Jurors to decide case of pain clinic manager
Prosecutors say Delray man ran pill mill operation.
A Palm Beach County jury is now deliberating the case of a suburban Delray Beach pain clinic manager accused of running a pill mill operation in Boca Raton and Palm Springs.
Ri c hard McMill a n, 44, faces 11 charges including racketeering and drug trafficking connected to claims that he and another man teamed up with doctors to run a network of illegal pain clinics that prosecutors say earned him $1.25 million.
The nearly two-week trial before Circuit Judge Cheryl Caracuzzo ended Tuesday with closing arguments. Prosecutors portrayed McMillan as prac tic ing “willful blindness” to illegal activity. McMillan’s attorneys cast him as an innocent business owner who tried to keep current with changing pain management practices but had no involvement with the high doses of pain pills doctors prescribed.
Assistant State Attorneys Christopher Hudock and Adriana Lopez told jurors that McMillan ran the Total Med i c a l Exp r e s s c l i n i c s in Palm Springs and Boca Raton, where doctors saw a long list of patients at the cash-only clinic. Even when McMillan had the opportunity to take preventive measures, like buying computer software that would ferret out potential doctor shopping, he refused by saying it was too expensive.
“He has to know something is going on, but you know what? The money’s Defense attorney
too good for him to stop it,” Lopez said.
McMill a n’s 2 01 1 a r re s t came at the height of local and state authorities’ crackdown on large-scale pill mill operations linked to at least dozens of prescription drug overdose deaths
He and business partner Pasquale Gervasio, who testified against him, first were arrested June 2011 on a Clay County warrant on a charge of operating an unlicensed pain clinic, after a yearlong, multiagency investigation called Operation Blue Spoon.
They were arrested again later that month as a part of seven raids in Palm Beach and Broward counties.
McMillan took the stand in his own defense Monday and told jurors he tried diligently as a non-physician to make sure his business was operating legally even in the midst of changing laws.
He never applied to obtain any medicine, never ordered any pills, never ordered the transfer of any pills from a pharmacy or from one clinic to another and never oversaw what any of the doctors were doing, he said. Instead, McMillan said, he deferred the medical side of the operation to Dr. Sherri Pinsley, whom he once fired but brought back to supervise doctors “for compliance reasons,” he said.
W h e n M c M i l l a n w a s arrested, authorities found more than $260,000 cash in a shoe box in his closet. Hudock and Lopez said it was the behavior of a man running what he knew was an illegal operation, but McMillan had another explanation.
“I had an accountant tell me it’s good, and it’s OK, to have some cash around, just in case,” McMillan said.
“Did you report the money on your t a xe s? ” defense attorney Marc Nurik asked.
“Every penny of it,” McMillan replied.
In his last words to jurors, Nurik, representing McMillan along with defense attorney Guy Fronstin, said prose c ut or s were of f base i n their attempts to characterize McMillan’s clinics as a pill mill, and wrong to pin racketeering charges on the man whose focus was on office administration and marketing.
“They want you to pick up this dust they’re throwing at you, and it’s not there,” Nurik said.
Caracuzzo sent jurors back to begin deliberating just after 3 p.m. and sent them home for the night two hours later. They are expected to continue their deliberations early today.
If convicted as charged of the 11 first-degree felonies that include one count each of racketeering and conspiracy to commit racketeering, along with nine counts of trafficking in oxycodone, McMillan faces a maximum possible 330-year prison sentence.