The Trovan team chartered a jet, flew to Kano, an ancient Nigerian city of 2 million on the edge of the Sahara, commandeered the overcrowded compound of crumbling cinder-block bunkers that passed for a hospital, ran the test, and flew out two weeks later with their data. When all but five of the 100-child Trovan cohort survived (six on the control drug died)--the death rate of untreated meningitis in Kano had been 20 percent--Pfizer trumpeted to Wall Street that the drug's success spelled blockbuster. That Trovan could be portrayed as having saved African children might even lend a priceless "halo" effect to the drug's launch.

The company's predictions turned out to be inflated, to say the least. Though U.S. guidelines say that meningitis experiments should include long-term follow-ups, Pfizer called for no such checks. When less than half of the tested children returned to the clinic, Pfizer said that this minority was sufficient to prove the experiment showed no side effects.

The trial data were so sloppy that the FDA refused to even consider approval of Trovan for children or for meningitis. Although the antibiotic hit the market in 1998, it quickly resulted in a rash of complications due to liver toxicity, including six deaths. Less than two years after its launch, the drug itself was finished.

A Pfizer infectious-disease specialist who later analyzed the test procedures was fired after protesting to Pfizer executives that the study was a violation not only of medical ethics but of federal and international laws.

In Kano, a groundbreaking Washington Post investigative series found that parents had not knows that their children were part of an experiment, nor were they informed that an adjacent clinic administered by Medicines San Frontieres could have given their children a proven antibiotic. As an injectable, unlike the oral Trovan, that faster-acting antibiotic offered a critical advantage against meningitis, which can kill in hours.

In 2000, following the Post revelations, a cry for justice in the Nigerian media triggered street protests and an investigation by Nigeria's health ministry, whose report on the incident went missing until 2006, when a leaked version revealed that the health officials had reached more or less the same verdict as the fired Pfizer expert: The experiment was "an illegal trial of an unregistered drug," a "clear case of exploitation of the ignorant," and a violation of Nigerian and international law.

These disclosures prompted a raft of civil and criminal lawsuits in Kano State Court on behalf of the families and in Federal High Court on behalf of the nation itself, as it were. But Pfizer kept the suits tangled up in proceedings to postpone any settlement.

A State Department cable dated April 20, 2009 and released by WikiLeaks, however, suggests that Pfizer's legal strategy was not simply to delay--it was also to blackmail. Written by an economic counselor at the US embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, the cable reports minutes of meetings during which Pfizer representatives informed the U.S. ambassador that the firm had agreed to settle the Kano State suit for $75 million, mere pocket change for the pharma giant. The ambassador was told that Pfizer "was not happy settling the case, but had come to the conclusion that the $75 million figure was reasonable because the suits had been ongoing for many years costing Pfizer more than $15 million a year in legal and investigative fees."