John Cornille had been with the Drug Enforcement Administration for seven years. Yet he couldn’t wrap his head around what his informant was describing.
It was November 1992, and the man was talking about a visit to a home in Reeds Spring, Missouri. He said he’d been forced at gunpoint to use methamphetamine manufactured there. But something was off. The informant didn’t mention beakers, flasks, Bunsen burners — none of the complex glassware Cornille was taught were part of meth labs.
Instead, the informant reported an unusual scene: Black trash bags stuffed with empty boxes of cold medicine. A mason jar full of kerosene, with something resembling a hockey puck settled at the bottom. Starter fluid. And a cookie sheet in the oven, with a yellowish cake on it.
Cornille, like other DEA agents, had made meth himself, under controlled circumstances, as part of his official duties. It was standard practice; the agency knew it meant he’d have more credibility when he asked a court for a search warrant or filled out a probable cause statement recommending criminal charges. It was important that prosecutors see him and other agents as experts on the manufacturing of illegal drugs.
As Cornille sat down to request a warrant for the Reeds Spring home, he couldn’t be that authoritative. He needed another source, someone who could credibly link common household items with the production of meth, a highly-addictive 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 investigation, but that’s not the only comment that remains lodged in Cornille’s memory.
At some point, as the informant was describing the unusual lab in Reeds Spring, Cornille asked him if the meth was any good. If the answer was no, he figured, the situation might not be that big a deal. Low-quality stuff was unlikely 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 introduced 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 ammonia 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 interested 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 catalysts, synthesis and hydroxyl groups. Scientific terms flowed with minimal prompting.
About halfway through the conversation, Paillet made a remark that fell somewhere between 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 methamphetamine 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 number of meth labs seized by the authorities drastically increased, first in Missouri, and gradually in other communities around the country. Before the decade was out, as the public and the media sought answers as to how the drug shifted 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,” Springfield 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 opposite, spawning a generation of cooks by unintentionally democratizing an illegal industry. One textbook released in 2014 called Paillet “arguably the Johnny Appleseed for the spread of local meth production throughout the Midwest.” Journalist Frank Owen, in his own book released in 2007, wrote that Paillet “effectively decentralized the local meth trade … broadening the appeal of the drug.”
In other words, Bob Paillet reinvented meth.
How did he do it? The story he told law enforcement 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 converting 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 Springfield office from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s.
Despite Paillet’s pioneering role in an American 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 urban 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 public 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 arrested two Springfield residents, Christopher Fricks and Kimberly Lee Duncan, for possession 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 taken into custody. What is clear is that they told deputies of two places where Paillet stored materials 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 previously lived. One of his ex-wives allowed law enforcement 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 Battlefield. 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: Nineteen rounds, one in the chamber. 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 documents, Paillet “stated he was glad to see them and glad that it was over.”
Then he began to talk.
Source: Springfield News Leader