FORT WORTH, Texas — A Fort Worth pharmacy co-owner was sentenced Friday to four years and four months in prison and ordered to pay nearly $60 million in restitution for defrauding the government in an illegal kickback and money laundering scheme, federal officials say.
Richard Hall, 53, worked with others to create and market compounded medications, which are intended to be custom-tailored to individual patient needs, according to court documents and evidence presented at trial.
Hall paid marketers to recruit area doctors to write prescriptions for the medications, including by creating so-called “investment opportunities” so that doctors who wrote prescriptions to the pharmacy could profit from the pharmacy operations, officials say.
A federal jury in the Northern District of Texas convicted Hall in July 2023 of four counts of paying and receiving unlawful kickbacks and one count of conspiring to launder money.
Hall, Scott Schuster, Dustin Rall, and George Lock Paret, all of Fort Worth, Johnathan Le of Dallas, and Quintan Cockerell, of California, were each charged in an indictment in connection with the case, federal officials announced in 2020.
Cockerell, a medical marketer from California, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, one count of receiving kickbacks, and one count of money laundering in October 2023, officials say. Two other co-defendant marketers, Turner Luke Zeutzius and Michael Ranelle, previously pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and pay and receive kickbacks.
According to that indictment, from May 2014 to September 2016, Hall, Schuster, Rall, Paret, Le and their co-conspirators allegedly engaged in a scheme to pay kickbacks and bribes for the referral of TRICARE and U.S. Department of Labor beneficiaries to obtain compound drugs. Hall, Shuster and Rall were co-owners of Rxpress Pharmacy and Xpress Compounding, compound pharmacies in Fort Worth.
The superseding indictment alleges that Rxpress Pharmacy and Xpress Compounding utilized the same marketers but paid them differently depending on whether they were receiving a commission on a federal or private prescription, in order to disguise the illegal kickback payments on federal prescriptions.
The superseding indictment alleges that both Rxpress Pharmacy and Xpress Compounding utilized the same marketers but paid them differently depending on whether they were receiving a commission on a federal or private prescription, in order to disguise the kickback payments on federal prescriptions.
According to the superseding indictment, Hall, Schuster, Rall, and Cockerell spent proceeds of the scheme on luxury vehicles and chartered vessels, among other property for themselves and others.
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