Owners Of Brooklyn Pharmacy And Clinic

Attorney General Spitzer today announced that a Brooklyn grand jury has charged two owners of a Williamsburg pharmacy with acting in concert with the owners of a Court Street medical clinic to steal more than $2.3 million from taxpayers by billing for expensive HIV/AIDS medications that were never dispensed to patients.

The grand jury also charged the medical clinic owners with stealing in excess of $50,000 by fraudulently billing the Medicaid program for having provided physical therapy to hundreds of patients even though the therapy had been ordered without the patients first being examined by a physician.

Arraigned yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court on a twenty-count indictment were drugstore owners and pharmacists Lev Rivkin and Jeremy Boim, their corporation, Bridge Total Health Corp., and medical clinic owner Alex Lachter.

Russell Erlich, a co-owner of the medical clinic, is incarcerated on unrelated charges and will be arraigned at a later date, along with Brooklyn Medical Arts HIV Care, P.C., the corporation he and Lachter own.

The six defendants were variously charged with Grand Larceny in the First and Second Degrees and Offering a False Instrument for Filing in the First Degree. If convicted, they each face up to 25 years in prison.

"Instead of providing needed medication to HIV patients, the defendants took advantage of a government program to enrich themselves," said Spitzer. "So brazen was their scheme that, at one point, the clinic owners offered free marijuana to patients as an inducement to visit their clinic. Unscrupulous health care providers are put on notice that my office has zero tolerance for such fraud, and will vigorously prosecute those individuals who steal from the taxpayers and the Medicaid program."

In carrying out their scheme, prosecutors charge that the defendants Rivkin, Boim, Erlich, and Lachter set up a bogus in-house pharmacy at Brooklyn Medical Arts, through which prescriptions for AIDS medications, including Serostim, were funneled to Bridge Total Health Corp., which does business as Echo Drugs. The drugstore, in turn, would make regular deliveries of the medications to the clinic. However, instead of dispensing the medications, clinic owners Erlich and Lachter would often tell recipients that the drugs were either missing or stolen. At the end of the day, Echo's owners Rivkin or Boim would retrieve from the clinic any medications that had not been dispensed and take them back to their drugstore. Between January 1999 and May 2002, it is alleged that the defendants fraudulently submitted or caused to be submitted hundreds of reimbursement claims for prescription medications and refills that were never dispensed to patients. As a result, Echo Drugs was improperly paid more than $2.3 million in Medicaid reimbursement.

Prosecutors further charged that, between April 2000 and June 2002, Erlich and Lachter induced patients to come to Brooklyn Medical Arts by offering marijuana to those patients who visited the clinic. Once at the clinic, Erlich and Lachter would then bill Medicaid for physical therapy services even though they knew the recipients had never been examined by a doctor, a prerequisite for the ordering of therapy. In reliance on these false billings, Medicaid paid Brooklyn Medical Arts more than $50,000.

The Attorney General thanked the state Health Department and the Office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau for referring the matters to his office.

Spitzer noted that his office would refer the matters of Rivkin and Boim to the State Education Department for a review of their pharmacist licenses.

Bridge Total Health Corp., which does business as Echo Drugs, is located at 260 Broadway in Brooklyn. Lev Rivkin, 33, is the supervising pharmacist and a co-owner of Echo Drugs. He resides at 333 West 57th Street in Manhattan. Jeremy Boim, 30, is also a pharmacist and co-owner of Echo Drugs. He resides at 768 Central Avenue in Woodmere, Long Island.

Brooklyn Medical Arts HIV Care P.C. was located at 26 Court Street and then at 360 Court Street in Brooklyn. Alex Lachter, 49, lives at 2659 East 66th Street in Brooklyn. Russell Erlich, 28, resides at 7175 Perri Lane in Brooklyn.

The case is being prosecuted by Special Assistant Attorney General Glenn M. Jones, of the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit's New York City Regional Office. Assisting in the investigation was Special Investigator Albert T. Mariorano, Jr. and Associate Special Auditor Investigators Thomasina Piccolo Smith and Paul J. Erhardt.

The charges against the defendants are mere accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.