Irvine-based pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, found itself one of three corporate victims of a former South Korean law enforcement officer who allegedly tried to smuggle 40,000 fake boner pills through LAX.
The $700,000 worth of copycat erectile-dysfunction pills–which also included bogus Cialis, which normally come from Indiana's Eli Lilly, and Levitra, from German's Bayer–were stuffed in 71-year-old Kil Jun Lee's golf bag, according to customs officials.
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The bag was searched when Lee returned from Korea on Feb. 25. Inside, according to customs agents, were packets wrapped in aluminum foil containing 29,827
phony Viagra tablets, 8,993 counterfeit Cialis pills and 793 fake Levitra tabs.
If this has a familiar ring to it, you may be thinking of my colleague R. Scott Moxley's post on a 40-year-old Korean being briefly detained when a search of his carry-on bags at LAX on Jan. 6 produced aluminum-wrapped packets containing 63.3 pounds of tadalafil, the main chemical component of Cialis. The substance had a street value of $179,000, customs officials said at the time.
Lee, who was arrested on suspicion of trafficking in counterfeit items Wednesday at his LA apartment, was asked if the pills found in his golf bag were for his personal use, according to the complaint, which includes his alleged answer: if he took that many it would kill him
because he has a heart condition.
But he'd always have a place to hang his hat.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.