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Physician charged, agrees to pleaBy JEFF TESTERMAN © St. Petersburg Times, published October 21, 2000 TAMPA -- Dr. Richard Tyson, a prominent south Florida physician active in his support of Alzheimer's groups and addiction treatment, has been charged with conspiracy to commit Medicare fraud for his role in a patient brokering network that stretched from Illinois to Florida. Prosecutors say Tyson and his associates generated huge revenues by enticing addicts into treatment with illegal inducements, coaching patients to exhibit phony symptoms to maximize insurance reimbursements and concocting false management contracts to disguise bounties paid for patients that ran as high as $3,000 a head. Tyson, a Fort Lauderdale resident, has agreed to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy and pay $1.5-million in fines and restitution, according to documents filed by federal prosecutors in U.S. District Court in Tampa Friday. He faces as much as five years in prison on the conspiracy charge. John Lauro, Tyson's Tampa attorney, said Tyson feels remorse for his involvement in the patient brokering conspiracy and hoped to maintain his medical license by providing good-faith assistance with the ongoing grand jury investigation. "He deeply regrets his involvement in this matter," said Lauro, "And from an early stage in the investigation, he accepted responsibility to do the right thing." Lauro emphasized that Tyson's crimes were economic, not medical. "There has never been any assertion by prosecutors that patient care was compromised," he said. The patient brokering investigation was sparked by a 1993 St. Petersburg Times series titled, "The Patient Pipeline," which chronicled stories of patients duped into unnecessary or inappropriate treatment by unscrupulous brokers. More than 50 people have been charged in the patient brokering conspiracy, and defendants have agreed to pay more than $10-million in fines and restitution to U.S. government agencies. This is not Tyson's first brush with trouble. The graduate of Columbia University and the University of Miami Medical School began free-basing cocaine and abusing Quaaludes in the 1980s and was put on five years' probation by the Florida Department of Professional Regulation in 1984. Tyson recovered and opened a drug and alcohol treatment clinic in Dade County called Interphase. It was a success, a former clinical director said, because Tyson insisted "there is no inappropriate admission: as long as a patient had insurance, they were appropriate." Brokers helped fill the beds at Interphase, according to the court documents filed Friday, and Tyson soon partnered with William Demaria Jr., a New Jersey businessman with organized crime ties who prosecutors regard as the kingpin of the brokering network. Like Tyson, Demaria has pleaded to conspiracy charges and is awaiting sentencing. Demaria and Tyson were principals in Recovery Management Corp., the operator of both the Nova treatment program at The Manors, a Tarpon Springs psychiatric hospital that is now closed, and Recovery Bridge, a treatment program also now out of business but originally part of Sun Coast Hospital in Largo. Brokering fees fueled profits at both programs, prosecutors say. At Sun Coast, according to court papers, Tyson signed a lease agreement with a hospital representative "to cover up and hide the fact that Sun Coast was unlawfully paying Tyson's company for patient referrals." Demaria and Tyson's Recovery Management company was also the major stockholder in a company that owned Colonial Hospital, a small Newport News, Va., facility that prospered by attracting $1,000-a-day psychiatric and substance abuse patients from as far away as Florida and California. Six years ago, the hospital was found guilty of violating federal Medicare anti-kickback laws by luring patients into treatment at Colonial with free air fare. Colonial was hit with a $200,000 fine and stripped of its Medicare license. It later went into bankruptcy and was sold. Part of the conspiracy charges against Tyson involve defrauding the Internal Revenue Service. At The Manors, a tax return filed in 1994 listed an expense of $1.69-million for "clinical fees." But investigators say $982,473 of the deducted fees were actually illegal patient brokerage fees paid to an Ohio company.
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