United States v. Sanyani Edwards

707 F. App'x 332
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedAugust 30, 2017
Docket16-1168/16-1343
StatusUnpublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 707 F. App'x 332 (United States v. Sanyani Edwards) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Sanyani Edwards, 707 F. App'x 332 (6th Cir. 2017).

Opinion

ALICE M. BATCHELDER, Circuit Judge.

These consolidated appeals arise from Sanyani Edwards’s conviction for conspiring to commit health-care fraud as one participant in a network of physicians, pharmacists, and others who engaged in a kickback scheme in the Detroit area. Edwards asserts that the district court erred: (1) by admitting certain testimony at trial from a federal agent who supervised the collection of wiretaps against him; (2) by allowing him to represent himself during sentencing; (3) by selecting as the loss amount for sentencing purposes' the amount set forth in his Pre-Sentence Report (PSR); and (4) by using the same loss amount as the restitution award. Finding no error, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

I.

We have previously considered cases involving other members of this conspiracy and described the scheme as follows:

The leader of these conspiracies, Babu-bhai Patel, was a registered pharmacist and businessman who owned or controlled at least twenty pharmacies in Michigan.
* * * *
The conspiracies began in January 2006 and ended in August 2011 when Patel and his associates were arrested, effectively ending their illegal activities. The number of pharmacies controlled by Patel varied over time, and he changed their corporate structures frequently. Patel hired all of the staff and supervised the pharmacy operations.
*334 The scheme to defraud insurers depended on the participation of physicians, pharmacists, recruiters, and patients. Patel paid cash bribes to physicians to entice them to write patient prescriptions for expensive medications and controlled substances that could be billed to Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurers through the Patel pharmacies. He paid kickbacks to managers of health-related companies so that they would send patients to his pharmacies, and he employed “marketers” to recruit “patients” directly from the streets.
Pharmacists facilitated the criminal activity by charging insurers for expensive medications that were ordered from wholesale distributors and held in inventory but not dispensed to patients. These surplus medications were later returned to the supplier for credit or sold on the black market. Pharmacists also billed insurers for controlled substances that the pharmacists knew were illegally prescribed. These controlled medications included hydrocodone (Vico-din, Lortab), oxycodone (Oxycontin), al-prazolam (Xanax), and codeine-infused cough syrup, When filling prescriptions, the pharmacists usually “shorted" the number of dosage units placed in the medication vials for patients, billed the insurers for the full drug quantities prescribed, and then sold the excess pills on the street.
A significant portion of the prescription fraud was perpetrated through Visiting Doctors for America (VDA), a physician group that purported to provide home doctor visits to patients. Marketers recruited “patients” from homeless shelters and soup kitchens by offering them small amounts of cash or controlled substances. The marketers transported the “patients” to a VDA physician, who performed cursory examinations of the “patients” while they sat together in one room. VDA staff provided the co-conspirators with dummy patient files and blank prescription pads previously signed by a physician or physician’s assistant. Mehul Patel and later Arpit Patel, neither of whom is a physician, wrote prescriptions for controlled medications and expensive non-controlled medications on these blank, pre-signed prescription pads. The prescriptions were taken to the Patel pharmacies, where the pharmacists used the dummy patient files to enter patient profiles into the computer database, billed for all of the medications prescribed, but filled only the controlled medications. The controlled substances were then distributed, or sold on the street.
Patel paid his pharmacists salaries, bonuses, and twenty percent of pharmacy profits to encourage them to engage in fraudulent practices.

United States v. Patel, 579 Fed.Appx. 449, 451-62 (6th Cir. 2014).

The grand jury indicted Sanyani Edwards — along with more than twenty other defendants — 'for health-care-fraud conspiracy in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1349, and conspiracy to distribute controlled substances in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 846. A superseding indictment added a charge for conspiracy to pay and receive health-care kickbacks in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. Edwards went to trial with two co-defendants, where a jury found him guilty of all three counts.

At trial, the government’s evidence illuminated Edwards’s role in the conspiracy. First, the evidence demonstrated that Edwards, who is a psychologist, managed the prescription-writing activities of a psychiatrist named Dr. Mark Greenbain, who wrote prescriptions to Patel’s pharmacies. Greenbain was licensed by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration *335 (DEA) to prescribe controlled substances, but Edwards was not. One of Patel’s twenty-six pharmacies in- Detroit, Care 4 U Pharmacy, was located across from the office of Dr. Pramod Raval, whose office space Greenbain occasionally used. Edwards worked with Greenbain at that office. The pharmacist at Care 4 U, Anish Bhavsar, testified that he had observed Edwards both at the pharmacy and at Greenbain’s home, and that Edwards acted as Greenbain’s “personal assistant.” Bhav-sar testified that on six occasions, he collected names of patients and went with Patel to Greenbain’s house to obtain prescriptions for the listed names from Green-bain. On one of those visits, he saw Patel give money to Greenbain to encourage him to write prescriptions; twice, he saw Edwards there.

Another pharmacist, A.shwani Sharma, also testified about Greenbain, Edwards, and another assistant, Ms. Jackson, explaining that all three saw patients in the office of Dr. Anmy Tran, a podiatrist. Jackson would relay verbal prescriptions to Sharma, and then Edwards would later email or call with updated prescriptions for more expensive medications.

Beyond Edwards’s assisting of Green-bain, the government’s evidence at trial also demonstrated that Edwards was a marketer who recruited other individuals to engage in Medicare back billing and to submit prescriptions to Patel’s pharmacies. Dinesh Patel, another pharmacist who participated in Babubhai Patel’s scheme, testified that he too saw Edwards in Green-bain’s home and that he saw Babubhai Patel pay kickbacks to Greenbain in front of Edwards.

Other evidence against Edwards came from a DEA agent, Tyler Parkison, who was a co-case manager for the DEA’s investigation of this conspiracy and who worked on the case for over two years. Agent Parkison testified that the government intercepted approximately 11,000 voice/audio calls through wiretaps on Ba-bubhai Patel’s cell phones.

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707 F. App'x 332, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-sanyani-edwards-ca6-2017.