Pills of Eli Lilly & Co.'s antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, the company's top-selling drug with $4.7 billion in sales last year, are arranged for a photo at New London Pharmacy in New York on July 22, 2009. Photographer: JB Reed/Bloomberg News

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) — ProsecutorMichael Loucks remembers clearly when lawyers for Pfizer Inc., the world’s largest drug company, looked across the table and promised it wouldn’t break the law again.

It was January 2004, and the attorneys were negotiating in a conference room on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse in Boston, where Loucks was head of the health-care fraud unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. One of Pfizer’s units had been pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved.