Secrets of sociopath chemist who invented ‘avenue fentanyl’ revealed

Federal agents were scrambling as bodies piled up in morgues across New York City in February 1991.

A terrifying new drug had hit the city’s streets – a white powder distributed in tiny baggies stamped ‘Tango & Cash.’

It was a sick joke.

‘Tango & Cash’ was a recent buddy cop movie about narcotics detectives, starring Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell.

Meanwhile, dead overdose victims were being found with syringes still hanging from their arms.

NYPD officers took to driving through drug-infested neighborhoods using loudspeakers to warn addicts against the new product.

Then similar overdose deaths began to be reported in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Boston.

It was a national crisis and it took two years for law enforcement to trace this new scourge to its source – a makeshift laboratory in an industrial park outside of Wichita, Kansas.

There they arrested a high school dropout in overalls with no formal training in chemistry.

His name was George Erik Marquardt.

Somehow, he had discovered how to manufacture one of the world’s deadliest street drugs – fentanyl.

Now, the four-part FOX Nation documentary ‘The Godfather of Fentanyl,’ hosted by FOX News anchor John Roberts, reveals never-before-seen tapes of Marquardt, who agreed to sit for interviews in 1995 following a 22-year prison sentence.

‘Marquardt really was a real-life Walter White,’ said Donna Nelson, the science advisor on the hit AMC drama ‘Breaking Bad‘ about a disillusioned high school chemistry teacher, who turns to manufacturing methamphetamine after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Marquardt’s break from the law came much earlier in life.

Born in 1946, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Marquardt came from a traditional family, ‘just like TV shows about the 50s with a stay-at-home mom, and a dad who goes to work every day,’ said his sister Gini, who spoke to Fox Nation.

As a child, he showed an exceptional aptitude for science.

In his taped interview, Marquardt recalled attending a lecture given by the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ Robert Oppenheimer. 

‘We ended up with quite a bit of conversation going,’ said Marquardt, who was a middle schooler at the time. ‘It turned into sitting in the back of a chemistry department till two in the morning.’

‘That night I decided whatever the decisions of my life – right or wrong – were going to be, I was going to make them myself,’ he said.

In high school, Marquardt enrolled in college-level science courses, and he forged an ‘unusually’ close relationship with a family doctor who taught him how to make heroin from codeine.

He wanted nothing to do with formal education. 

‘To me, it was someone telling me how to think and I wanted no part of that,’ he said.

Marquardt was expelled from school for non-attendance before graduation – that’s when his criminal career took off.

It was the 1960s and he found his illegal drug-making skills very much in demand.

Marquardt began manufacturing the potent psychedelic drug, Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD.

He stole to obtain the raw materials and equipment that he needed.

At 19 years old, he was caught robbing the stock room of the chemistry department at the University of Wisconsin in 1965.

He was convicted and sentenced to probation and ordered to make restitution for the stolen goods.

At 23 years old, Marquardt stole the family truck ‘and disappeared into the night,’ said Gini. ‘He never talked to my parents again, ever.’

By 1975, he was living in Oklahoma and manufacturing methamphetamine to sell to workers toiling 16 hours a day in the state’s oil fields.

There, too, he quickly came to the attention of law enforcement – and the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics detective John Madinger.

‘[Marquardt] wasn’t like anybody that I’ve ever run across before in the drug business,’ said Madinger, now retired and the author of ‘Lethal Doses: The Story Behind ‘The Godfather of Fentanyl.’

‘He was personable, friendly, open,’ recalled Madinger, ‘definitely the smartest criminal I met in 35 years of law enforcement.

But he warned, ‘The guy has killed more people than all the serial killers you can name put together.’

In Oklahoma, Marquardt was arrested for selling more stolen lab equipment. But instead of doing his time quietly, he contacted law enforcement to see what he could trade for his freedom.

He became an informant for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, flipping on his partner in exchange for legal immunity.

After the case went to trial, Marquardt vanished.

He ended up hiding out at campgrounds and trailer parks while cooking meth out of a recreational vehicle.

‘I was on top of my game as a hit-and-run drug manufacturer,’ boasted Marquardt in his interviews. ‘It was a rather fun way of making a living.’

Though his ‘fun’ wouldn’t last.

He was arrested in 1978 for selling meth in Oklahoma and was sentenced to ten years, eventually begin transferred to Pennsylvania‘s Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.

In prison, Marquardt connected with prominent organized crime figures and illicit chemists, who discussed how they could produce the next big street drug, a synthetic heroin, fentanyl.

Fentanyl was first synthesized in 1960 by Dr. Paul Janssen, a Belgian chemist and founder of Jassen Pharmaceutica.

Janssen was trying to develop a potent painkiller for use during surgery that was similar to morphine or codeine – naturally occurring substances derived from the opium poppy plant.

The result was fentanyl – a drug 100 times more powerful than morphine.

But the manufacturing process was incredibly complicated – too involved for an illicit chemist – even one as brilliant as Marquardt – to reproduce on their own.

By 1989, Marquardt was out of prison and bankrolled by the Boston mob.

He set up shop in Wichita, Kansas, where he began to experiment with ways to simplify Janssen’s process.

‘My approach was to take what’s in the literature and mess with it,’ Marquardt explained. ‘Then I hope for serendipity to strike, and every once in a while, it does.’

After a few weeks of trials, he found it.

‘Suddenly I saw these beautiful white crystals forming,’ he said, ‘I was extremely excited.’

In January 1991, Marquardt used one of his prison contacts to take his lethal white powder to New York City.

From there, it was supplied to a dealer who was supposed to cut the fentanyl with other powders for distribution.

Pure fentanyl is deadly in doses as small as one single grain of salt. If the drug is not properly diluted, it’s lethal.

That’s what happened.

Within days of Marquardt’s fentanyl hitting the streets of New York City, emergency rooms and morgues were overwhelmed with overdose cases.

Tracking this drug to its source became a national priority.

In December 1992, a New York drug dealer let it slip to undercover agents that his supplier in Wichita nearly died the previous summer after accidentally inhaling fentanyl vapors in a makeshift lab in a remote industrial park.

In short order, cops discovered that the laboratory was registered to one George Marquardt.

By August 1993, he had been arrested, charged and pled guilty to conspiracy to manufacture fentanyl.

During his sentencing, the judge offered him leniency if he agreed to parole, but he blithely refused, saying he fully intended to go right back to drug manufacturing.

Marquardt was sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in federal prison and was released in 2015.

He died in 2017 at the age of 69, leaving a horrifying legacy.

Today, illegal fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45 – and kills around 2,000 Americans every week.