Eight thousand miles from the execution chamber at the Nebraska State Penitentiary is Salt Lake City — a planned satellite town in Kolkata, the capital city of India’s West Bengal state. It’s a modern mecca of swanky office complexes, colleges, shopping malls, and restaurants. Here, on the eighth floor of a plush glass building overlooking a lake, is an office where Nebraska’s lethal injection drug supplier says he makes his drugs.
A laminated paper sign stuck on the door of room 818 reads “Harris Pharma - manufacturer and distribution.” The office, with powder-blue walls and a frosted glass facade, is one of 61 spaces on the floor rented out to various companies.
This is the facility in India where a man named Chris Harris, a salesman without a pharmaceutical background, claims his manufacturing and distribution business is based. He has sold thousands of vials of execution drugs for corrections officials in the U.S. who are desperate to find drugs to carry out the death penalty.
An employee who works at the facility, however, said the office is not being used to make drugs.
Saurav Bose, a customer relations officer at the office rental company who has met Harris twice since he started working here a few months ago, said Harris did not manufacture drugs in this rented office.
Left: The building in Salt Lake City in India. Right: The office Harris rents.
Tasneem Nashrulla
Harris’s office, which was shut on a Tuesday morning when a reporter from BuzzFeed News visited, is much like the other ready-to-use, standardized workspaces available to rent by Regus — an international firm operating in 900 cities across the world, including the more well-known Salt Lake City in Utah. It appeared highly unlikely that the rented office would accommodate laboratory equipment required to manufacture pharmaceutical drugs.
“He comes only two to three times in a month,” Bose said, adding that most of his communication with Harris was limited to email. Bose, who described Harris as being “fickle” with his visits to the office, said he rarely had any clients or other people in the office.
BuzzFeed News identified several such inconsistencies after reviewing thousands of pages of court records, emails, and invoices; interviewing his past business partners; and visiting the locations in India from which Harris claims to run his business.
Chris Harris
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BuzzFeed News spent more than four months trying to talk to Harris over emails, via phone calls and during a visit to his office in India. Each time, Harris refused to talk.
“Quote me on this. I don’t speak to reporters as they always say what is not true,” Harris told BuzzFeed News when first contacted for comment in June.
After months of reporting on his sale to Nebraska, Harris again declined to talk with BuzzFeed News in September, writing, "Do and say what you want. But I will never give a reporter 2 min of my time. As all print what they want. Not the true story. They need a scandal to get sales and keep they jobs."
BuzzFeed News has been able to confirm four times that Harris sold execution drugs illegally to four death penalty states, and documents indicate there is likely a fifth. His sales follow a typical script: The legal issues are fixed this time, don’t worry about it. Other states are buying it, too. You aren’t the only one. You just need to make it a “minimum order” to make it worth the while. Payment in advance.
The documents show little effort by states to investigate Harris’s qualifications or the legalities of importing drugs.
Harris has gotten states to pay tens of thousands of dollars for his drugs, but each time, after concerns were raised over the legality of the purchase, the drugs have gone unused.
Somehow, states are still falling for it.
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts had a problem. In a few days, the state legislature would vote on repealing the death penalty in his state. He needed to convince a few of them that the death penalty in Nebraska was salvageable, that the state’s prior problems with the death penalty were just logistical issues that he, a new governor, could fix.
So, on May 14, he announced that he had found a way for Nebraska to get execution drugs — something that many states have struggled to find.
“The functionality of the death penalty in Nebraska has been a management issue that I have promised to resolve,” Gov. Ricketts said, announcing the purchase a day before the legislature would vote to advance the repeal. “Through the work of [Department of Correctional Services] Director Frakes, the department has purchased the drugs that are necessary to carry out the death penalty in Nebraska in the near future.”
Despite having only 10 men on its death row and no executions in the state for more than 15 years, Rickett’s Department of Correctional Services placed an order to Harris for enough drugs to conduct hundreds of executions. As BuzzFeed News reported this summer, Nebraska did so because Harris said he would sell to the state only if they agreed to buy a “minimum order” of 1,000 vials.
Nebraska sent Harris a check for $54,400.
The state legislature voted to repeal the death penalty anyway, overriding Ricketts’ veto, and Ricketts’ management has led Nebraska to a stand-off with the Food and Drug Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Customs over illegally importing the drugs.
Many reputable drug makers have enacted stringent guidelines that keep their products out of the hands of executioners. In turn, states — disregarding federal laws on importing drugs — have sometimes turned to foreign suppliers like Harris as they’ve become more desperate to get a hold of lethal drugs. The drug Nebraska purchased, sodium thiopental, is an out-of-date anesthetic that stopped being used in executions after the sole FDA-approved manufacturer quit making it to keep it away from death penalty states.
Other death penalty states have turned to different drugs, but Nebraska had few options because the state’s protocol calls for sodium thiopental. Changing it to a more modern execution drug would have required public meetings, and that would take time that Ricketts and his DOC did not have.
Sodium thiopental is not used in the U.S. anymore, but it’s still widely used in India and in parts of the developing world as an anesthetic. So when Harris approached Nebraska in April, it might have seemed like an easy choice for the state.
"He told us that if he gets the consignment his life will be made."
“He used to sit at home all day long. How did he manage to sell lethal injection drugs to the U.S.?” Pijush Kantibairag wondered aloud, as he sat smoking in his 1,050-square-foot apartment in Kasba, a suburban maze of narrow lanes and ramshackle buildings in southern Kolkata, nearly eight miles away from Harris’s office in Salt Lake City.
Two floors above him is Flat C1, where Harris used to live. Kantibairag and Harris were neighbors. Harris's flat, however, is now empty and bolted shut. Flat C1, a residential apartment, also is one of the office addresses of Harris Pharma — the company owned by Harris.
This is Harris’s second listed business location — the location he tells the DEA and Nebraska that Harris Pharma is based out of. But he hasn’t lived here in more than two years, both his former neighbor and his landlord told BuzzFeed News.
Harris lived in the apartment with his second wife, Sanjukta Harris, but left the building in 2013 ago without paying seven months’ rent and electricity bills, his landlord, Abhijit Majumder, told BuzzFeed News.
Majumder said Harris was behind rent and utility payments. “But on April 14 [2013] — I still remember the date — he suddenly handed over the keys to the caretaker and just left the building,” said Majumder, who rents out two apartments in the building but does not reside there. He also claimed some items in the apartment were destroyed after Harris left.
Majumdar said that he rented out the flat to Harris for “residential purposes only” and was unaware that Harris had registered it as an office. “He told me he was a computer professional dealing in software.”
Kantibairag, the former neighbor, said Harris told him he manufactured and sold “sexual feel drugs” on a website. Kayem Pharmaceuticals, for which Harris was a broker during this time, sells drugs to enhance male sexual performance. Kantibairag said that Harris never seemed to have money to pay for rent, yet spent excessively: “Every day there was a new car outside the building.”
While Kantibairag said he was shocked to read the news about Harris’s $54,000 deal with Nebraska, he recalled that Harris had hinted about a business deal with the U.S. at a birthday party he hosted on the building’s terrace for his wife. Kantibairag said Harris bragged to his neighbors about getting a “big consignment” from the U.S.
According to Kantibairag, Harris told his guests that America needed lethal injection drugs for the death penalty and that he was manufacturing the drugs for them.
“He told us that if he gets the consignment his life will be made,” Kantibiarag said. This was back before Harris had started his own company and was working with the Mumbai-based firm Kayem Pharmaceuticals. Kantibiarag said Harris showed them his business cards that named him the director.
Majumder said Harris made excuses for not paying the rent, saying he was going through “financial losses.”
“In February 2013, I told him, ‘You must give me rent or otherwise you leave the apartment.’ He told me he was trying to get the money and to give him some time,” Majumder said.
But Harris left the apartment two months later without informing Majumder, who said he didn’t file a police complaint because he thought it wasn’t worth the time and the effort.
“He and his wife stopped answering my calls and his mobile number was later disabled,” Majumder said.
Using a colloquial Hindi saying, Kantibairag summed up his feelings on Harris: “10 paise ki aukat hai, aur 2 lakh ki baat karta hai” — He is worth only 10 paise (less than a penny), but he talked like he was worth 2 lakh rupees (around $3,000).
Harris's former apartment
Tasneem Nashrulla / BuzzFeed News