NEW YORK—A drug trafficking operation involving the sale of thousands of prescription pills across New York City and Long Island was shut down Wednesday, officials announced.
A Staten Island resident allegedly made fraudulent claims of being disabled after a car accident in 2007, and filed a false lawsuit, where he received benefits, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security Disability Insurance, according to the office of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman.
After beginning to receive benefits, the defendant started obtaining multiple prescriptions for drugs, including oxycodone, an addictive painkiller.
Between August 2011 and June 2012 the defendant allegedly received at least 27 prescriptions totaling about 5,890 tablets, for oxycodone from five different doctors and two doctor’s assistants.
The man and his girlfriend allegedly sold the oxycodone, xanax tablets, and hundreds of fentanyl patches—a potent anti-depressant—for $5 to $19 each. They made about $84,000 from August 2011 to June 2012, according to the arraignment.
As an example of how lucrative the operation was, the felony complaint notes that in July 2012 “the defendants obtained a cash-counting machine capable of counting 1,200 bills per minute.”
Officers acting on court-ordered search warrants found dozens of different medications in the defendant’s residence, as well as bundles of cash and jewelry.
The man and his girlfriend, along with the girlfriend’s mother and two others, are being charged with multiple felonies including criminal possession of a controlled substance. The man and his girlfriend each face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
“The arrest of this major drug trafficker and his associates will make our streets safer, and sends a message to would-be criminals to think twice before dealing drugs in New York state,” Attorney General Schneiderman said in a release.
Schneiderman notes that the I-STOP legislation, passed in June, which requires doctors to review a patient’s prescription drug history and update it in real time for some drugs, could have sped up the process of detecting this drug trafficking operation.
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