[3] Fuisz was born on December 12, 1939, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Anton Fujs, a Slovenian immigrant from Murska Sobota and Margaret Matuš, a Slovenian-American whose parents had migrated from Prekmurje.

[5] After completing medical school and his residency, Fuisz served as a general physician and lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, where he was stationed at the White House during the Johnson administration.

[4] Fuisz served as president and chief executive officer of Medcom from 1975 until 1982,[8] when the company was purchased by Baxter International, the world's larger supplier of hospital equipment, for $52 million.

[4][9] Fuisz initially offered to stay on for a three-year transition period to introduce the new ownership to his clients, but he was instead fired by Baxter chief executive Vernon Loucks.

[10] After Medcom's sale and Fuisz's removal, business declined dramatically in the company's two biggest markets, the United States and Saudi Arabia, and profits plummeted.

He alleged that Baxter sold their Ashdod facility to Teva Pharmaceutical while simultaneously negotiating the construction of a similar plant in Syria, and that, for this reason, in 1989, they were removed from the Arab League's blacklist.

[19] In January 1992, The New York Times published an article by journalist Seymour Hersh alleging that U.S. intelligence had helped to arm the Iraqi military during the Gulf War, naming Fuisz as its primary source.

[20] The article described an affidavit Fuisz had submitted to the United States House Agriculture Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight, and Department Operations, which was investigating American heavy equipment manufacturer Terex Corp. Fuisz, who had been involved in business in the Middle East for many years, was representing a Saudi family interested in purchasing a heavy equipment company when he was given a tour of the Terex plant in Motherwell, Scotland in September 1987.

When Fuisz questioned Terex Vice President David Langevin about the vehicles, he claims he was told that the shipments had been requested by the CIA, with the cooperation of British intelligence.

Fuisz claimed that he had attempted to bring Terex's arms deals to the attention of the United States House Energy Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in 1987, but committee chairman John Dingell had refused to act.

[21] Fuisz did not press the issue again until Charlie Rose of the Agriculture Committee asked him for an affidavit; the Scud launchers were suspected of being funded with ear-marked agriculture money through the Atlanta branch of the Italian Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) – documents obtained in a 1989 raid on the bank revealed that Terex, through its independent British distributor, had sold dump truck chassis in 1988 to the Iraqi "Technical Corps for Special Projects, Project 395," a code name for Saddam Hussein's missile program.

[23] In March 1993, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest in the trial and invoked the state secrets privilege to bar Fuisz from testifying in his own defense.

[31] Despite these lucrative arrangements, aggressive short-sellers began spreading rumors that Fuisz was being imprisoned by the FBI while being investigated by the IRS, and that his pills were so fragile they would disintegrate in shipping; by early 1997, the company's stock had plummeted to $5.62.

[34] By September, McVey, then living in a hotel in the Channel Islands, had filed two complaints of securities fraud with the Securities and Exchange Commission: first, to investigate whether Fuisz had knowingly and wilfully stolen assets from FT through his purchase of the online drugstore, and second, to investigate Patrick Scrivens, the firm's chief financial officer and former CIA public accountant,[35] who had sold all his FT stock at $15/share immediately before its big fall,[16] and became CFO of the online drugstore upon his resignation.

[37][38] Although it was initially reported in various international media that a state secrets gag order barred Fuisz from speaking about Lindauer's statement,[25][39] documents released in December 2013 by a member of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's legal team show this to be only partially true.

[24] Fuisz insisted that this was not true, that he was subject to a "statutory obligation of secrecy" independent of the Terex litigation, and that he had been specifically advised by Murtagh and another DOJ lawyer to remain silent about Lockerbie.

[45] After their initial introduction in 1994, Fuisz and Susan Lindauer continued to meet weekly to discuss her diplomatic contacts in the Middle East, including her work related to the lifting of U.S. sanctions against Libya and Iraq.