The co-owner of a Fort Worth Pharmacy sentenced to prison and ordered to pay restitution for his role in a $60 million kickback scam related to pain creams.
Richard Hall, 54, and his Xpress Compounding co-defendants took doctors on private jets to Mexico, Las Vegas and a Hollywood movie premiere to get them to send patients to their pharmacy, the feds said.Richard Hall, the co-owner of a Fort Worth pharmacy, was sentenced Friday to four years and four months in federal prison and ordered to pay about $60 million in restitution for defrauding the government with an illegal kickback scheme.
“Doctors were taken on trips. They were flown on jets. They were bought expensive dinners all the time to try to keep their business from moving to a different pharmacy,” said co-defendant Scott Schuster, a co-owner of Xpress Compounding, during his trial testimony.The defendants’ goal, prosecutors said, was to “improperly influence those who make healthcare decisions on behalf of patients.
Schuster testified that Hall traveled with a prescribing doctor to Cabo San Lucas in Mexico on a private jet. As Schuster explained it, the trip was “all expenses paid. No reimbursement necessary. Makes the doctor want to write more scripts for sure.”The doctor, an orthopedic surgeon, was among those who wrote the highest volume of TRICARE prescriptions for the pharmacy, Schuster said.
One of Hall’s lawyers, Marlo Cadeddu, unsuccessfully sought an acquittal or a new trial, arguing that “no rational juror” could have found that Hall made an agreement with the other owners to launder the proceeds of an illegal kickback scheme.The men merely made individual spending decisions on expensive items, she said in a court motion.
The Xpress Compounding pharmacy stole about $53 million from TRICARE, a federal health insurance program for military members and veterans and their families, authorities said.Katherine Payerle, a Justice Department trial lawyer, said in a court filing that Hall was aware of the pharmacy’s practice of “selecting combinations of medications with an eye toward extremely high reimbursements,” like between $8,000 and $12,000 per bottle.
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