Florida’s underground plastic surgery post-op industry is thriving
MIAMI — Ground zero in the United States for the Brazilian butt lift, the mommy makeover, breast enlargement and other plastic surgery specialties, Miami has achieved another distinction: It is home to a cottage industry of illegally operating recovery centers for post-op patients who need to hunker down and heal, sometimes for days.
Embedded in suburbia, the homes are engaged in a game of whack-a-mole with authorities, who look for vans disgorging bruised and bandaged passengers, and featuring back-alley garbage cans brimming with bandages and other medical waste.
Often overcrowded and/or unsanitary, these unlicensed centers are “costing Miami-Dade County millions,” said Detective Gabriel Rodriguez, who has overseen a string of recent busts.
That includes one this month when police raided a home on a cul-de-sac on Southwest 139th Court. They said they found 21 women jammed into the one-story, four-bedroom dwelling, 17 of whom were paying at least $250 per night as customers. Two women were arrested.
County data analyzed by the Herald — lacking some detail because of the medical privacy law known as HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) — suggest the recovery houses have become a persistent problem, generating scores of distress calls to fire rescue.
Recovery houses can count on a never-ending flow of potential customers — usually tourists from other states, drawn to South Florida by the area’s vast array of officebased cosmetic surgery centers. As with any operation, even outpatient ones, patients can be rendered fragile and in need of rest. They may also want to lose the just-had-surgery look before heading home.
The outfits advertise openly online but conduct business furtively behind closed doors and covered windows in residential neighborhoods. Their social media advertisements, festooned with photos of smiling customers flaunting surgically enhanced breasts and ballooning buttocks, provide phone numbers but not addresses.
The ads suggest conciergestyle luxury, including one in which a pixelated woman in a red dress rhapsodizes about a home’s charms. Reality, as represented in police photos, can be far different: blood-stained pillows, bedside tables littered with a panoply of bandages, sport drinks, pain relievers and other miscellany, grungy bathrooms and beds wedged in side by side.
Operators occupy threeto five-bedroom homes and charge hundreds or even thousands per night per patient. Attending staffers can range from actual nurses to the untrained making less than minimum wage.
Don’t expect this to end any time soon. It’s too lucrative. Thanks to the seemingly unquenchable desire to look better, recovery houses do a volume business, taking in as much as $3,000 per night in the case of a three-bedroom house. The consequences for getting caught can be trifling. First-time offenders often are placed in a diversion program, which make them eligible to have the conviction expunged.
Recently, another real estate agent contacted Katia Rojas looking for a “rental that she could live in but also use to assist her clients as a licensed home-care provider. Her clients only stay in the home for a few days and then they leave.” Is that something your client would be OK with?” she asked. The client wasn’t OK with it. But it wasn’t the first time Rojas had gotten such a request. In unincorporated Miami-Dade, the job of investigating these homes — and arresting those running them should they lack proper permits — falls on Miami-Dade police’s medical crimes squad, headed by Detective Rodriguez. The unit’s plate is full, having also been tasked with investigating certain types of health-care fraud, including Medicare rip-offs, a category in which the Miami metropolitan area is a national leader.
Officers in the unit: four. “We’re stretched. The whole department is stretched,” Rodriguez said during an interview with the Miami Herald.
Calls for service to MiamiDade Fire Rescue suggest the problem is widespread although Miami-Dade Fire Rescue refused to provide data that would reveal the full scope of the problem, citing medical privacy statutes.
Recovery houses thrive in a regulatory netherworld. There’s no unique license for them. For the purposes of licensing, they are the same as an Adult Living Facility or ALF, where elders live together under one roof. Those businesses obtain licenses and are inspected.
The homes nearly always operate without a license, without signage and without any outward indication that they are there. A search of the licensed ALFs in MiamiDade on the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) website shows none containing the word “recovery.” As a result, nobody knows to look in and see if conditions are safe and sanitary.
Those advertising their services online do not list an address. An example is one recovery house that lists a Coral Gables office building on its website — but that’s not where they serve customers. When a Herald reporter inquired about the location of the actual home through an online chat, a representative wrote that they “had multiple properties throughout Miami,” but added: “due to the security of our present guests,” they do not share addresses until a customer books a stay. Among other aesthetic services, the company advertises “post-op private suites.”
Busts occur at recovery houses when suspicious activity becomes impossible to ignore. Suspicious activity can be cars or vans shuttling in bandaged individuals at regular intervals.
When Miami-Dade police, accompanied by AHCA, busted a West Miami-Dade house run under the name Alpha Recovery Miami last December, 64-year-old Almarosa Davis functioned as if a licensed nurse, according to police. Davis wasn’t any such thing. Police said she had been administering injections of Lovenox, which helps prevent blood clotting.
Arrest paperwork said Davis’ daughter claimed in an email to two customers that she was a licensed nurse named “Vanessa.” She was neither a nurse nor named Vanessa. What Almarosa Davis and her 43-year-old daughter (real name Rosa Davis) actually were: felons. Both were both arrested anew.
The elder Davis is now serving a two-year probation after pleading guilty to running an unlicensed ALF and practicing nursing without a license.
The younger Davis, on probation until 2029 for stealing a California nurse’s identity to rent a Miami apartment, was arrested at Miami International Airport earlier this month when she arrived from Opelousas, Louisiana.
One customer told police she’d paid “Vanessa” $2,500 via CashApp, but decided to spend her post-op time elsewhere upon seeing the “unsanitary conditions” at the house and the lack of a real nurse.