Drug firm saleswoman from LI charged in opioid prescription bribery scheme
A pharmaceutical company saleswoman from Farmingdale was charged Friday with a scheme in which a medical professional was bribed to prescribe $3.6 million worth of a very powerful narcotic used to treat severe pain in cancer patients, according to court records and officials.
Sonia Palermo, 38, a saleswoman for Arizona-based Insys Therapeutics, pleaded not guilty in federal court in Central Islip to conspiracies both to violate the federal anti-kickback statute and to commit honest services wire fraud, as well as aggravated identity theft, court papers and officials said.
Insys specialized in selling Subsys, a drug that contains fentanyl.
Palermo is the latest person affiliated with the company to be charged with using kickbacks to inflate the sale of Subsys as a part of the nationwide law enforcement crackdown growing out of the opioid crisis.
The crackdown has seen the head of Insys sentenced to 5 1/2 years in federal prison in Boston in January. The company itself declared bankruptcy in 2019.
In the scheme, known as the “Speaker Program,” medical professionals were paid thousands of dollars, ostensibly in a legitimate marketing campaign, to give lectures to their colleagues about the benefits of using Subsys, according to officials.
In fact, the program was used to funnel kickbacks to willing medical professionals “to induce them to prescribe larger volumes of Subsys,“ the indictment says.
The scheme involved the recipients of the kickbacks lecturing audiences that did not include physicians, or in which the names of physicians who were not in attendance were forged on attendance sheets, the indictment says.
The indictment says that between July 2013 and August 2016, Palermo “arranged approximately 81 events" in which the unnamed practitioner “purported to be a speaker” and received $207,000 in fees.
During the same period, the unnamed practitioner wrote 400 Subys prescriptions for which Medicare paid $3.6 million, the indictment says.
At one event, in April 2013 at an unnamed Melville restaurant described in the indictment, Palermo listed the medical professional as speaking to a group of only “nonlicensed medical staff,” according to the indictment.
At another event in September 2014 at an unnamed Syosset restaurant, Palermo forged the name of a doctor who was not there on the sign-in sheet, the indictment said.
Palermo was released on $75,000 bond by U.S. Magistrate Steven Locke.
Palermo’s attorney could not immediately be reached for comment Friday night. Eastern District spokesman John Marzulli declined to comment.
Bob Kessler covers federal law, including law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, DEA, IRS and ATF, as well as the federal courts.
Out East with Doug Geed: Wine harvests, a fish market, baked treats and poinsettias NewsdayTV's Doug Geed visits two wineries and a fish market, and then it's time for holiday cheer, with a visit to a bakery and poinsettia greenhouses.
Out East with Doug Geed: Wine harvests, a fish market, baked treats and poinsettias NewsdayTV's Doug Geed visits two wineries and a fish market, and then it's time for holiday cheer, with a visit to a bakery and poinsettia greenhouses.
