels asked. “Are they will-
ing to work if they are offered a job?”
 Sunday | May 28, 2017 | news-leader.com | PART OF THE USA TODAY NETWORK
The News-Leader is celebrating its 150th anniversary. See historic pages and a historic masthead every Saturday.

inside
$79
in coupons
Value may
vary by area CHAPTER 3

EASE
INTO
JUNE
River Jam, Pridefest
and Over the Edge
among highlights of our
June calendar, Page 1C

BUSINESS

3M makes
expansion
plan final
City leaders OK’d
financial incentives
THOMAS GOUNLEY
TGOUNLEY@NEWS-LEADER.COM

Manufacturer 3M on
Wednesday said it is official-
ly moving forward with plans
to expand operations in
THE REINVENTION
Springfield.
The announcement comes

B
THOMAS GOUNLEY y the time he was arrested with methamphetamine in the “I just
months after Springfield TGOUNLEY@ trunk of his car in 1993, Bob Paillet was on his third marriage. remember
City Council approved finan- NEWS-LEADER.COM
cial incentives in an effort to He had fathered two children, born 10 years apart, in dif- seeing this
land the project. Minnesota- ferent states, to different women. The lives of his daughters, one huge
based 3M had said Spring- to this day, have had relatively little overlap. table ...
CHAPTER 4 Both women, however, have memories of living with their father on a with
field was competing for the
expansion against other cit- COMING plot of rural land along Highway JJ, not far from Morrisville, Missouri. beakers
ies where it has a plant. THURSDAY The town of about 400 is 25 miles north of Springfield. and pots
The $40 million project The remote venue in the anonymous rolling hills of the Ozarks appears and things
will include upgrades at 3M’s to have been one place where Paillet refined the work that would later smoking
current plant at 3211 E. ONLINE turn the meth trade on its head. and, you
Chestnut Expressway, as
Gena Paillet, Bob’s youngest daughter, lived there in the mid-1980s. know, tubes
well as the redevelopment of Miss a chapter? You
the former Mammoth build- can read the full She and her father had recently moved back to Missouri from California. going from
ing on East Pythian Street, series online now at Her mother, Bob’s second wife, stayed behind in the Golden State for a one to
which 3M has owned for News-Leader.com. year to work. Gena and her father lived in a modified school bus while Bob the other.
years. It is expected to in- began building a house. I didn’t
Want more in-depth
crease the plant’s workforce journalism like this? It was a simple setting. The bathroom for a time was an outhouse. But know what
by about 90 people in the next Go online to the property gave Gena, who says she grew up fearing her father, what it was, but I
several years, according to a offers.news- she calls “some of the best memories of my life.” There were dense woods knew he
news release from the Mis- leader.com/EWJ to explore, and the property abutted the Little Sac River. was up to
souri Department of Eco- for a special digital something.”
“We’d go swimming in that all the time and catch crawdads, things like
nomic Development. subscription offer.
“We hope 3M’s expansion that,” Gena said. “I’ve thought about going back to that property.”
GENA
of its adhesives and tapes di- Within a couple of years, however, Bob and his second wife separated. PAILLET
vision in Missouri sends a USA TODAY NETWORK Gena said her father was unfaithful and verbally abusive. She and her BOB PAILLET’S
message to those in the busi- ILLUSTRATION BY mother went to live in Morrisville. DAUGHTER
MARK MARTURELLO
ness community — from the Not long after, in 1987, Bob’s oldest daughter, a product of his first mar-
small family business to the riage, arrived at the property.
major corporation — that we
are going to work to help See METH, Page 4A
them grow and prosper,”
Gov. Eric Greitens said in a
statement.

See EXPANSION, Page 6A

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4A May 28, 2017 SUNDAY NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com

TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 3

“If you heard the geese and it was dark outside, you hit the lights and you hit the floor.”
LISA PAILLET, BOB PAILLET’S DAUGHTER

NATHAN PAPES/NEWS-LEADER, USA TODAY NETWORK ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO

A 2017 photo of Highway JJ, several miles west of Morrisville. Bob Paillet lived along the road during the 1980s.

Meth
Continued from Page 1A

Lisa Paillet — the first name is a pseudonym

— grew up in California, where she was born in
1968. She saw her father only occasionally, but
at times felt his presence even when he wasn’t
around. In high school, Lisa said, adults would
sometimes show up and “imply that they knew
my father and were supposed to watch out for
me.”
Lisa came to live with her father as she pre-
pared to attend Southwest Missouri State Uni-
versity in Springfield. He was footing the bill.
Three decades later, Lisa remembers the
property as a place where her father experi-
mented. Bob never said exactly what he was do-
ing, and Lisa sensed it might be best if she didn’t
exactly know. She recalls helping her father
hook together motors and going on shopping
trips to Wal-Mart to buy cold medicine.
“He would buy tons of that stuff, and he said
it was easy for him to break down to get the
chemicals he wanted,” Lisa said.
Bob coached Lisa not to give her name to
people. If somebody came looking for her fa-
ther, she was supposed to deny that she knew
him. Instead of guard dogs, the property near
Morrisville had guard geese. The animals tend PHOTO SUBMITTED BY FAMILY
to raise a racket when they’re disturbed. Bob Paillet holds his daughter Gena in the 1980s.
“If you heard the geese and it was dark out-
side, you hit the lights and you hit the floor,” Li-
sa said. in Ash Grove, joined the DEA in
There is some overlap in Lisa and Gena’s 1983, and was soon working out
memories. Both recall a room on the property of the agency’s Houston office.
where they weren’t supposed to go. Gena dis- In an interview, Console said
tinctly remembers hiding behind a tree one day, that meth labs back then were
on a weekend visit sometime after her parents primarily located in out-of-the-
separated, and watching her father go inside. way, rural areas, so the rotten
“I just remember seeing this one huge table Nick Console egg smell produced during a
... with beakers and pots and things smoking cook wouldn’t give the operation
and, you know, tubes going from one to the oth- away. They were full of glassware, not unlike a
er,” she said. “I didn’t know what it was, but I scene from the hit TV series “Breaking Bad.”
knew he was up to something. And by his behav- The labs churned out batches of the drug mea-
ior becoming much more erratic, we knew sured in pounds.
something was wrong. We just didn’t know Busts by the authorities would sometimes
what.” lead to shootouts. At times, cleaning up a lab
consisted of dumping the chemicals in the near-
est ditch, Console said. The Environmental Pro-
tection Agency had yet to sound the alarm. No-
body thought to wear a respirator.
“These labs, they were out in west Texas,
they might be out in the boonies in an old mobile
home, but everything in that mobile home was a
lab,” Console said.
Meth was big business for the bikers, and it PHOTO SUBMITTED BY FAMILY
required a specialized workforce, he said. The Bob Paillet is embraced by a sister.
gangs employed their own chemists, who gen-
erally used what is known as the P2P method, in
reference to its incorporation of phenylace- Galloping Goose motorcycle club, gunned
tone, a chemical often used for industrial clean- down Highway Patrol Trooper Russell Harper
By the 1980s, the U.S. meth trade — both ing or photo processing purposes. during a routine traffic stop just outside
manufacturing and distribution — was largely Back then, Console said, “you had to be a Springfield. It was later determined Sweet, who
run by outlaw motorcycle gangs. In some chemist to make meth.” was ultimately put to death, was transporting
places, it was the Hell’s Angels. In Texas, it was The meth trade’s biker era bled into south- meth.
the Bandidos. west Missouri. In 1987, Glennon Paul Sweet, a
Nick Console, a Louisiana native now living local member of the Hell’s Angels-affiliated Continued on Next Page

HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.
The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records. Additional information regarding
Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time associates, along with current and retired law enforcement personnel, were conducted between
August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed
on the condition that her first name be replaced with a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.
The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet were obtained from
the Greene County Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.
SUNDAY NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com
TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 3
Bob Paillet, left, poses with a friend in a photo believed to be from the 1970s.
Continued from Previous Page
The wooded hollows of southern Missouri once at-
tracted moonshiners. By the late 1980s, the region’s
rural nature and sparse law enforcement presence
were seen as ideal for making meth. DEA officials re-
ported that manufacturers were buying or leasing
farmhouses and converting them into P2P labs. Still,
they were few and far between; Cornille said agents
typically came across a couple of labs per year.
After being transferred from Houston, Console
worked for the DEA overseas in Turkey, then in San
Francisco. In the fall of 1994, about a year and a half
after Paillet’s arrest, he arrived in Springfield as the
DEA’s new resident agent in charge.
“When I got here, it was the beginning of the spike
in meth labs,” he said.
Lisa Paillet doesn’t believe her father was ever in a
motorcycle gang. But Bob definitely associated with
some shady types.
“I know that when I was in circles of people that I
would consider very bad people, he was known in
California,” she said.
Lisa also said her father “would have hundreds of
thousands of dollars of cash sometimes, and then he
would have nothing.”
Either way, Paillet had no prior criminal record
when, in January 1993, he became a person of interest
to law enforcement agencies in southwest Missouri.
The authorities had encountered a new type of meth
lab — using what became known as the “Nazi method”
— in the town of Reeds Spring just a couple of months
earlier.
In DEA records reviewed by the News-Leader,
Paillet said he was the one who discovered the new
process, but never specifically stated when that hap-
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The Reeds Spring lab wasn’t the first of its kind. A
Nazi method-style lab was found in 1988 in a trailer
park in Vacaville, California, according to a 1990 arti-
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later came to believe Paillet was behind the lab — a
conclusion that appears supported by his numerous
connections to the state.
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The Nazi method starts with the compound pseu-
doephedrine, which, chemically speaking, is one oxy-
gen atom removed from methamphetamine.
Pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in cold
medicines sold under brand names such as Sudafed.
Here’s how a former DEA chemist described the
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To make meth, the manufacturer pulverizes the
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Methyl alcohol, in the form of something like wind-
shield washer fluid, is poured over it, and then evap-
orated out.
The cook then adds ether, anhydrous ammonia — a
compound commonly used by farmers as fertilizer —
and sodium metal or lithium metal, which can be
stripped from commercial batteries. That produces a
liquid called meth oil.
More ether is added, and the solution is put
through another coffee filter. A bubbler is then used
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“Bob made meth a recipe anyone could follow,” he AVAILABLE ON LIMITED INVENTORY
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Additionally, the chemicals involved were legal,
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Weekend

CHAPTER 4

OUT &
DOWN
Rappelling Sky Eleven
building part of Over the
Edge fundraiser

THREE MISSING WOMEN

NATHAN PAPES/NEWS-LEADER
Janis McCall, the mother of Stacy
McCall, holds a missing poster of
the three missing women.

Mother of
missing
woman:
Don’t call it
anniversary
McCall: 25th marker
of disappearance
is not a celebration
GIACOMO BOLOGNA
GBOLOGNA@NEWS-LEADER.COM

Standing in that bedroom on

June 7, 1992, Janis McCall had
no way of knowing her daugh-
ter would become part of
Springfield’s most puzzling un-
solved disappearance.
Instead, McCall was angry.
Her daughter Stacy had just
graduated from Kickapoo and
was spending the night at a
friend’s home, but when Stacy
THE ASSOCIATES
didn’t call her the next day,

B
THOMAS GOUNLEY ob Paillet ordered a pecan waffle with extra butter and a “Friend?
McCall went over to the central TGOUNLEY@
Springfield home. glass of milk, then settled into the booth at a north Spring-
The doors were unlocked.
NEWS-LEADER.COM
field Waffle House. He was wearing a wire. No.
And inside a room were Stacy After being arrested on Feb. 2, 1993, the Springfield-
McCall’s shorts, shoes and bra Associate.
in a neat pile on the floor next to
CHAPTER 5 area resident told the authorities that he’d taught his new
the bed. Nearby were her keys, COMING recipe for methamphetamine — the so-called “Nazi method” — to a Close
her bathing suit, her purse and friend. Now, less than 24 hours later, Paillet, 49, was killing time reading
her make-up kit. SUNDAY associate.”
the newspaper, waiting for that man to arrive. Drug Enforcement Ad-
“I thought, ‘This is absolute-
ly stupid’ — that she left her ministration agent John Cornille and a Missouri State Highway Patrol MIKE
stuff here and she left her car ONLINE POPLAWSKI
trooper were listening from a van parked nearby. DESCRIBING HIS
and she didn’t have any sense to Miss a chapter? You “Hey, late as usual,” Paillet said as Mike Poplawski, 34, arrived. RELATIONSHIP WITH
call me,” McCall said. can read the full
Stacy was a beautiful, vi- A transcript of the conversation that took place over breakfast — BOB PAILLET IN A
series online now at RECENT INTERVIEW
brant girl, McCall said. She News-Leader.com. obtained from the DEA under the Freedom of Information Act — is
used to model wedding dresses, heavily redacted, with Poplawski’s comments completely blacked out.
and her long hair reached past Want more in-depth USA TODAY NETWORK
her waist. journalism like this? By the time they parted ways, however, Poplawski had given Paillet ILLUSTRATION BY
Even now, when McCall sees Go online to 279 milligrams of meth, according to court documents. The wire caught MARK MARTURELLO
a girl with hair that long, she has offers.news- everything.
to get a glimpse of the girl’s face leader.com/EWJ
for a special digital The next day, Cornille and the trooper showed up at Poplawski’s
just to see that it’s not Stacy.
Why didn’t she call? And subscription offer. home on South Newton Street.
why was her car still parked
outside? See METH, Page 3A
“Her shirt and her panties
were all that she had,” McCall
said.

See MISSING, Page 2A

BOMB IN AFGHANISTAN KILLS AT LEAST 90, WOUNDS MORE THAN 400 PAGE 1B

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NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com Thursday, June 1, 2017 3A

TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 4

“He experimented on people. He’d change the formula a little bit and then give it to junkies he knew’d
take it and ask no questions, and then watch their reactions. This is the guy that DEA worked with.”
MIKE POPLAWSKI, BOB PAILLET’S ASSOCIATE

Mike
Poplawski

Gary
Davis

Frank
Wright

Kenneth
Allen

RIGHT:
Waffle House
on North
Kansas
Expressway.
NATHAN PAPES/NEWS-LEADER, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO

Meth guy with “a big man’s want for power,” someone

Continued from Page 1A
Poplawski was cooperative. He invited the
officers in, and, when told there was an ongoing
investigation that involved him, admitted that
he cooked meth, according to court documents.
He showed the trooper a baggie of the drug in-
side his wallet, and then took them to another
apartment where he stored lab equipment and
precursor chemicals.
Later, at the DEA office, Poplawski con-
firmed he’d been taught by Paillet how to make
meth using the Nazi method.
who walked around “like a bantam rooster.” A
guy who “hit on every woman that he come
across, no matter what.” And a man whose de-
fining obsession — all speeders have one, Po-
plawski said — was “his process,” the way he
made his dope.
“He experimented on people,” Poplawski
said. “He’d change the formula a little bit and
then give it to junkies he knew’d take it and ask
no questions, and then watch their reactions.
This is the guy that DEA worked with.”
As Poplawski looked at the transcript, he
wouldn’t even agree with Paillet’s remark that
he showed up to the Waffle House late.
“I’m more on time than anybody I know,” he
said.
said he’d participated in an earlier one.
Wright, in turn, contacted the DEA in mid-
August. He said he’d been introduced to meth
about 18 months prior when he was at Poplaw-
ski’s home. Paillet showed up to deliver the
drug. Wright said he started doing work on Pail-
let’s vehicle, and his involvement gradually
grew, until he was loading and unloading chem-
icals and driving Paillet around while he distrib-
uted meth.
Wright told the DEA that Poplawski taught
him to make meth. He described it as a some-
what formal process that entailed assisting with
three cooks. (Poplawski, in a recent interview,
denied ever teaching anyone the Nazi method).
The hardest ingredient to obtain was sodium
metal, Wright told the DEA, so he figured out a
way to manufacture it himself, using lye, an
electric stove, jumper cables and a 12-volt car
battery.
How did Wright come up with the worka-
round? Perhaps his time with Paillet influenced
him.
“In late June, 1993, or early July, 1993, Wright
did research into the manufacture of sodium
metal at Southwest Missouri State University,”
court documents say.

In a recent interview, Poplawski, now 59, said

he first met Paillet in 1979.
Roller skating was the thing to do back then,
and “we were both hotdoggers,” Poplawski said,
using a term for those fond of showing off. The
pair — 35 and 21 years old — met at a north
Springfield rink. Poplawski said they were
among the first in the city to purchase jogger
skates, basically tennis shoes with big, brightly
colored wheels.
Poplawski said he believes Paillet might’ve
smoked a little pot back then, and he drank, but
he didn’t do anything harder. Then Paillet left
for California. When he returned, he was into
meth. And Poplawski was, too.
He attempted to describe his relationship
with Paillet back then.
“Friend?” he said. “No. Associate. Close asso-
ciate.”
It’s unclear from court records when Paillet
taught Poplawski the Nazi method. Poplawski
declined to clarify the timeline.
Poplawski did state that, sometime in 1992,
there’d been what might be called a misunder-
standing between the pair. Paillet asked Po-
plawski to stop giving meth to a mutual friend of
theirs. Poplawski complied. The friend com-
plained to Paillet, who by that point had forgot-
ten his earlier directive and became angry at
Poplawski. The two stopped talking.
Then six or eight months later, there was a
phone call. And a request to meet at the Waffle
House along North Kansas Expressway. From
Poplawski’s perspective, it seemed an effort to
repair the rift.
Sitting in the living room of his east Spring-
field home, Poplawski briefly looked over the
redacted transcript of the conversation that
day. Some of it was small talk, he said. Mostly,
Paillet was “crying about hurting, wanting
some speed.”
It’s been nearly a quarter century since the
conversation, and Poplawski doesn’t have a sin-
gle positive thing to say about Paillet.
The man was chauvinistic, he said. A shorter
The authorities didn’t stop with Poplawski.
Shortly after 9 p.m. on July 26, 1993, Cornille
and three other law enforcement officers
parked their vehicles in rural Webster County,
with a barn in sight. They were investigating
the latest appearance of Nazi dope. Cornille re-
members hearing coyotes howl.
“Having moved from D.C. to here, it was a bit
of a change for me,” he said.
Earlier in the day, an informant told a Spring-
field police detective that a man named Frank
Wright was planning to cook meth at the barn,
which was owned by an associate, Gary Davis.
The men would start once the sun went down,
the informant said, to take advantage of lower
humidity levels. The informant indicated
Wright drove a green Dodge van. It was parked
by the barn.
Investigators would later learn that, earlier
that afternoon, Davis heard that a friend with a
similar vehicle was stopped by the DEA. Davis
became nervous and told Wright to “burn the
barn” if agents showed up.
Around 10 p.m., the van started up. It drove
off the property, headed west. Cornille and the
others followed and initiated a traffic stop.
Wright agreed to a search. The van was
clean. But the officers found a cigarette pack
with a small amount of meth on Wright himself.
They read him his rights.
Wright admitted to the authorities that he
was planning to cook meth and said he was plac-
ing supplies inside the barn. It was to have been
something of a trade, court documents indicate.
Davis, in exchange for providing the location
for the cook, was to receive two “eight balls” —
the term for an eighth of an ounce — and be al-
lowed to assist in production, so as to learn the
new method himself.
Wright was arrested. The barn, by all ac-
counts, escaped unharmed.
Davis contacted the DEA a week later. He ad-
mitted to knowing about plans for the cook and
Paillet, Poplawski, Wright and Davis were
indicted by a federal grand jury on Oct. 8.
1993, along with two others, Kenneth and Sybil
Allen. Court documents say Poplawski sold
meth to, and purchased meth from, the couple.
The charge against Sybil Allen was later
dropped.
None of them were rich, at least as far as the
court knew. Financial affidavits indicate that
Poplawski was the only one employed in a tradi-
tional sense, bringing home $280 a week. Paillet
and the others were listed as self-employed or
unemployed, with minimal assets.
Three of the men had a record. Poplawski
had been convicted in 1978 of felony robbery in
Phelps County. Two others had stealing and
drug offenses.
The men all initially pleaded not guilty and
bonded out of jail. Dates were set for jury trials.
Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were
being made for plea agreements.
Between mid-December and early January
1994, all five pleaded guilty to conspiring to
manufacture and distribute meth. In exchange,
additional charges against some of them, for
physically manufacturing or possessing the
drug, were dropped.
With Paillet and his co-conspirators rounded
up, the authorities could have been excused for
thinking they’d nipped the nascent meth-mak-
ing boom in the bud. But they were soon disap-
pointed. The recipe for Nazi dope was no longer
a secret.

HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.
The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records. Additional information regarding
Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time associates, along with current and retired law enforcement personnel, were conducted between
August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed
on the condition that her first name be replaced with a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.
The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet were obtained from
the Greene County Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.
 OPEN
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inside
$108
in coupons
Value may
vary by area CHAPTER 5

DOWN
ON THE
FARM
Kratochvil’s 100-acre
farm offers glimpse of
days past | Page 1C

State cuts
funding
for sobriety
checkpoints
Lawmakers’
priority shifted to
saturation patrols
SUMMER BALLENTINE

THE LEGEND
ASSOCIATED PRESS

JEFFERSON CITY - Mis-

souri lawmakers effectively
eliminated funding for sobri-
ety checkpoints for the fiscal
year that begins in July, a
move by a core group of criti-
cal conservative Republicans

T
THOMAS GOUNLEY he inaugural class of those involved with “Nazi dope” was sen- “If I
that officials say could hinder
or end the manpower-inten-
TGOUNLEY@ tenced in Springfield in the spring of 1994. could’ve
NEWS-LEADER.COM There was Bob Paillet, who told authorities he was the pio-
sive practice in some areas of shot
the state. neer behind the new meth labs popping up in southwest Mis-
souri; Mike Poplawski, to whom Paillet taught his new meth- lightning
Missouri lawmakers in the CHAPTER 6
past provided federal fund- od; Frank Wright, who said he learned it from Poplawski; Gary Davis, who out of my
ing for both sobriety COMING arranged to learn it from Wright; and Kenneth Allen, who bought meth eyes, he’d
checkpoints and saturation THURSDAY from, and sold meth to, Poplawski. have been
patrols. Checkpoints involve Allen, who tested positive for using drugs while on bond, was sen-
blocking a street so that all a pile of
tenced to three years probation.
drivers are funneled through ONLINE flesh, a
a group of officers and are Davis also used meth while on bond and traveled without permission
out of the state. He was sentenced to five years in prison. pile of
stopped. Miss a chapter? You
The saturation patrols in- can read the full Poplawski was sentenced to nearly six years in prison. ash, in a
volve positioning extra offi- series online now at If the sentencing guidelines at the time were followed, Wright heartbeat.
cers in pre-defined, unan- News-Leader.com. would’ve faced something similar — between six to seven years behind He just
nounced areas to watch for bars. Prosecutors, however, told the judge he provided “substantial assis-
signs of drunken driving be-
Want more in-depth cost me
journalism like this? tance” in the prosecution of Poplawski. So he was sentenced to about three
fore pulling over drivers. years in prison, followed by a similar amount of probation. five years.
Go online to
The budget now on Repub- Then there was Paillet, who received the best deal of them all. He cost
offers.news-
lican Gov. Eric Greitens’ desk
shifts all but $1 of the $20 mil-
leader.com/EWJ Using the sentencing guidelines, prosecutors calculated Paillet’s “total me five
for a special digital offense level” to be 31. That would correspond with nine to 11 years behind years.”
lion devoted to impaired driv-
subscription offer. bars. The prosecutors, however, wrote that “defendant agreed to fully co-
ing detection to saturation pa-
trols — a technical budgeting operate with the government.” He was credited with assisting in obtain- MIKE
maneuver. USA TODAY NETWORK ing the guilty pleas of the others: Poplawski, Allen, Wright and Davis. POPLAWSKI
Police will still be able to ILLUSTRATION BY TALKING ABOUT
MARK MARTURELLO BOB PAILLET
set up checkpoints, but they See METH, Page 4A
can’t pay for them using that
funding.

See PATROLS, Page 7A

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TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 5

“Once everything got rolling, it spread like wildfire.”

NICK CONSOLE, LED THE DEA’S SPRINGFIELD OFFICE FOR ABOUT A DECADE STARTING IN 1994

NEWS-LEADER FILE PHOTO, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO

Drug enforcement agents wait for fumes to be ventilated from a house before searching it for evidence of a meth lab.

Meth was then Southwest Missouri State University.

Continued from Page 1A
Additionally, the prosecutors wrote that
Paillet “provided significant information con-
cerning the origin of this particular method of
making methamphetamine.”
“Defendant fully admitted that he first de-
vised this method of making methamphet-
amine, and it was through him that the method
was related to other ‘cooks’ in the southwest
Missouri area,” they wrote.
Paillet was sentenced to five years of proba-
tion. He also attended a drug treatment pro-
gram. While there, he received a letter from his
oldest daughter, living in California.
“Surprise, Surprise,” she wrote. “If I would
have known you could do things like that I
would have asked for help with my chemistry
homework.”
Nearly a quarter century later, Poplawski
doesn’t understand how Paillet didn’t spend a
day in prison.
“This was the man that experimented on peo-
ple, and the DEA worked with him,” Poplawski
said. “I’m a little burnt about that, still. It still
rises my anger a bunch. Not that I was interest-
ed in working with them myself, don’t get me
wrong, and not that I wasn’t involved, don’t get
me wrong there. But I was not the man on top. I
was not the man to hit for the heavy sentence.”
Poplawski was implicated when Paillet wore
a wire to their meeting at a north Springfield
Waffle House. Poplawski told the News-Leader
the pair never spoke after that day, except for
one comment when they found themselves in
the same courtroom.
“No hard feelings,” Paillet told the man who
had once been his friend. Poplawski, flabber-
gasted, didn’t respond.
“If I could’ve shot lightning out of my eyes,
he’d have been a pile of flesh, a pile of ash, in a
heartbeat,” Poplawski said. “He just cost me
five years. He cost me five years.”
There’s something about calling a drug reci-
pe the “Nazi method” that attracts attention.
A few days after Paillet was arrested in Feb-
ruary 1993, the News-Leader wrote about the
bust. A spokeswoman for the Drug Enforce-
ment Administration was quoted saying that
“people give their drugs all kind of names.”
“Just because it was made by German sol-
diers during World War II and now is called ‘Na-
zi drugs’ has no meaning to us,” the spokeswom-
an said. “It’s a nothingness. It only means that
the producers don’t have to use the usual ingre-
SUBMITTED PHOTO
A German patent from 1936 discussing techniques for
synthesizing pseudoephedrine and ephedrine using
methcathinone. Retired DEA chemist Terry Dal Cason
found it while investigating the origins of the “Nazi
dope” moniker in the 1990s.
dients, that they can make it without the regular
methods. It’s dangerous, no matter what you
call it or how you make it.”
There’s a problem with the spokeswoman’s
response — one that’s been replicated in many
subsequent discussions of the Nazi method. It
implied there’s a direct link between Paillet’s
recipe and the Third Reich. But is there? After
reviewing the available evidence, the News-
Leader found the connection, while compelling,
is tenuous.
Researchers have delved into German use of
meth during World War II. Temmler, a Berlin-
based pharmaceutical company, introduced
meth in pill form under the brand name Pervi-
tin in 1938, according to a 2005 report in the
news magazine Der Spiegel. By 1940, millions
of pills were being shipped to the front lines, re-
sulting “in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed.”
Germany wasn’t alone in exploiting new sub-
stances with minimal consideration for side ef-
fects. The United States and British supplied
service members with tablets of Benzedrine,
an amphetamine, during the same period. Both
were viewed as particularly valuable for pilots,
who needed to remain alert on long bombing
raids.
The large-scale manufacture of Pervitin
pills in German factories, however, stands in
stark contrast to Paillet’s method, which result-
ed in small amounts of a powdered version of
the drug. Which raises the question: If the
method wasn’t the same, how did meth pro-
duced in southwest Missouri end up referenc-
ing a fascist state?
In an interview, DEA agent John Cornille
said that Paillet told him he learned the Nazi
method by researching in the library at what
Cornille said Paillet indicated he came across a
book or a document with a swastika on it.
Those two particular claims aren’t found in
the hundreds of pages of federal court and DEA
records reviewed for this story. The DEA rec-
ords, which were heavily redacted, do include
one conversation in which Cornille asked Pail-
let if he looked “this stuff up in a book or some-
thing.” The response, however, contradicts the
notion that there was one all-important docu-
ment.
“OK, I have a lot of books,” Paillet said. “I
have gone through the library, many libraries
and read lots of books, hundreds of ’em. Ah, in-
volving many phrases of chemistry.”
Cornille asked what books “originally kinda
gave you this idea that maybe this thing could
work.”
“I can’t say that it was any one in particular,”
Paillet responded.
Cornille told the News-Leader he believes
most of the backstory Paillet gave regarding
his discovery. However, he said the DEA tried
to determine the exact book that contributed to
Paillet’s breakthrough, but came up empty-
handed.
“I believe he found it in a book at SMS,” Cor-
nille said. “But the swastika thing — they
looked far and wide.”
The man who did the searching says it’s a lit-
tle more complicated than that.
Terry Dal Cason retired from a 40-year-ca-
reer as a forensic chemist with the DEA in 2011.
He told the News-Leader that, back in the
mid-1990s, his colleagues in the world of meth
lab analysis didn’t talk vaguely about a cook in
southwest Missouri coming across a book or
document with a swastika on it, as Cornille does
now.
Instead, Dal Cason said, they specifically
mentioned a “Nazi patent.” Some of his col-
leagues stated as fact that the cook came across
a patent that contained the exact recipe for Nazi
dope. But Dal Cason wanted proof.
“People kept talking about this patent, and I
was trying to get a copy of it,” he said.
Dal Cason ended up with two theories. In
1997, he laid them out in an article for a little-
known DEA publication called Microgram.
Theory one:
Dal Cason wrote that “one of the earliest
groups” to make Nazi dope compiled packets of
documents that included instructions for the
Continued on Next Page

HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.
The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records. Additional information regarding
Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time associates, along with current and retired law enforcement personnel, were conducted between
August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed
on the condition that her first name be replaced with a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.
The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet were obtained from
the Greene County Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.
SUNDAY NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com
Meth
Continued from Previous Page
method, and hid them away from their
lab sites. If the lab was busted, the hid-
den packets ensured they’d still have a
written copy of the recipe somewhere,
Dal Cason wrote.
What does that have to do with the
name? “The top page of the synthesis
‘packets’ was a photocopy of a drawing
from the cover of a video cassette case
of the Third Reich propaganda film, ‘Tri-
umph des Willens,’” Dal Cason wrote.
“Triumph of the Will,” the English
translation of the title, was commis-
sioned by Hitler. The drawing Dal Cason
referred to shows an eagle clutching a
wreath containing a swastika.
Dal Cason wrote in 1997 that “it is rel-
atively easy to postulate how the seizure
of these packets could present an oppor-
tunity to misinterpret a relationship be-
tween the most recognizable of NAZI
symbols and the Li (or Na)/NH3 reduc-
tion procedure contained in the pack-
ets.”
“From this point it is easy to imagine
a ‘word of mouth’ genesis of the ‘Nazi
patent’ myth,” he wrote.
The documents and court records re-
viewed by the News-Leader do note ma-
terials seized in connection with the in-
vestigation of Paillet and his associates,
but don’t mention the German propa-
ganda film. Dal Cason told the News-
Leader he didn’t recall the specific indi-
viduals who apparently hid the packets.
The footnotes of his Microgram article
reference cases filed in federal court in
1996, years after Paillet was arrested
and the Nazi dope moniker was first
used.
Theory two:
Dal Cason also asked a colleague in
the United Kingdom to search German
patents. Those published from 1932 to
1945 were topped with the “Imperial Ea-
gle,” a coat of arms depicting an eagle
perched on wreath containing a swasti-
ka (similar, but not identical, to imagery
on Triumph Des Willens).
Leslie King, head of the Forensic Sci-
ence Service’s Drugs Intelligence Lab-
oratory, wrote Dal Cason in October
1996, and said he failed to find a patent
for the technique Paillet used.
There were, however, patents that
were somewhat related. Dal Cason said
the packets mentioned in his first theory
contained not just a recipe for the Nazi
method, but also instructions for anoth-
er process using methcathinone.
Dal Cason said King found a German
patent from 1936 which provided tech-
niques for synthesizing pseudoephe-
drine and ephedrine using methcathi-
none.
“The chemical names ‘Ephedrinen’
and ‘Pseudoephedrine’ are easily recog-
nized among the German wording of the
patent,” Dal Cason wrote. “Misinterpre-
tation of the patent’s content, combined
with a clandestine laboratory having
chemicals appropriate for the Li(Na)/
NH3 method, might easily lead to the as-
sumption that this process was de-
scribed in the patent.”
To be clear, however, the patent
wasn’t describing the method Paillet
used. And to Dal Cason’s knowledge, no
one ever found a copy of the German
patent in connection with a lab bust —
it’s something for which Dal Cason had
to search.
The audience for Microgram, where
Dal Cason’s article appeared, was large-
ly limited to law enforcement. An edi-
tor’s note attached to the piece read: “If
anyone has hard evidence that a ‘NAZI’
patent does exist, please contact the Mi-
crogram editor.” Dal Cason never heard
from anyone.
Poplawski, for his part, offered a
third theory.
In an interview, he said Paillet
“wasn’t smart enough to invent” the
method, and that he must have gotten
the recipe from someone else. Poplaw-
ski also said he never heard Paillet or
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Among the items police have confiscated from suspected meth labs are drain line opener, cold
medicine, rock salt and a heat lamp.
any of his associates use the phrases
‘Nazi method” or “Nazi dope.”
“The first time we heard it the DEA
threw it out there, and we had no idea
what they were talking about,” he said.
Why does all this matter? Words stir
emotion. Dan Viets — a defense attorney
based in Columbia, Missouri — told the
News-Leader that, by the late 1990s,
prosecutors were brandishing the Nazi
method moniker “as a weapon” in front
of juries, taking advantage of the aver-
age person’s extreme dislike of Nazis.
Viets considers the term “obviously
prejudicial,” particularly given the the
lack of an established connection be-
tween Paillet’s method and actual Nazis.
“The cops liked to say that as many
times as they could in a courtroom,” he
said.
The sentencing of Paillet and his as-
sociates didn’t stop use of the Nazi meth-
od.
Instead, the opposite occurred. The
small-scale labs began to proliferate.
At first, most state and local officials,
such as the average rural county sher-
iff’s office, didn’t have the training to
safely deal with meth labs. Instead,
they’d call the DEA. As the 1990s pro-
gressed, Cornille says he began feeling
like a firefighter, rushing from small
blaze to small blaze without time to inves-
tigate their causes. Instead of fires, of
course, it was meth labs — although the
explosions the labs sometimes prompted
could end up blurring the distinction.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol,
contacted by the News-Leader this fall,
could only find records regarding the
number of meth lab incidents in the state
annually dating back to 1996. That year,
according to the patrol, there were 121
labs found.
That figure increased to 319 in 1997.
Then 480 in 1998. Then 615 in 1999.
“Once everything got rolling, it
spread like wildfire,” said Nick Console,
who led the DEA’s Springfield office for
about a decade starting in 1994.
(A meth lab doesn’t have to be opera-
tional when it is discovered to be count-
ed in state or federal tallies of “meth lab
incidents.” Those tallies generally also
count situations when authorities seize
materials used to make meth, or find
sites where lab waste material has been
discarded.)
Call To Schedule A Free Consultation!
NEWS-LEADER FILE PHOTO
Cornille said he recalls Paillet telling
him that he taught five people his meth-
od for Nazi dope.
“My initial thought was if we could
get those five, we could make an im-
pact,” Cornille said. “But it didn’t work.
Maybe we didn’t get one or we didn’t get
to them fast enough.”
Console said he spent the mid-to-late
1990s trying to warn DEA leadership in
Washington D.C. that what was happen-
ing in southwest Missouri was a serious
situation, one that could get worse if un-
checked. He says the leaders didn’t feel
a sense of urgency.
“We’re trying to tell them — it’s not
heroin, it’s not cocaine,” Console said.
“It’s not a major organization, like a bik-
er gang, that’s producing large amounts
of methamphetamine. It’s Mr. Smith and
Mrs. Smith down here, and the Johnsons
over here, making a half ounce. In their
eyes, that wasn’t a problem. That was a
local problem. It wasn’t a national prob-
lem.”
The spread of the Nazi method meant
that a drug once manufactured in large
quantities by “superlabs” situated away
from populated areas was now being
produced on a small scale within towns
and cities.
Console said he can tell stories all day
about unusual busts.
There was the time agents executed
a search warrant and noticed bullet
holes in the ceiling of a bedroom. When
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SUBMITTED PHOTO
A drawing that accompanied copies of the
1935 German propaganda film “Triumph of
the Will.” Retired DEA chemist Terry Dal
Cason said the drawing was found with
recipes for Nazi dope in southwest Missouri.
they asked the home’s resident why,
the man said he knew the agents were
monitoring him from his attic, so he
shot at them while he laid in bed. The
agents hadn’t been to the house previ-
ously.
“Think about being up without sleep
for seven days,” Console says. “Think
about it. Where would your mind be,
where would your body be? So they’d be-
come very paranoid.”
There was the man in Joplin whose
lab exploded, the force of it enough to
embed sodium metal in his skin. Sodium
metal reacts when it comes in contact
with water. When someone went to clean
the man’s body with a saline solution at
the hospital, the sodium metal exploded
— the “pops” sounding like a miniature
fireworks display.
Then there were the deformed chick-
ens. Agents responded to a farm in
Christian County where large tanks of
anhydrous ammonia were buried in the
barn. The stuff wasn’t being used as fer-
tilizer.
“He had chickens with double beaks,
he had chickens that were a foot grow-
ing out of another foot,” Console said.
“All the chemicals they were using —
they were making meth there for a long
time — were being dumped all over the
area where the chickens were being
raised.”
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The News-Leader is celebrating its 150th anniversary. See historic pages and a historic masthead every Saturday.

CHAPTER 6

THE SPREAD
I
THOMAS GOUNLEY n 1998, the man credited with pioneering the so-called “Na- “It has exploded on the scene so quick, it’s
TGOUNLEY@ zi method” of methamphetamine production was contact-
NEWS-LEADER.COM ed by a News-Leader reporter. so easy to do, and there are so many people
Bob Paillet had moved to Texas from southwest Mis-
souri several years prior, not long after being sentenced involved in manufacturing it, that it has
CHAPTER 7 for conspiring to manufacture and distribute the drug. He was completely overtaxed our capabilities.”
COMING still on probation.
It appears to be Paillet’s only published interview. He ex- THE COMMANDER OF AN 11-COUNTY NARCOTICS TASK FORCE
SUNDAY pressed regret to reporter Laura Bauer. IN NORTH TEXAS TOLD A MAGAZINE IN 2001
“I never thought it would spread like this,” he said. “ ... I don’t
USA TODAY NETWORK travel in those circles anymore.” ONLINE
ILLUSTRATION BY
MARK MARTURELLO
In the years after his arrest, Paillet also wrote several letters
to — and once spoke on the phone with — John Cornille, the Drug Miss a chapter? You can read the full series
Enforcement Administration agent who investigated him. online now at News-Leader.com.
“I can remember him expressing remorse that he had started Want more in-depth journalism like this?
‘this mess,’ as he referred to it,” Cornille said. Go online to offers.news-leader.com/EWJ
for a special digital subscription offer.
See METH, Page 4A

As camp crackdown continues, smaller

homeless camps see a rise in population
GIACOMO BOLOGNA
GBOLOGNA@NEWS-LEADER.COM
As expected, officials say,
homeless camps around
Springfield have seen a popu-
lation bump as the city works
to clear out its biggest home-
less camp this month.
The city has been working
with local organizations, busi-
nesses and community mem-
NATHAN PAPES/NEWS-LEADER bers on a plan since April to
One man was fatally shot Wednesday outside of Commerce Bank. disband the camp, located
northeast of the intersection
of North Glenstone Avenue
and East Kearney Street.
People have camped out in
that area for about three dec-
ades, and recent population
estimates ranged from 50 to
100 people.
Oftentimes, when a camp
is disbanded, homeless people
move to a different homeless
camp rather than receive the
help they need, said Jennifer
Cannon of Gathering Friends.
“We see this nomadic be-
havior all the time,” she said.
This month, however, Can-
non said extra steps are being
taken.
A response center staffed
with more than two dozen
agencies was set up near the
camp in northeast Springfield
this week. The temporary
center provides medical and
mental health services, emer-
gency shelter assessments,
and help with obtaining IDs
and dealing with municipal
See HOMELESS, Page 5A

Police investigate fatal

shooting outside bank
ALISSA ZHU
DZHU@NEWS-LEADER.COM
Police are investigating a re-
ported homicide that occurred
in north Springfield Wednesday
afternoon.
One man was fatally shot at
about 4 p.m. Wednesday out-
side of Commerce Bank, near
the corner of Kansas Express-
way and Kearney Street, ac- ROLLIN’ ON
THE RIVER
cording to police spokesperson
Lisa Cox.
The suspect is currently at
large and the shooting did not
appear to be random, Cox said.
River Jam in Ozark celebrates
Cox said the victim was area waterways with live music,
transported to a hospital, where
he died.
crawfish and more | Weekend
The shooting was not related
to the bank, Cox said.

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TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 6

“The devastation and the damage to kids … I understand why Bob had regret.”
JOHN CORNILLE, DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION AGENT

Meth
Continued from Page 1A

By the turn of the new millennium,

Nazi dope was no longer a Missouri-
specific phenomenon.
In north Texas, the commander of an
11-county narcotics task force told a
magazine in 2001 that the unit came
across its first Nazi lab three years pri-
or. By the following summer, the task
force was busting one every week.
“It has exploded on the scene so
quick, it’s so easy to do, and there are so
many people involved in manufactur-
ing it, that it has completely overtaxed
our capabilities,” the commander said.
In Illinois, a state police representa-
tive said in November 2000 that meth
labs were “getting to the epidemic
stage.” He cited the fact that the state
was on track to have 400 lab busts by the
end of the year. Within four years, Illi-
nois would be logging more than 1,500
labs annually.
In California, the Modesto Bee re-
ported in 2000 that officials in the Cen-
tral Valley had encountered eight labs
using the Nazi method, and that “five of
them were traced to a man from Mis-
souri who had moved into a trailer park
near Fresno and was teaching this
method.”
Officials in numerous other commu-
nities around the country reported a
version of the same thing.
Nick Console, the former head of
Springfield’s DEA office, said top agen-
cy officials did little to respond to the
growth in small-scale labs in the 1990s.
By the early 2000s, he said, that began
to change, as politicians representing
affected communities began putting
pressure on the agency.
“It took ‘em a good eight to 10 years,”
Console said. “And the damage was al-
ready done, it’d already spread.”
The Nazi method didn’t just spread
cook to cook. Its rise coincided with the
early days of the modern internet and
anonymous forums like The Hive,
where users traded information about
illegal substances.
“There were a number of really good
dope sites,” said Terry Dal Cason, a re-
tired DEA forensic chemist who inves-
tigated the origins of the Nazi method
moniker.
Since 2002, the DEA has published
an annual report called the “National
Drug Threat Assessment,” which de-
tails the prevalence of illegal drugs in
the United States.
Each year, the agency asks various
state and local law enforcement agen-
cies what they consider the “greatest
drug threat” in their community. In
2003, 33.1 percent of agencies selected
cocaine. Methamphetamine was sec-
ond, with 31 percent.
The report stated that meth was
widely available in the western and
central United States and gradually be-
coming more available in the eastern
United States. It concluded, however,
that “despite the rising threat, metham-
phetamine is not likely to surpass the
overall threat posed to the United
States by powder cocaine and crack in
the near term.”
Two years later, it did.
The 2005 report read: “According to
state and local law enforcement agen-
cies, the threat associated with meth-
amphetamine trafficking and abuse
has increased sharply since 2002 and
now exceeds that of any other drug.”
To be clear, the Nazi method wasn’t
the only way meth consumed in Amer-
ica was produced. In its annual reports,
the DEA largely focused on other
sources.
First, there was the foreign supply;
meth was smuggled into the United
States from Mexico and, to a much less-
er extent, southeast Asia.
Then there were the domestic “su-
perlabs” — those capable of producing
10 pounds of meth in a single day. In
2001, federal authorities seized 303 of
them, two-thirds of which were located
in California. The California labs alone
likely produced more meth than all oth-
er domestic laboratories combined, the
DEA wrote.
There was regional variation, how-
ever. In 2002, the agency wrote that “lo-
cal independents account for as much
DEA agents put on protective suits Thursday to check for fumes and damage at a suspected meth lab on South Market Avenue in 1999.
as 80 percent of retail methamphet-
amine distribution in some areas of the
country,” specifically the central Unit-
ed States. The Nazi method was a key
process used, but there were also other
recipes, like the “Red-P” method
named for the required red phospho-
rous.
The DEA struggled to accurately de-
tail the problem. In 2004, the agency
wrote that meth use and distribution in
the Midwest was “very high” in rural
and suburban areas, but “less so in met-
ropolitan areas, where most drug con-
sequence data are collected.”
“Therefore, available drug conse-
quence data for methamphetamine use
in the Central States likely under-repre-
sents the problem, perhaps significant-
ly,” the agency wrote.
Small labs accounted for much of the
drug’s impact on communities, which
was felt in burn units and mental health
clinics, courtrooms and cemeteries.
While the Nazi method simplified meth
production, it didn’t make it foolproof.
The more labs, and the more cooks, the
more opportunities for something to go
wrong, and the greater the cost of
cleanup.
In 2003, there were 361 reported
fires and explosions at meth lab sites,
and 255 law enforcement officers were
injured responding, according to the
DEA. The agency spent $16.3 million on
laboratory cleanup that fiscal year,
eight times more than it spent less than
a decade earlier.
That same year, the DEA reported
that 893 children were present when
meth labs were seized. About two-
thirds tested positive for toxic levels of
chemicals in their bodies. The agency
said “child neglect and abuse are com-
mon within families whose parents or
caregivers produce or use metham-
phetamine.”
“The devastation and the damage to
kids … I understand why Bob had re-
gret,” Cornille said.
Nationwide, meth lab busts peaked
in 2004, when there were nearly 24,000
seizures.
Almost 3,000 of them were in Mis-
souri. Two years earlier, the number of
meth lab busts in the state passed those
in California — the birthplace of the
methamphetamine industry — for the
first time. Since then, Missouri has led
the nation most years, never dropping
below third in annual busts. In some
parts of the country, the area code for
southwest Missouri, 417, is said to be
slang for meth, or a particular type.
Cornille and Console both acknowl-
edge that if Paillet hadn’t introduced
the Nazi method, someone else might
have done so a short time later. Just like
any legal industry, there is a steady
pace of innovation in the world of illegal
NEWS-LEADER FILE PHOTO, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO
drugs, typically in response to some
government crackdown.
To combat meth in the early 2000s,
laws were implemented requiring med-
ications containing pseudoephedrine to
be sold from behind the counter. In
2007, fewer than 7,000 meth labs were
seized across the country.
But makers and users adjusted, de-
veloping what became known as “one-
pot” or “shake-and-bake” meth produc-
tion, in which just a couple of pseudoe-
phedrine pills are mixed in a 2-liter so-
da bottle for smaller batches. The new
method led to another spike — 15,000
national meth lab busts in 2010.
Console said he views these newer
methods as just continued innovation.
The Nazi method was the truly critical
shift, he said — the one that turned
meth consumers into producers.
After they were sentenced for con-
spiring to manufacture and distribute
meth, those indicted alongside Paillet
struggled to stay on the right side of the
law.
Kenneth Allen, who was given three
years probation, ended up behind bars
after he repeatedly tested positive for
meth; he was also arrested for driving
with a revoked license and failing to
support his dependents.
Michael Poplawski, sentenced to
nearly six years in prison, later com-
pleted community service for patroniz-
ing a prostitute in the early 2000s, ac-
cording to online court records. He
pleaded guilty to possession of marijua-
na, with intent to distribute, in 2012.
Gary Davis, sentenced to five years
in prison, briefly escaped in August
1994 from the Kansas facility where he
was incarcerated. His sentence was lat-
er reduced for aiding in the prosecution
of two others, but he ultimately ended
up back behind bars. Davis is currently
serving time in a federal penitentiary in
Texas for, among other things, stealing
explosive materials and conspiring to
use them to rob a bank, according to a
spokesman for the Federal Bureau of
Prisons.
Court records indicate that Paillet
never violated parole. There is no evi-
dence he got in trouble with the law dur-
ing the rest of his life.
Paillet found work after he moved to
Texas in the mid-1990s. His youngest
daughter said he was a CNC program-
mer, developing the programs that run
automated machining equipment. His
oldest daughter, however, said Paillet
did sales and technical installations for
a company.
By the end of the decade, health
problems prompted him to go on dis-
ability, and he talked about having dys-
tonia, a neurological disorder charac-
terized by uncontrollable and some-
times painful muscle spasms.
Court records indicate Paillet di-
vorced his third wife in 2008. He spent
the final years of his life living with an-
other woman in a trailer park in Sher-
man, a city of about 40,000 an hour
north of Dallas.
In 2014, Stephanie Denton, 37,
moved into the unit next to Paillet. With-
in a few months, she and Paillet — now
in his early 70s — were drinking coffee
together every morning.
Denton was having issues in her re-
lationship, and her son was having legal
troubles; Paillet encouraged her to be
more positive, she said. From what
Denton could tell, her neighbor didn’t
really have close friends.
Paillet didn’t talk about his past very
much, Denton said. She knew he was a
Vietnam vet — Paillet talked about the
war being pointless — and that he’d
been involved with drugs to a degree.
She said he claimed he’d sold drugs to
raise money for a school for disabled
kids.
Paillet was more inclined to talk
about the government, with a bent more
paranoid than partisan. Denton said he
repeated a well-known conspiracy the-
ory that claims the Federal Emergency
Management Agency plans to imprison
citizens in camps after the imposition
of martial law. Paillet’s minimal online
presence included posts about a group
advocating for the secession of the
state of Texas.
Paillet also had an extensive rock
collection and talked and posted online
about searching for gold on a claim in
Colorado. He appears to have become
obsessed with the process, not unlike
his days of manufacturing meth.
“He first really started talking about
gold mining after he was arrested,” his
oldest daughter Lisa Paillet said. “One
of the things that he was really very in-
terested in doing was separating gold
from rock, so not mining in the river,
but using chemistry to remove gold
from rock without requiring massive
amounts of water.”
Lisa said her father’s health issues
worsened during the final years of his
life, and that he appeared to be strug-
gling with dementia at times. In what
would end up being her last conversa-
tion with her father, he talked about his
will.

HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.
The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records. Additional information regarding
Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time associates, along with current and retired law enforcement personnel, were conducted between
August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed
on the condition that her first name be replaced with a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.
The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet were obtained from
the Greene County Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.
 See Details

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CHAPTER 7

A LEGACY OF REGRET
B
THOMAS GOUNLEY ob Paillet didn’t leave a suicide note. There’s a guest book option on the site. One per- “I hope my name
TGOUNLEY@ Early in the afternoon of Jan. 1, son — Paillet’s second wife, Gena’s mother — has
NEWS-LEADER.COM 2016, the 72-year-old drove his red left a message: “We had a lot of happy years to- is forgotten or it’s
Dodge truck from the mobile home gether. You will be missed. Your pain is over, ours
park where he lived in Sherman, Tex- now begins.”
put in the back of
ONLINE
as, to a nearby hospital. It was a little over a mile. Otherwise, there was nothing in the public rec- people’s minds.”
Miss a chapter? Then, he took a gun — “he had a lot of guns,” said ord acknowledging that the man credited with
You can read the full his daughter Gena — walked to the front of the ve- reinventing methamphetamine production in the BOB PAILLET
series online at hicle, and shot himself in the head. He died min- U.S. was dead. All in all, it probably turned out IN AN INTERVIEW WITH
News-Leader.com. utes later in the emergency room. about how Paillet would have wanted it. THE NEWS-LEADER IN 1998

Want more in-depth
journalism like this?
Go online to offers.
news-leader.com/EWJ
for a special digital
subscription offer.
Paillet’s family held a memorial service after In 1998, he spoke briefly with a News-Leader
his death. To the outside world, however, the only reporter, the only time he was ever quoted in the USA TODAY NETWORK
acknowledgment of his passing can be found on media. At the time, meth lab busts were drastical- ILLUSTRATION BY
MARK MARTURELLO
the website of a Denison, Texas, funeral home. It’s ly increasing across the central United States. Au-
not really an obituary, just a name and a pair of
dates. See METH, Page 4A

LEGISLATURE

Greitens seeks more abortion curbs

Calls lawmakers back for special session
SUMMER BALLENTINE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
JEFFERSON CITY - Missou-
ri’s Republican-led Legislature
is returning to the Statehouse on
Monday for a special session
sought by Gov. Eric Greitens to
consider new abortion regula-
tions aimed at fighting back
against a federal judge’s ruling
against some state laws on the
procedure.
Greitens has said a May rul-
ing by U.S. District Judge How-
ard F. Sachs “weakened our
state’s health standards in abor-
tion clinics, so we’re also pro-
posing some basic, common-
sense standards to keep Missou-
rians safe.”
The ruling, which the state is
appealing, invalidated require-
ments that doctors who per-
form abortions have admitting
privileges at nearby hospitals,
and that clinics meet hospital-
like standards for outpatient
surgery.
Planned Parenthood affili-
ates with Missouri health cen-
ters sued over those restric-
tions after the U.S. Supreme
Court struck down similar laws
in Texas, ruling those laws
BEARS NEED A WIN
sharply reduced the number of
Late rally by TCU leaves Bears in need of a win
See ABORTION, Page 3A Sunday to stay in Super Regional, PAGE 1D

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4A June 11, 2017 SUNDAY NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com

TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 7

“A lot of people believe that addiction is genetic.

I am my father’s daughter, not just in that way, but every way that there is.”
GENA PAILLET, BOB PAILLET’S DAUGHTER

PHOTOS SUBMITTED BY FAMILY, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO

Bob Paillet, far right, with his daughter Gena and her husband in the late 1990s.

Meth
Continued from Page 1A

thorities were blaming the phenomenon on the

ease of the “Nazi method” and said Paillet pio-
neered it while living in the Springfield area.
In that interview, Paillet expressed regret, as
well as a wish regarding his future.
“I hope my name is forgotten or it’s put in the
back of people’s minds,” he said.
Perhaps Paillet found some measure of
peace. In an interview, Gena said that, while
growing up, she was not allowed to talk or ask
about the concept of a God around her father. In
his later years, however, Bob Paillet softened on
that view.
In 2008, he wrote on online message boards
that “I was an atheist, then agnostic, and now I
believe that there is a God.” He also said that he
believed in evolution, and expressed a degree of
incredulity that there are individuals who do not.
“He was still a scientific man, but he found
his version of God,” Gena said.

Paillet holds his daughter Gena in the 1980s.

Gena, 38, came of age in a world that her fa-
ther helped create.
Growing up in Morrisville, she “never really
fit in,” she said, and started drinking at an early
age. When Gena and her mother moved to
Springfield, she “immediately just fell in with
the wrong crowd.” She graduated from Spring-
field’s Parkview High School in 1996.
“A lot of people believe that addiction is ge-
netic,” Gena said. “I am my father’s daughter,
not just in that way, but every way that there is.”
Gena said she used meth for the first time at
age 15. Two years later, she met Steven Joseph
Brown, the man who would become her hus-
band.
“He used needles, and he shot me up for the
first time with heroin, and it was pretty much
over from there,” she said. “It was always either
that or meth. There was like a two-year period
where I probably never slept. It’s been a strug-
gle for me ever since.”
Brown — who died in February 2016 — was 16
years older than Gena. Prior to meeting her, he
gave Gena’s father precursor chemicals in ex-
change for meth, she said. At one point, he was
even arrested by John Cornille, the Drug En-
forcement Administration agent who investi-
gated Bob.
“My husband kind of ended up learning my
dad’s recipe,” Gena said. “Not anywhere near as
good as my dad.”
Gena, who said she grew up fearing her fa-
ther, first got in trouble for drugs when she was
17. She thought her father was going to kill her.
Instead, she said, he “became my best friend
ever, because we understood each other.”
“My mom — I love my mom — she’s never
done a drug in her life,” Gena said. “She’s had
maybe one speeding ticket, and I think she even
got that dismissed. Really, this connection grew
between him and me that was just amazing. I
could really do no wrong in his eyes.”
Gena said that between her late teens and
late 2015, she was only “clean” for extended pe-
riods twice, when she became pregnant. “But I
always went pretty much right back.”
In late December 2015, Gena said, she over-
dosed on heroin. Gena’s mother, with whom she
lived at the time, kicked her out of her house.
Gena called her father, who paid for a motel
room for a week and indicated she should come
live with him in Texas.
“He said, ‘I want you to go to your parole offi-
cer and start getting everything transferred
down here and I want you to come back here,’
and he said, ‘I will get you through this,’” Gena
said.
Two days later, she got the call that her father
was dead.
Gena said she traveled to Texas to attend her
father’s memorial service, but got in a dispute
with the woman Bob was living with at the time
of his death, and ended up leaving beforehand
(Lisa Paillet described her half-sister as “high
as a kite” at the time). Gena expressed regret
that she didn’t receive something her father
wanted her to have — “this metal container
thing that his very first successful batch of
stuff was made in.”
In August, Gena said she put herself through
treatment after returning from Bob’s memorial
service. She said she had been clean since Jan. 25.
“It really hurts me that my dad never got to
see me get my life together,” she said.
By November, however, Gena was back in a
three-week rehab program. She attributed the
relapse to her depression and said she “wasn’t
managing it with medication like I should have
been.” In early May, she said she had stayed
clean since completing the program.
“It’s still hard a lot of days,” Gena said. “And
it’s hard to stay away from the people that kind
of want to push it on you.”
Continued on Next Page

HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY

Reporter Thomas Gounley began working on this story in the wake of Bob Paillet’s death in January 2016.
The events leading to the arrest of Paillet and his co-conspirators are detailed in federal court records. Additional information regarding
Paillet was obtained from the Drug Enforcement Administration through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Interviews with Paillet’s family members and one-time associates, along with current and retired law enforcement personnel, were conducted between
August 2016 and May 2017. One of Paillet’s daughters, citing concerns regarding how this story could affect future job prospects, agreed to be interviewed
on the condition that her first name be replaced with a pseudonym. Editors agreed to that request.
The photos of Bob Paillet in this story were provided by his daughters. Booking photos of those indicted alongside Paillet were obtained from
the Greene County Archives and Records Center. Center staff said they did not have a booking photo of Paillet himself.
SUNDAY NEWS-LEADER § News-Leader.com
TH E M A N W H O R E I N V E N T E D M E T H : C H A P T E R 7
“I wish I never started it. I would never do it again. I caused a lot of trouble with a lot of people.”
BOB PAILLET, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH THE NEWS-LEADER IN 1998
In this 1998 photo, deputies with the Greene County Sheriff’s Office sort through meth-making equipment in the back of a pickup for which they had been searching.
Meth
Continued from Previous Page
Lisa Paillet, who asked that her first name be
changed for this story, graduated in 1991 from
then-Southwest Missouri State University with
a degree in theater — which she said her father
“paid for, I’m pretty sure, with drug money.”
She returned to California, where she grew
up, and gradually drifted away from theater-re-
lated work. When her father, then on probation
in Texas, found a job making machining equip-
ment, he paid for her to go to school to get a ma-
chinist’s certification. She was hired by a com-
pany she described as being in the military
aerospace research sector, which paid for her to
get a bachelor’s degree in engineering.
“That’s when our conversations about sci-
ence really took off, and we would talk for long
periods of time,” she said of her father.
Regarding her sister, she said Gena’s “world
is very, very different from mine.”
“He and Gena had a very, very different rela-
tionship than he and I had ... I think he treated
her far more like a child than he ever treated
me,” Lisa said. “And because he didn’t really
raise me, he didn’t have rules for me … I think
even though I went down his road a little bit
when I was very young, I think my upbringing
with my mother definitely was not the same.”
Lisa said her father’s decision to take his own
life wasn’t entirely unexpected. Suicide was
something he mentioned casually over the
years, she said.
“He knew he was going to commit suicide if
he ever got too sick, and I knew it a long time
ago,” Lisa said.
Bob Paillet’s parents died in the 1980s. They
are buried in a cemetery in Exeter, Missouri,
where they lived and where Bob spent his high
school years.
Lisa said her father, who became obsessed
with gold mining in the later years of his life,
requested his ashes be scattered at his gold
claim. However, she’s has been unable to find it.
When Lisa called Colorado, she was told he
didn’t have a claim in the state.
Though Paillet appears to have avoided run-
ins with the law late in life, the process he pio-
neered continued to occupy authorities.
Some states responded to the rise in small-
scale meth labs by requiring prescriptions for
purchase of products containing pseudoephe-
drine.
Missouri didn’t, but over time dozens of com-
munities within the state instituted their own
prescription laws. City leaders in Springfield
debated doing the same in 2013, but the effort
wasn’t without controversy.
That fall, Councilwoman Cindy Rushefsky —
a former prosecutor who supported the mea-
sure — asked Springfield’s police chief to pro-
vide monthly reports detailing meth lab activity
in the city. She pitched it as a way for City Coun-
In this photo from March 2004, medications containing pseudoephedrine sit on a store shelf in Oklahoma.
cil to stay informed on the issue. Councilman
Doug Burlison, a Libertarian who opposed the
prescription requirement, described it as “an
attempt to educate us to have different opin-
ions.”
Then a funny thing happened. The police
chief’s monthly reports consistently described
fewer and fewer meth labs being found in the
city. In July 2014, the prescription bill was ta-
bled indefinitely.
The situation wasn’t unique to Springfield.
The number of small meth labs seized in the
United States has declined in recent years, from
about 15,000 in 2010 to about 4,500 in 2016.
It’s not that the drug has lost its presence in
the United States. Last year, when state and lo-
cal law enforcement agencies were asked to
name the greatest drug threat in their area, her-
oin received the most votes. The agencies that
selected it, however, were strongly concentrat-
ed in the Great Lakes and northeast regions of
the United States. In the western part of the
country, more agencies chose meth.
Most of that meth is produced in Mexico and
smuggled across the border.
In a 2016 report, the DEA attributed the de-
cline in domestic labs to the wide availability of
high-purity, high-potency meth from Mexico, as
well as the passage of the Combat Methamphet-
amine Epidemic Act, a federal law enacted in
2006 which placed restrictions on the meth pre-
cursors ephedrine, pseudoephedrine and phen-
ylpropanolamine.
Nick Console, who spent about a decade as
the top DEA official in Springfield, said Paillet’s
Nazi method may have prompted the cartels to
become more involved with production of meth.
“Why? Because you had a huge addiction
problem here in the United States to metham-
phetamine,” he said. “Supply and demand.”
Console retired to a farm in Ash Grove. John
Cornille, the DEA agent most involved with in-
vestigating Paillet, still works for the agency.
Mike Poplawski — who was taught the Nazi
method by Paillet himself — has served his pris-
June 11, 2017 5A
NEWS-LEADER FILE PHOTO, ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK MARTURELLO
ASSOCIATED PRESS
on sentence. He understands
how the statute of limitations
works, double jeopardy and all
that.
Ask him about the early days
of Nazi dope, however, and he
chooses his words carefully.
Mike He’s convinced that saying cer-
Poplawski tain things could get the DEA in-
terested in him again. He says
he’s been at the same job for 15
years, together with his wife for
25 years.
“I’ve got grandkids that love
me, stepkids that love me, ex-
tended family that love me,” he
said. “You look from the other
Gary Davis side — the law enforcement side
— I’m a bad man.”
In an interview in his Springfield home, Po-
plawski, 59, said the people he considers meth’s
Nazi dope generation are “all in jail or dead,”
and that those currently involved with the drug
aren’t self-starters. He voiced frustration at
seeing “bangers shooting each other, shooting
up neighborhoods, doing dope and falling
asleep in their cars with the kids in the cars and
s---- like that.”
“I want to go around with a .22 starter pistol
and start capping people,” he said. “I can still
find the houses. They’re not the same houses.
But a speeder can always recognize another
speeder.”
Asked about his own actions, Poplawski said,
“if I knew then what I knew now, I would’ve
done things different.”
“I like to think that I had the ability to make a
change,” he said.
At the same time, he said, “there’s always go-
ing to be an addiction.”
“The hole’s always there,” he said. “And once
it got filled by meth, we had the meth crisis ...
Now you’ve got [a] prescription drug crisis and
you’ve got [a] heroin crisis hard. Meth’s bad. I
don’t think heroin’s an improvement.”
Reached at a federal prison in Texas, Gary
Davis — the only other individual indicted
alongside Paillet still living — declined to be in-
terviewed without compensation. In a brief
email, he did include one comment.
“Meth is a scourge on society,” Davis
wrote. “I wish I would have never messed
with it.”
Paillet expressed similar sentiments years
before his death.
“I wish I never started it,” he told a News-
Leader reporter in 1998. “I would never do it
again.”
“I caused a lot of trouble with a lot of peo-
ple.”