A Texas pharmaceutical marketer was sentenced to two years and five months in prison and ordered to pay over $59 million in restitution for conspiring to defraud the United States, receiving illegal kickbacks in exchange for compounded medications prescription referrals, and money laundering. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Quintan Cockerell, 43, of Palos Verdes Estates, California, worked with others to create and market expensive compounded medications, which are intended to be custom-tailored to individual patient needs, that were not medically indicated. Cockerell and others used preloaded prescription pads that identified the high-billing formulations for doctors to easily select. Cockerell, along with his co-conspirators at the compounding pharmacy that received the fraudulent prescriptions, implemented “standing orders” that enabled the pharmacy to swap out ingredients in the medications originally prescribed by doctors to maximize insurance reimbursements.
Cockerell and others recruited doctors to write prescriptions for these expensive compounded medications by creating so-called “investment opportunities” so that doctors who wrote prescriptions to the pharmacy could profit from pharmacy operations. Cockerell and others also took doctors on expensive and lavish trips to Las Vegas, Mexico, and the Grand Caymans, among other places. In an effort to conceal the illegal kickbacks Cockerell received in exchange for prescription referrals, the pharmacy paid Cockerell’s wife at the time as a sham employee. Evidence presented at trial demonstrated that Cockerell’s wife did not work at the pharmacy, but that Cockerell communicated with the pharmacy using her email address and received checks for his kickbacks in her name. Cockerell then spent the proceeds from the kickback scheme.
