Why would a fraud care about fraud? MAGA has been played for suckers. Donald has been on a pardon and commutation spree, and included in his latest round of commutations is the former co-owner of American Therapeutic Corp., Lawrence Duran, and he's a real piece of work. Duran, whose company ran seven health care clinics in Florida, pleaded guilty in 2011 to multiple felonies, including defrauding Medicare, healthcare fraud, and money laundering, and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
What did he do? He ripped off millions of dollars from Medicare.
The Miami Herald reports:
A judge sentenced Duran, now 63, to the longest prison term in history for Medicare fraud in September 2016. Trump issued Duran's commutation on Wednesday. Duran and his girlfriend, Marianella Valera, the co-owner of the company and one of its therapists, filed 866,000 false claims with Medicare and received more than $87 million from their scheme, according to court records. Their case was part of a much larger probe that included 22 other defendants, including senior company employees, psychiatrists and patient recruiters. In all, the scheme involved $200 million in false billings. At the time, it was the nation's largest Medicare therapy rip-off scam in history.
Valera, now 54, was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Her sentence was reduced to 15 years, and she was released from custody in March 2020, federal Bureau of Prison records show. The fraud involved billing Medicare for group mental-health sessions that were either not needed or not provided to patients. The patients at the clinics were not capable of feeding themselves, unable to independently use the bathroom and lacked the mental capacity to respond to counseling, federal prosecutors said at the time. This meant they likely weren't even eligible for the treatment for which the company was billing Medicare, according to prosecutors.
Oh, lookie here:
Duran is the second defendant in the case to be spared by Trump. In 2020 in his first term, Trump commuted the 35-year sentence of Judith Negron. A jury convicted her on 24 counts of conspiracy, fraud, paying kickbacks and money laundering in collaboration with Duran and Valera in August 2011. Negron, now 54, was vice president of an American Therapeutic Corp.. subsidiary called MedLink Professional Management Group, which federal prosecutors said was established with the sole purpose of laundering $83 million in Medicare payments to Duran, Valera, employees and others who participated in the scheme for more than 10 years.
This has all happened before.
CBS reports:
Five years ago, the CEO of one of the largest pain clinic companies in the Southeast was sentenced to more than three years in prison after being convicted in a $4 million illegal kickback scheme.
But after just four months behind bars, John Estin Davis walked free. President Trump commuted Davis' sentence in the last days of his first term. In a statement explaining the decision, the White House said that "no one suffered financially" from Davis' crime.
In court, however, the Trump administration was saying something very different. As the president let him go, the Department of Justice alleged in a civil lawsuit that Davis and his company defrauded taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars with excessive urine drug testing. The DOJ alleged that Comprehensive Pain Specialists made such a "staggering" sum from cups of pee that employees had given the testing a profit-minded nickname: "liquid gold."
In a March address to Congress, Trump said his administration had found "hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud" without citing specific examples. Trump puts on an act and says what his fire-breathing, lint-licking supporters want to hear. Nothing about him is genuine or original. When will MAGA wake the fuck up? Maybe they like feeding the leopards with their faces.
