feds nab city doctors

Lap dances, fancy dinners, drinks.

Those were some of the perks — along with payments reaching into the six-figures — five Manhattan doctors received from an Arizona pharmaceutical firm in exchange for prescribing millions of dollars worth of a potent and highly addictive fentanyl spray, a synthetic opioid, federal officials alleged last week.

Gordon Freedman, 57; Jeffrey Goldstein, 48; Todd Schlifstein, 49; Dialecti Voudouris, 47; and Alexandru Burducea, 41, were arrested Friday morning and charged with violating a federal anti-kickback statute, related conspiracy counts and other charges, officials from the offices of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and from the FBI’s New York Field Office said.

The payments were in the form of fees for a series of bogus “educational programs,” the indictment alleges. Prosecutors said the pharmaceutical company started a “speaker’s bureau” in 2012 ostensibly to educate health practitioners about the company’s fentanyl spray, Subsys, which the firm had begun marketing in March of that year. The presentations, though, were “predominantly social affairs” where attendance was inflated by forged sign-in sheets, according to the indictment.

Freedman, who specializes in pain management and anesthesiology in private practice on the Upper East Side, received $308,600 from the company in exchange for writing scripts for “large volumes” of the fentanyl spray, prosecutors said.

The indictment recounts how Freedman, an associate clinical professor at Mt. Sinai Hospital, was contacted by one of the pharma company’s representatives and told he would receive additional speaker programs because the company wanted to increase prescriptions for the fentanyl spray. The rep asked Freedman to up his scrips of the spray, to which Freedman responded “Got it.”

Prosecutors allege Freedman’s fentanyl spray prescriptions increased, subsequently netting the company more than $1 million in the final quarter of 2014 alone.

Goldstein, in private practice on the Upper East Side specializing in osteopathic medicine, got about $196,000 through the speaker program. Goldstein’s prescriptions for the spray accounted for about $809,275 in the last quarter of 2014.

At one point, a senior executive from the company took Schlifstein, then an attending physiatrist NYU Langone Medical Center, and Goldstein, who co-owned a private medical office on the Upper East Side, to a Manhattan strip club and spent about $4,100 on a private room, alcohol and lap dances for the two doctors, according to the indictment.

In the month following that October 2013 outing and Schlifstein’s recruitment into the speaker program the doctor’s fentanyl spray prescriptions increased substantially, prosecutors said.

Fentanyl is roughly 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and is often cited as the predominant reason for the fourfold spike in overdose deaths attributable to synthetic opioids in recent years.

The company is not named in the 75-page indictment, but several references, including the names of two co-conspirators, make it clear the firm in question is Insys, which is based in Chandler, Arizona. The company advertises its Subsys product as “the one and only fentanyl sublingual spray for breakthrough cancer pain.”

The company’s founder, John Kapoor, is alleged to also have taken part in a scheme to bribe doctors to prescribe the spray and was arrested in October on charges of conspiracy to commit racketeering and mail and wire fraud. Kapoor’s arrest followed, by about 10 months, the arrests of several other Insys executives on similar charges.

The U.S. Attorney’s office here also said on Friday that two former Insys employees, Jonathan Roper and Fernando Serrano, had pleaded guilty in connection with the bribery and kickback scheme and were now cooperating with prosecutors.

The company put out a statement today saying that last week’s indictments of the New York doctors are tied to allegations involving “former employees” but that it was working with authorities.

“The company continues striving to take responsibility for inappropriate actions of some former employees and has invested significant resources over the last several years to establish an effective compliance program and build an organizational culture of high ethical standards,” the statement said.

The five doctors pleaded not guilty in federal court on Friday afternoon. Each was released on $200,000 bond.