Officials in New York arrested 12 people on Friday in what
was described as a conspiracy involving three Brooklyn medical clinics that
helped flood the streets with prescription painkillers while defrauding
Medicare and Medicaid out of millions of dollars.
After announcing the arrests — a 13th person, a former state
assemblyman from Brooklyn, was also indicted in the case — prosecutors
described the scope of the conspiracy, saying it put 6.3 million oxycodone
pills on New York’s black market and generated more than $24 million for the
three clinics…
“I have to say I’ve never really seen anything like it,”
Bridget G. Brennan, New York City’s special narcotics prosecutor, said at a
news conference on Friday.
Those charged in two indictments announced on Friday
included three doctors, Michael Taitt, Paul McClung and Lazar Feygin, who was
described as the “chief architect” of the scheme; medical office managers Pavel
Krasnou, Vyacheslav Maksakov, Rachel Smolitsky and Konstantin Zeva; physician
assistants Juan Cabezas, Marie Nazaire and Abdus Sattar; a nurse practitioner,
Marjorie Louis-Jacques; and a physical therapist, Reynat Glaz. The former
assemblyman, Alec Brook-Krasny, was out of the country, officials said.
The yearslong investigation that led to the charges began
when federal agents and narcotics investigators found a group of “doctor
shoppers,” people seeking prescription pills even though they did not need them
for medical reasons.
Officials said they learned in the course of the inquiry
that two Brooklyn clinics owned by Dr. Feygin — Parkville Medical Health, in
the Kensington neighborhood, and LF Medical Services of NY, in Clinton Hill —
were selling large numbers of prescriptions for oxycodone.
The investigators said Dr. Feygin began hiring medical staff
members in 2012 in order to prescribe the oxycodone.
Dr. Feygin and members of the staff at his two clinics
prescribed more than 3.7 million pills from 2012 to 2017, and received more
than $16 million in reimbursements from Medicaid and Medicare, officials said;
the third clinic was responsible for 2.6 million pills, and was reimbursed more
than $8 million…
As he was led into a Manhattan courthouse at the head of a
line of suspects, Dr. Feygin denied that he or his co-defendants had ever fed
anyone’s addiction.
“We’re not treating addicts; we’re treating very, very sick
people,” he said. “We’re primary-care physicians.”
Judge Neil Ross of Manhattan Criminal Court ordered Dr.
Feygin held without bail. Prosecutors noted that he had an apartment in Russia.
Arthur Gershfeld, a lawyer for Mr. Krasnou and Dr. McClung,
said the large number of pills prescribed was proof of a great number of
patients served, not of wrongdoing.
Dr. Feygin, a native of Belarus who moved to the United
States more than 25 years ago, was featured in a 2013 New York Times video
about style in Brighton Beach, a Russian-American enclave in Brooklyn. He
talked about his personal shopper and pointed out his Ferragamo shoes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/nyregion/brooklyn-clinics-oxycodone-indictments.html?_r=0
Courtesy of Doximity
The April 2016 real estate clip for the mansion at 64 McCully Avenue on Staten Island is quite remarkable.
ReplyDeleteFootage shot from a drone shows a tan mansion with expensive windows and accents, on a corner lot, with a gorgeous pool and paved backyard, eight luxury bathrooms, a Master Chef’s kitchen, and six, palatial-sized bedrooms.
It’s in the tony Lighthouse Hill section of the borough.
This is the place that Dr. Lazar Feygin has called home since June 2016, when the mansion was purchased for $2.3 million.
Prosecutors say it’s the mansion that opioids and Medicaid fraud bought.
The 70-year-old Feygin was the first doctor walked into court by Drug Enforcement Administration agents last Friday, as he led a chain gang of other physicians, nurse practitioners, and physicians’ assistants…
Dr. Feygin, and his associate—Dr. Paul McClung—were listed in New York State’s “Top Ten” list of physicians getting millions in Medicaid reimbursements.
Their clinics collected a total of $24 million dollars in a four year period, with Feygin’s two clinics getting $16 million of that amount.
The city’s Metroplus health program paid out $13 million of the 24 million received by the doctors.
Commissioner Mark Peters from the New York City Department of Investigation said “These defendants commandeered the insurance plan for city residents, Metroplus. This is only the first investigation of overbilling of the city’s Metroplus program, but it is not our last.”
The indictment said the conspiracies reached their height last year, when three clinics involved in the scams averaged 1,600 patient visits a month.
A physical therapist, Reynat Glaz, was accused of billing Medicaid for sham services, often putting patients in a massage chair for a few minutes.
Scott Lampert, in charge of the Inspector General’s Office for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said “Thousands of patients were charged an estimated $700 a visit.”
The U.S. government started a Medicare Fraud Task Force in nine cities ten years ago, in March 2007.
In that time, it’s uncovered evidence of $11 billiion dollars in fraud.
But that could be a drop in the bucket.
PIX11 has been following government raids at corrupt medical clinics since 2010.
The owner of one clinic on Bay Parkway in Brooklyn, Irina Shelikhova, was ordered to pay back $50 million dollars to the U.S. government. She also had to forfeit $38 million dollars in assets.
She’s currently serving 15 years in prison.
http://pix11.com/2017/04/11/the-mansion-that-opioids-and-medicaid-fraud-bought-prosecutors-follow-the-cash-to-staten-island/