NEW YORK CITY, NY – This past May, a federal jury found a 78-year-old man who ran a medical clinic out of Brooklyn guilty for his role in a health care fraud scheme that involved illegal kickbacks and the unlawful distribution of an opioid use disorder medication.
A fraud investigation headed by Homeland Security Task Force New York resulted in the May 20th conviction of 78-year-old Tony Brown-Arkah, the individual who previously headed the New York-based clinic American Medical Centers (AMC) which was reportedly entangled in numerous illegal conspiracies.
Per a press release from the Justice Department affording insight into the case and subsequent conviction of Brown-Arkah, AMC was operating under the guise of providing “substance abuse treatment” but was instead illegally prescribing the opioid treatment medication Suboxone, which the Justice Department highlighted is “commonly abused by prison inmates by boiling the medication and dripping it into users’ eyes.”
Brown-Arkah reportedly allowed drug dealers to openly purchase patients’ prescribed Suboxone right outside the clinic, with one witness even testifying that an AMC staff member outright directed a patient to a van outside where they could sell off their prescribed medication.
Investigators learned many of the prescriptions were signed off by a nurse practitioner based out of Florida who never formally met or consulted with any of AMC’s patients. Furthermore, AMC reportedly required patients “to undergo invasive, medically unnecessary testing in order to get Suboxone prescriptions,” while Brown-Arkah also submitted invoices to Medicare and Medicaid for services never rendered.
In an effort to keep the fraud going, investigators learned of a kickback system Brown-Arkah had in play to keep the cash coming in, offering kickbacks to patients to play along in the scheme while also receiving kickbacks himself from a laboratory to perform needless tests where they too could shell out their own invoices. Brown-Arkah went so far as to create a shell company to help conceal the Medicare and Medicaid fraud, which totaled up to approximately $52 million, according to prosecutors.
Among the evidence that led to Brown-Arkah’s conviction was a meeting that was secretly recorded with a confidential informant posing as a prospective patient, where Brown-Arkah walked him through much of the scheme.
Brown-Arkah was found guilty of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, 12 counts of health care fraud, conspiracy to illegally distribute narcotics, 3 counts of illegal distribution of narcotics, conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks and to defraud the United States, and 2 counts of receipt of kickbacks.
While sentencing has not been scheduled yet for the defendant, Brown-Arkah could face decades behind bars between the multiple offenses he was convicted of.
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