Doctor detained on pill mill, laundering charges
A suspended doctor accused of distributing hundreds of thousands of pain pills from a rented office in Coraopolis and then returning to his home in California was arraigned Friday in federal court and will remain locked up pending trial.
Paul Michael Hoover, 57, a former pain specialist for decades in Beaver, and his girlfriend, Marcia Ramsier Arthurs, 60, were indicted last month on charges of conspiring to distribute fentanyl, oxycodone and other narcotics. Both are also charged with health care fraud and conspiracy to launder money.
The pair live in Novato,
Calif., but traveled back to the Pittsburgh region during the last three years to distribute drugs to addicts, according to federal agents.
Dr. Hoover appeared briefly Friday in handcuffs before U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan and waived a detention hearing, after which U.S. marshals took him back to jail. He said nothing in court beyond a standard not guilty plea.
Ms. Arthurs had previously been ordered to be released by a magistrate in California, but prosecutors in Pittsburgh are challenging that decision, saying she lied about her finances.
Prosecutors said in court papers that Dr. Hoover distributed at least 136,658 pills with a value of nearly $1 million and took “elaborate steps” to launder the cash through shell corporations withvarious bank accounts.
Assistant U.S. attorneys Rachael Mamula and Cindy Chung said that those numbers are based on Medicaid and Medicare prescriptions only, and the actual amount of pills distributed is probably double that estimate.
Dr. Hoover and Ms. Arthurs flew from their home in California back to Pittsburgh every three months.
Here, they rented a barebones office in Coraopolis and arranged appointments with up to 60 people a day to write prescriptions for oxycodone, charging $200 in cash per prescription, according to information revealed in a request for detention.
Prosecutors said the office had no medical equipment, and Dr. Hoover rarely did any physical exams or provided any followup care.
“He just wrote prescriptions for highly addictive opiates for cash,” they said. Ms. Arthurs accompanied Dr. Hoover and acted as his assistant in the office in filing the Medicaid and Medicare paperwork for the prescriptions.
The investigation was built partly on recorded office visits by three confidential sources and an undercover agent on various dates in March and May. Agents also watched the couple travel around as they depositedcash in area banks.
The Hoover prosecution is among more than a dozen such cases brought in this district since Attorney General Jeff Sessions created the Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection Unit in 2017 to go after medical professionals who are contributing to the opioid crisis.