'Chillin' like a Villain': Medical lab owner caught off Bahamas pleads guilty to patient brokering
A co-owner of a now-closed medical lab in Lake Park who fled to the Bahamas after his arrest and was captured on a catamaran named "Chillin' like a Villain" pleaded guilty Wednesday to 53 counts of patient brokering.
Thomas Ralph Stanley, 54, of Stuart will receive five years in prison when Circuit Judge Sarah Willis sentences him in April, according to court records.
On Wednesday, Willis ordered Stanley to pay fines totaling $250,000 as well as court costs. The fines will drop to $100,000 if Stanley pays them within 60 days.
Why patient brokering is illegal
Stanley was a co-owner of Coastal Laboratories LLC in Lake Park. He was among dozens arrested in 2019 in a multimillion dollar patient brokering scheme connected to the now-closed lab.
Under Florida law, it is illegal for a lab or a health-care provider either to offer or to pay a sober home or a drug-treatment center a commission, a bonus or a bribe for the referral of patients.
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Patients with private health insurance can be particularly lucrative to them. Doctors affiliated with sober homes and treatment centers can order multiple urine drug tests each week. The tests can cost thousands of dollars, which the insurance companies then reimburse.
Prosecutors alleged that more than $6 million was kicked back to the operators of treatment centers for referring patients' urine specimens to Coastal. The lab reportedly billed insurance companies $141 million for urine tests over a two-year period from 2015-2017.
In 2016, Palm Beach County's State Attorney's Office formed a Sober Homes Task Force to investigate fraud and abuse at treatment centers. Since the task force was formed, the State Attorney's Office has made 121 arrests for patient brokering resulting in 94 plea deals and one conviction by a jury. A jury also found one person not guilty as well.
Catamaran found off Pig Beach in the Bahamas
Authorities say Stanley absconded to the Bahamas after his arrest, where he was found in July, weeks after he failed to show for a scheduled court hearing. Bahamian and U.S. authorities found Stanley and an acquaintance anchored off Pig Beach in the Exumas district of the Bahamas.
Last summer, the Lake Park lab's co-owner, Jesse Peters, pleaded guilty to five counts of patient brokering and seven counts of conspiracy to commit patient brokering.
Peters was sentenced to 60 months in prison and fined $110,000.
@JuliusWhigham
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Medical lab owner faces five years in prison after patient brokering plea