Flirtation, fine dining were the Insys prescription for selling Subsys

A woman eager to learn the pharma trade with an emerging startup called Insys Therapeutics testified Thursday she instead became swept up in a web of extravagant deceit and sexual treachery — the end goal of which was to dominate the pain-management market with a potentially lethal fentanyl medication.

Jessica Crane Bradley, 31, landed her big break in 2014 when she interviewed to be the assistant to Insys sales representative Natalie Levine at Levine’s South Boston home. Their territory would be Boston, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Bradley took the stand Thursday in U.S. District Court in Boston. Four of Insys’ former executives, including a onetime exotic dancer and billionaire founder John Kapoor, are on trial for racketeering for allegedly bribing health care providers across the country to recklessly prescribe Subsys, a fentanyl mouth spray designed to ease pain in cancer sufferers.

Subsys made Insys millions of dollars. And as Bradley told jurors, the company was willing to spend big to keep doctors addicted to the payola.

One of them, Bradley testified, was Christopher Clough, a physician assistant in New Hampshire. Clough was convicted Dec. 18 of receiving kickbacks by a federal jury in Concord, N.H. He is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

“Christopher Clough was infatuated with Natalie Levine,” Bradley said. “The majority of time it was Natalie using that against him to manipulate him to write more prescriptions.”

Clough was also paid handsomely to continuously represent Insys at dinner meetings to promote Subsys to other providers. But there was nothing educational about the outings, Bradley testified, adding they were rarely attended by anyone but Clough, her, Levine and the occasional office staffer with no authority to prescribe medication. Once, she said, they simply signed Clough’s ex-wife’s name.

“I was there. She wasn’t,” Bradley said. “It was just another name to fill in for what we needed.”

The meal tab for one such outing at Abe and Louie’s steakhouse in the Back Bay hit $996 on May 1, 2014. Bradley testified she later gushed about Clough on his presentation scorecard, awarding him a top “5!”

Days later, another $310 was dropped at Sonsie restaurant on Newbury Street.

Bradley, who Insys later fired, returns to the witness stand this morning.