HUNTER: Real-life Walter White was sociopath behind fentanyl epidemic

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A powdered pestilence was raging through the Big Apple and cops were finding dead junkies with the needles still in their arms.

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Next stop: Morgue.

It was a white powder packed in little baggies stamped Tango & Cash. This was February 1991 and it was America’s first taste of the deadly opioid fentanyl.

Cops were so alarmed they drove around with loudspeakers warning addicts about the new killer drug. Soon, the plague spread across the country.

Now, a new four-part FOX Nation documentary called The Godfather of Fentanyl, reveals the rogue chemist who unleashed this horror.

George Erik Marquardt was the real-life Walter White, the cancer-stricken protagonist of the acclaimed series Breaking Bad who turns to meth-dealing to help his family.

“Marquardt really was a real-life Walter White,” Donna Nelson, the Breaking Bad science advisor, told the doc.

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The series features interviews with Marquardt from the 1990s where he admits his interest in science came from a lecture delivered by atomic bomb brainiac Robert Oppenheimer.

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

For Marquardt — born in 1946 — formal education was for the birds. After he quit school, the future Godfather of Fentanyl discovered that his chemistry skills were in high demand. He started by making LSD before he was nabbed stealing chemistry stocks at the University of Wisconsin.

“[When he was 23] he stole the family truck and disappeared into the night,” his sister Gini told the doc. “He never talked to my parents again, ever.”

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By the mid-1970s, he was in Oklahoma and cooking meth, making big bucks selling it to oil field workers.

“[Marquardt] wasn’t like anybody that I’ve ever run across before in the drug business,” former drug cop John Madinger said. He is the author of Lethal Doses: The Story Behind The Godfather of Fentanyl.

“He was personable, friendly, open, definitely the smartest criminal I met in 35 years of law enforcement,” Madinger said, adding “The guy [ultimately] has killed more people than all the serial killers you can name put together.”

At Lewisburg Federal Prison, Marquardt met big players in the underworld. Along with other criminal chemists, Marquardt and Co. were scheming to develop a synthetic heroin.

That would be fentanyl, first created in 1960 as a high-octane painkiller and 100 times more powerful than morphine. Creating the opioid was not easy and the Patriarca crime family of New England bankrolled Marquardt.

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

He added: “Suddenly I saw these beautiful white crystals forming. I was extremely excited.”

Using his underworld contacts, New York City would be the test market. That was January 1991.

But Marquardt’s drug was supposed to be cut with other powders. That did not happen and the Grim Reaper got busy.

Once the bodies started hitting the streets in New York, tracking down the criminal mastermind behind it became a priority for cops.

Investigators got a break when one pusher babbled “his supplier in Wichita nearly died after accidentally inhaling fentanyl vapours in a makeshift lab in a remote industrial park.”

By the summer of 1993, Marquardt was behind bars after pleading guilty to conspiracy to manufacture fentanyl. He was caged for 20 years before being sprung in 2015, dying two years later aged 69.

Today, 2,000 Americans per week and countless Canadians pay the price for Marquardt’s “serendipity”.

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@HunterTOSun

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