Doctor accused of turning NC practice into pill mill gets decades in prison, feds say
Federal prosecutors wanted a former doctor in eastern North Carolina to serve a life sentence after a federal jury found him guilty of turning his medical practice into a pill mill, according to court filings.
A judge settled on 20 years.
Dr. Sanjay Kumar, 54, was sentenced Tuesday and ordered to pay $471,758 in restitution as well as a $50,000 criminal fine after a jury found him guilty on charges of illegally distributing oxycodone, money laundering and tax evasion last year, the Justice Department said in a news release.
Kumar went from being a doctor to “a common, ordinary and dangerous drug trafficker,” Robert J. Higdon Jr., U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, said in the release.
Pill mill scheme
Kumar ran a sports medicine and rehabilitation practice in New Bern before local pharmacies grew concerned over his frequent prescriptions for narcotic pain killers and flagged the Federal Drug Administration.
From 2004 to 2011, prosecutors said Kumar was “adamantly opposed to the use of opioid narcotics for the treatment of chronic pain and rarely prescribed them to his patients.”
But he reportedly changed his mind when the business neared financial ruin in 2011.
That’s when prosecutors said Kumar began indiscriminately prescribing painkillers — namely oxycodone — for $200 in cash. Within a year, he fired all of his staff and only opened the clinic during the late afternoon and evening, according to the release.
Of the roughly 600 patients Kumar saw from 2011 to 2016, more than 97% reportedly “received a prescription for an opioid narcotic at their first visit” regardless of their medical records or history of substance abuse, prosecutors said in the release.
All told, Kumar reportedly doled out more than 1.2 million oxycodone pills before his arrest in 2016.
“Most of the defendant’s patients lived in Craven County, which has a population that hovers around only 100,000 people,” prosecutors said in court filings. “This means the defendant distributed enough oxycodone to put a handful of pills in the hands of every man, woman, and child in the county every year for four years.”
Fraudulent finances
When Kumar was arrested in June 2016 and law enforcement raided his house and business, prosecutors said they found dozens of guns and more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition as well as “five large duct-taped PVC tubes containing nearly $450,000 in United States currency.”
Investigators also discovered Kumar had funneled cash deposits into several bank accounts to avoid detection by the U.S. Treasury Department, according to the news release.
He reportedly used the cash on cars, gadgets at Best Buy and houses as well as “hundreds of thousands in purchases from Amazon.” Kumar also filed fake tax returns showing his business had lost money, the Justice Department said.
“The Defendant’s criminal conduct was extreme and wanton beyond all reckoning, laying waste to this eastern North Carolina community as he enriched himself to the tune of millions,” prosecutors said in court filings.
A jury found Kumar guilty on 13 counts after a 26-day trial in August 2019, McClatchy News reported, and he is no longer a licensed doctor in North Carolina.
Kumar has appealed the jury’s verdict, court filings show.
Conflicting sentencing requests
The Justice Department sought life imprisonment for Kumar, calling him “deliberately ignorant” and “selfish.”
Prosecutors had also said he was paranoid about getting caught and displayed “aggressive behavior” to members of the New Bern community, including confronting a citizen in an Applebee’s parking lot and stalking at least three people who took out charges against him.
But defense attorneys argued Kumar should receive a sentence of time-served with credit for the four years and three months he already spent behind bars.
They said a longer sentence would be “an unwarranted harsh punishment” for the 54-year-old with “serious medical and mental health problems” who would be “unable to protect himself against any violence that might befall him in jail.”
In letters to the court, his mother and brother pointed to the negative impact surveillance by law enforcement had on him and the family while asking for his immediate release. Neither have been able to visit him since his arrest.
“I am 81 years old and my only desire in life is to see my son again as a free man,” his mother wrote.
This story was originally published September 9, 2020 at 7:04 PM with the headline "Doctor accused of turning NC practice into pill mill gets decades in prison, feds say."
