Hialeah doctor called himself ‘El Chapo of Oxycodone.’ Now, they’re both prison inmates
Yet another South Florida pain-pills-and-Medicare-fraud scheme, this one perpetrated in Hialeah by a doctor, his wife and two other people who worked for his practice, ended Monday with the doctor’s sentencing in federal court.
The Justice Department said Dr. Rodolfo Gonzalez Garcia called himself the “El Chapo of Oxycodone” while running his scam. Now, after getting an eight-year sentence for conspiring to distribute a controlled substance, Gonzalez Garcia can call himself “U.S. federal prison inmate,” which is the same life status as the infamous drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
He won’t be able to call himself a doctor much longer. After U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman dropped the sentence on Gonzalez Garcia Monday, the Florida Department of Health dropped an emergency suspension order on the medical license he’s held since 1985.
Gonzalez Garcia and his wife, Arlene Gonzalez, live in Weston, but he worked out of 3408 W. 84th St. in Hialeah, an office he named “West Medical Office” and later “West Pines Medical.”
Arlene Gonzalez worked in the office and got four months for conspiracy to defraud the United States. Office receptionist Annie Suarez-Gonzalez got a year of probation for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Fidel Marrero-Castellanos of Hialeah, who recruited patients, got 13 months for conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to distribute controlled substances.
Two Ends of the Scheme
As Medicare scams go, this one followed a familiar pattern.
Gonzalez Garcia’s admission of facts says in 2016, he and office workers Tania Sanchez and Sucett Lopez “agreed to receive purported patients at West that were brought to West by patient recruiters. They also agreed that patient recruiters could bring just lists of purported patients to West instead of requiring the patient’s presence.”
One of the patient recruiters was Marrero-Castellanos. His admission of facts says he brought West Medical patients or at least their names on a list. He also brought $250 to give to Lopez, Suarez-Gonzalez, Arlene Gonzalez or receptionist Suyima Valdez.
For that $250, Marrero-Castellanos got the right to buy Gonzalez Garcia-signed (or Lopez or Gonzalez-forged) prescriptions for oxycodone or OcyContin. He and Gonzalez Garcia worked out a $25 discount per prescription.
Whether the patients took the prescriptions to the pharmacies on their own or Marrero-Castellanos took them for them, “all of the recruited patients gave the defendant their oxycodone and OxyContin pills. [Marrero-Castellanos] gave those pills to others knowing they would sell them off.”
Some of the patients were Medicare beneficiaries. That’s the Medicare fraud end of this scheme.
The doctor’s office end of this fraud, which ran from November 2016 through September 2018, featured Gonzalez Garcia prescribing 10,160 oxycodone pills in recruited patients’ names.
