Less than three months after their indictment, 11 Texans, including two doctors and a nurse practitioner, have pleaded guilty to taking part in a $300 million kickback scheme involving needless lab tests that were billed to Medicare and other taxpayer-financed insurance programs.
Jose Roel Maldonado, a family-medicine doctor in Laredo, Eduardo Carlos Canova, an internist in Laredo, and Keith Allen Wichinski, a nurse practitioner in San Antonio, were accused in a February 9 indictment by a federal grand jury in Fort Worth of taking under-the-table payments to order millions of dollars’ worth of blood and toxicology tests at three Dallas-area labs: Unified Laboratory Services in Fort Worth, Spectrum Diagnostic Laboratory in Arlington, and Reliable Labs in Carrollton.
Four founders or executives of those labs were also indicted: Jeffrey Paul Madison, Mark Christopher Boggess, Biby Ancy Kurian, Abraham Phillips. So was Sherman Kennerson, an investor in Unified.
The other three defendants were so-called marketers, go-betweens who helped arrange and disguise the kickbacks from the labs to the medical practitioners: David Michael Lizcano, Laura Ortiz (Lizcano’s sister), and Juan David Rojas.
Six of the defendants, including the two doctors and the nurse practitioner, entered guilty pleas within days of their indictments. The last of the 11 guilty pleas was entered on April 13, that of Kurian, the co-founder of Reliable Labs.
“The swift resolution of this case is a testament to both our office and to the investigative agencies that worked diligently to ensure our case was airtight,” said Chad Meacham, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas.
“We cannot allow physicians’ judgment to be clouded by financial considerations.”
P.J. Meitl, an assistant U.S. attorney in Dallas, is lead prosecutor in the case, which was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Dallas and Fort Worth, the Office of Investigations of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the of the Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general’s office.
According to the indictment, Maldonado, the family-medicine doctor in Laredo, got more than $400,000 in kickbacks for $4 million in laboratory tests billed to the federal government, Canova, the internist, got more than $300,000 for billings of $12 million, and Wichinski, the San Antonio nurse practitioner, ordered tests at the labs that resulted in more than $14 million in bogus billings. In exchange, the indictment said, Unified Laboratory Services agreed to pay half the salary of each of three employees and the full salary of a new employee, plus cover his monthly lease payments of $850.
Madison and Lizcano face up to 15 years each in federal prison. Kennerson, Ortiz, Phillips, Kurian, Maldonado, Canova, Wichinski and Rojas face up to five years in prison, and Boggess up to three.
According to court records, Madison is represented by Richard B. Roper, a partner at Holland & Knight in Dallas. Kennerson is represented by Michael J. Uhl of Fitzpatrick Jacks Smith & Uhl in Dallas. Phillips is represented by Arnold A. Spencer, managing partner in the Fort Worth office of Spencer & Associates. Boggess is represented by Sean McKenna, a partner with Spencer Fane in Dallas. Kurian is represented by Aaron L Wiley, special counsel at Oberheiden in Dallas. Rojas is represented by Gregg Gallian of Dallas.
Lizcano is represented by Thomas Christian Fagerberg of Austin, Ortiz by the Lahood Norton Law Group of San Antonio and Blakely Ian Mohr of Southlake; Wichinski by Davis & Santos of San Antonio; Maldonado by Nugent & Peterson of Houston; and Canova by Philip Daniel Del Rio of Laredo.