Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Drug test lab owners arrested
Officials cite new tactic in ‘patient brokering’ fight; 5 people charged
Authorities have arrested the owners of a Delray Beach drug testing laboratory on charges they bribed a sober-home owner with at least $150,000 so his residents would undergo lucrative drug screenings.
The arrests mark the first time the owners of a drug testing lab have been arrested under the state’s patient brokering law, a third-degree felony that carries a maximum of five years in prison, said Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg.
Aronberg calls drug-testing labs a “new frontier in the fight to clean up the drug treatment industry.”
Drug-lab operations are more sophisticated, in general, than treatment centers and sober homes, he said. They can have legal teams, accountants and “corporate walls” that make it easier to conceal funds, he said.
“A lot of the corruption in the drug-treatment/sober-home industries stems from the illegal payments to and from these labs,” Aronberg said.
Mark Desimone, 61, of Delray Beach; David Remland, 52, of Boca Raton; and Daniel Kandler, 41, of Boca Raton, were among five people arrested over the past two days on patient-brokering charges, according to an arrest report.
The three men ran Chapters Recovery, a treatment center in Delray Beach, as well as Impact Q Testing, a drug lab located next door, arrest reports show.
The partners profited off treating patients at Chapters and again by charging insurance companies to perform lucrative drug tests on patients, authorities say.
A sober home employee told police Impact Q Testing earned $800 for each urine analysis, according to the report.
Between September and February, the three partners received nearly $2 million from a bank account associated with the drug lab, records show.
Investigators said they found evidence of patient brokering in connection with the lab while raiding the property of another sober-home owner, James Tomasso, in February.
Tomasso later told investigators he was approached by Kandler, Remland and Desimone in October last year. They paid Tomasso $150,000 upfront so three sober homes would use their lab for drug testing, records show.
“We want to give you a taste upfront,” Kandler said, according to arrest report.
The Palm Beach County Sober Homes Task Force made the arrests. The task force, funded through a $275,000 state appropriation, is made up of more than a dozen investigators, analysts and attorneys working to combat unscrupulous business practices in the drug treatment industry.
To date, it has made 26 arrests.
A SWAT team entered Chapters Recovery Treatment Center in the 2200 block of West Atlantic Avenue with weapons drawn on Dec. 6 while employees and clients were in therapy, according to interviews with center employees.
“We got on our knees. They took computers and files and basically anything that would lead them to believe there was illegal things going on there,” said Sophia Baurkot, Chapters’ former housing director who was laid off after the raid.
Kandler, one of the three partners, was first arrested in February on charges he paid more than $325,000 to four employees so that they would find more patients.
He faces 93 counts of patient brokering stemming from that arrest, the largest number of charges faced by anyone arrested under the statute in Palm Beach County.
Remland and Desimone remained jailed Thursday night. Sheriff’s jail records didn’t specify whether Kandler was booked. Attempts by the Sun Sentinel to contact the men or their attorneys were unsuccessful.
Aronberg on Thursday said two other people also were arrested on patientbrokering charges.
Matthew Anderson, 38, of West Palm Beach, ran a sober home known as “Anastasia Way” where police responded to six overdoses and one fatality in the final six months of last year, according to an arrest report. He is charged with three counts of patient brokering for offering free or reduced rent to residents attending London Treatment Center, according to the report.
Dickie Dreher, 24, of Palm Beach Shores, was arrested on nine charges of patient brokering while running Strong Foundations Recovery.