Hudson Valley Cops Helped Put Pill-Pushing Doc Behind Bars

The Orangetown Police Department, the Rockland County Drug Task Force and the Westchester County Police Department helped federal officials put a Long Island doctor behind bars.

Moshe Mirilashvili, 67, was sentenced Wednesday to 13 years in prison for giving phony patients prescriptions for oxycodone, Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced.

The doctor also was ordered to forfeit more than $2 million he made operating the illegal pill mill out of a Washington Heights office — $1.75 million of which was recovered from his home in Great Neck at the time of his arrest.

“Moshe Mirilashvili was essentially a drug dealer masquerading as a doctor," Bharara said. "Through his sham medical practice in Manhattan where patients and dealers would line up, Mirilashvili wrote more than 10,000 medically unnecessary prescriptions totaling close to a million oxycodone pills. As today’s sentence makes clear, those who abuse their medical licenses to fuel the opioid epidemic that is devastating so many of our communities will be prosecuted and severely punished.”

Oxycodone is a highly addictive, prescription-strength narcotic used to treat severe and chronic pain conditions. Every year, more than 13 million Americans abuse oxycodone, with the misuse of prescription painkillers such as oxycodone, leading to as many as 500,000 annual emergency room visits. Oxycodone prescriptions have enormous cash value to street-level drug dealers, who can fill the prescriptions at most pharmacies and resell the pills at vastly inflated rates. Indeed, a single prescription for 90 30-milligram oxycodone pills has an average resale value in New York City of $2,700 or more.

From October 2012 until December 2014, Mirilashvili, a board-certified, state-licensed doctor, wrote thousands of medically unnecessary prescriptions for large quantities of oxycodone in exchange for cash payments. He did so out of a sham medical office located on West 162nd Street in Manhattan where he typically charged $200 to $300 in cash for “patient visits” that typically involved little, if any, actual examination and almost always resulted in the issuance of a prescription for a large quantity of oxycodone, typically 90 30-milligram tablets.

Bharara said virtually none of these “patients” had any medical need for oxycodone, nor any legitimate medical records documenting an ailment for which oxycodone would be prescribed. Instead, most of these individuals were members of “crews” – that is, they were recruited and paid by drug traffickers to pose as “patients” in order to receive medically unnecessary prescriptions. The Crew Chiefs then obtained these prescriptions and arranged for them to be filled at various pharmacies so that the oxycodone pills thereby obtained could be resold on the streets of New York.

As part of the scheme, he accepted and even created fake documents – such as MRI and urinalysis reports – ostensibly documenting the medical need for the oxycodone prescriptions he was writing. For example, among documents recovered from his home at the time of his arrest were lab reports in which the name of the “patient” had been cut and pasted onto the document, as well as similar reports in which the name of the patient or other relevant information had been whited out.

Ten other participants in the conspiracy have previously pleaded guilty, including the drug traffickers who oversaw crews of “patients” sent into the clinics to obtain the phony prescriptions, and clinic staff, who profited by selling access to him and the fraudulent prescriptions he wrote, Bharara said.

Bharara thanked the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Tactical Diversion Squad (which comprises agents and officers from the DEA, the New York City Police Department, the New York State Police, the Town of Orangetown Police Department, the Rockland County Drug Task Force, and the Westchester County Police Department) for their work in the two-year investigation.

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