Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Headline: Sober Home Fraud
Chatman would not have been able to commit this fraud without doctors signing off that they had reviewed the samples. So he hired some—including Dr. Joaquin Mendez, who worked in skilled nursing and had no background in addiction treatment—to rubber stamp the results.
“Through records, we were able to see that Dr. Mendez ‘reviewed’ 100 tests in a one-hour period. He clearly wasn’t looking at them. He was just going through and clicking to process these tests,” Gerrity said.
Chatman and his associates defrauded insurance companies of an estimated $24 million between 2013 and 2016. Chatman and his wife, Laura, lived a luxurious life thanks to their fraud proceeds, living in a $1 million home and driving high-end cars.
Yet the toll on the sober home residents was even worse than the financial crime.
Some of the more than 2,000 residents who lived in Chatman’s facilities died of overdoses. He also forced some of the women into prostitution, giving the addicted women drugs and then withholding those drugs if they would not comply. He told the women the prostitution would pay their “rent” to live at his sober homes, and sometimes the prostitution would even occur within the homes.
Last year, Chatman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud, money laundering, and sex trafficking and was sentenced to 27 and a half years in prison. Laura Chatman pleaded guilty to making false statements and received a three-year prison term, while Mendez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and was sentenced to four years.
The FBI’s victim specialists played a critical role in this case by assisting the human trafficking victims with resources, as well as helping patients get legitimate drug treatment.
“It’s incredibly rewarding that we were able to get someone like Chatman off the streets, and the lengthy sentence really sends a message,” Gerrity said. “We’ve met the mothers and fathers of the patients who came here thinking their sons and daughters would get clean. This is an incredibly important issue, and by investigating these types of cases, we’re doing our part in addressing the national drug epidemic.”