‘HOW CAN I TRUST THEM?’
In Florida, felons were allowed to open cosmetic surgery clinics – and patients paid with their lives
One man pleaded guilty to bank fraud. One was convicted of grand theft in a real estate scam. Two others admitted to Medicare schemes that siphoned millions of dollars from taxpayers. In Florida, one of the nation’s top destinations for plastic surgery, a felony conviction can bar someone from operating a massage parlor or a pawn shop. But not from running a cosmetic surgery clinic. Nearly a dozen miles from the iconic beaches of South Florida, the four convicted felons ran facilities that became assembly lines for patients from across the country seeking the latest body sculpting procedures at discount prices.
And at those businesses, at least 13 women have died after surgeries. Nearly a dozen others were hospitalized with critical injuries, including punctured internal organs.
The Florida health department was alerted to the casualties. Government inspectors cited the clinics for serious violations, including dirty operating rooms and sales agents with no medical licenses determining the appropriate surgeries for patients.
Plastic surgery experts warned lawmakers to take control of the centers by screening owners and boosting regulation.
Four times, legislators tried. Four times they failed to muster enough support to change the law, even as the toll at the four businesses continued to rise: two dead in 2013, no action; another dead in 2015, no action; three dead in 2017, still no action.
One woman who left Spectrum Aesthetics with a stray surgical sponge sewn into her abdomen said she would have canceled her tummy tuck if she had known the operators had been convicted of defrauding Medicare of $1 million.
A manager of the clinic, Evelyn Parrado, was granted permission to run the cosmetic surgery center during the day while spending her nights under house arrest on the felony charge.
“Why is that allowed to be legal?” said Porche Campbell, the 40-year-old mother who needed emergency surgery to take out the sponge and, later, reconstructive surgery to get rid of the scar. “How can I trust them to keep me safe?”
Representatives of three of the clinics – Spectrum, Strax Rejuvenation and New Life Plastic Surgery – told USA TODAY that criminal histories have no bearing on the way the centers are run and that their facilities meet all state safety requirements to carry out procedures. Jeffry Davis, a co-founder of Strax, pointed out that his convictions on federal bank fraud and tax evasion were nearly a quarter-century ago.
The president of Seduction by Jardon declined to answer written questions about the business or the involvement of her husband, who was convicted in a mortgage fraud case.
The role of clinic operators varies greatly but can include hiring doctors, ordering drugs, scheduling surgeries, and overseeing risk management to cut down on deaths and injuries. Health care experts say a criminal history – especially a conviction for financial crimes – is among the most important factors in deciding who should be allowed to run a center.
Clinic operators are expected to follow health regulations that require them to put safety over profit, said Michael Gonzalez, an Ohio lawyer who advises medical institutions on hiring. With felons, he said, “you have people with a propensity” to break the law.
Florida legislators are back this year with another proposal that would give the state the power for the first time to shut down clinics and impose other punishments.
The bill was introduced by Sen. Anitere Flores in February, days after a USA TODAY and Naples Daily News investigation revealed dangerous practices in a Miami-area plastic surgery business where eight women died after operations.
“People are coming here from all over the country for what should have been simple procedures, and they’re dying,” said Flores, a Republican whose district includes the state’s cosmetic surgery hub in the suburbs of Miami.
The proposal has gone further than previous bills, clearing three Senate committees and two House panels – all unanimously.
Nicola Mason, a Maryland woman with deep, jagged scars along her lower stomach that she blames on an operation at Spectrum in 2015, wonders why it has taken so long for the state to act.
“It’s outrageous,” she said. “They should have thought about this six or seven deaths ago.”
Waiting rooms were packed
At Strax Rejuvenation, surgeries turned deadly nearly every year.
A 64-year-old woman was given lethal doses of opioids by her doctor during a face-lift in 2008, a state malpractice probe found. Another woman died three years later after a neck lift during which her doctor gave her a dangerous mix of sedatives, state investigators reported.
Eight deaths in eight years, according to autopsy and state records. None of them made a difference.
Florida legislators passed laws decades ago that allowed the state to discipline doctors who owned clinics and practiced there. They never envisioned that private investors would jump into the industry, too.
Strax opened in 2004 and became the first of the large, high-volume clinics that can create unique risks for patients.
State inspectors have cited Strax’s two clinics more than 45 times in the past six years for violations that included dirty operating areas, cracked and worn equipment, and no records to show doctors examined some patients before surgeries.
Davis defends the model. He says the physicians control how many surgeries they do each day and the facility’s medical director makes sure patients are safe for their procedures.
But records show about half the doctors who have worked at Strax – 11 total – have been disciplined by medical boards during their careers. After facing 18 negligence and malpractice claims by patients, Strax’s parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2013.
Through all of it, the clinic never shut its doors.
By 2014, state Sen. Eleanor Sobel proposed a bill to allow the state to shutter the worst offenders and screen owners for criminal backgrounds, giving Florida the option of barring ex-offenders from clinics.
The Senate backed the legislation, but it failed to win support in a crucial House subcommittee. The following year, Sobel resurrected the bill. The same subcommittee killed it.
Fueled by star power
Driven by social media ad blitzes and telemarketers, the clinics rode the popularity of a new body-sculpting procedure, promoted by rap singers and reality show stars including Kim Kardashian: the Brazilian butt lift.
Among the facilities that capitalized on the trend was Spectrum Aesthetics, founded by Juan Hernandez and Evelyn Parrado in 2012, two years before Florida’s first attempt to screen owners.
The duo used to run a pharmacy in Miami’s Little Havana and took part in a scheme to falsely bill Medicare $1.2 million for drugs that were not legitimately prescribed, prosecutors charged.
Before Hernandez began serving a 15month prison term, he was granted permission to keep running Spectrum while on supervised release. His lawyer told the judge it was “staffed by boardcertified plastic surgeons.”
Records show that was not the case. The clinic had hired several doctors not certified in plastic surgery, including Osakatukei Omulepu.
On one day in May 2015, Omulepu punctured a woman’s liver five times and perforated the small intestine of another patient in several places while performing butt lifts.
Despite the state launching a malpractice investigation and a local hospital stripping Omulepu of his privileges, Spectrum continued to allow him to carry out surgeries for months, state health records show.
In September, Mason, the 46-year-old Maryland woman, alleged in a complaint to the health department that Omulepu performed the wrong surgery on her – a tummy tuck instead of a butt lift – leaving her with her unsightly scars.
Parrado, the company’s manager, did not respond to questions submitted to the clinic’s attorney. Hernandez said he was not connected to the clinic anymore.
In a statement, the clinic said it has been “delivering the highest standards of care to thousands of patients” for many years and the doctors connected to the injuries are no longer working for the facility.
Two years later, at a competing clinic, Seduction Cosmetic Center, a patient died after surgery by Omulepu. The cause of her death: fat embolism.
Death by faulty injection
Medical experts say the only way such an embolism occurs is when doctors inject the fat into areas they are warned to avoid: the deep gluteal muscles. Omulepu says the surgery brings high risks and he regrets what happened.
“Is it tragic? Absolutely,” he said. As to Mason’s claim that he performed the wrong surgery, Omulepu flatly denied the allegation, saying he would never do a procedure without the patient’s consent.
Sobel stepped forward with yet another bill in 2016, one that banned felony offenders. That proposal died in Sobel’s own health committee.
Ultimately, the medical board revoked Omulepu’s license in 2017. He fought the charges and temporarily won back the right to practice.
He returned to work and five weeks later performed the surgery at Seduction that led to the patient’s death by fat embolism. He lost his license again and is no longer practicing.
Kidney failure and shock
What caught Crystal Call’s eye about Seduction was the company’s elegant website and its promises of life-changing surgery at low prices.
What Call, then 31, didn’t know was the man who managed the clinic had been charged in a mortgage scam years earlier.
Rayner Aguiar took over the center in Aventura after he was convicted of falsifying paperwork to inflate the value of a home in 2008. The clinic is one of four run by Seduction, where Aguiar’s wife, Gretel Jardon, is president of the family business.
Aguiar did not respond to interview requests. Jardon said that clinics run by doctors are more dangerous but offered no proof.
With her mother outside in the waiting room, Call went into surgery at about 9 a.m. Hours later, Maria Basham got worried. She said she rushed to the rear of the clinic and started “banging on doors.”
Basham remembers dialing 911 and then being allowed into a back room, where she found Call in a bed, pale and unresponsive, her blood pressure plummeting.
“In an hour, she would have been dead,” Basham said.
When she reached Aventura Hospital, Call was in the throes of kidney failure and shock, hospital records state, and needed an emergency transfusion. After returning to New York, she was treated for complications that have consumed her life, she said, and left her with $156,000 in medical bills.
“It’s ruined my life right now,” she said.
Legislative fix on fast track
Members of the powerful Senate health committee considering the most recent reform proposal last month sat quietly in the darkness as a video played on a large screen.
With tears in her eyes, a middle-aged mother recalled the daughter who had dreamed of becoming a nurse. Instead, Adianet Galván died last year of a fat embolism after a Brazilian butt lift at New Life Plastic Surgery, autopsy records show.
The man who founded New Life was Santiago Borges, who years earlier had concocted a $70 million Medicare scam. After he was sentenced in 2015 to a term later reduced to eight years, his daughter, Claudia, became an owner of the clinic.
In a written statement, Claudia Borges and coowner Daniel Gonzalez said that Santiago Borges no longer oversees the clinic. They said the facility supports any regulations “that would improve quality of care and patient safety.”
Flores, who learned about the existence of former criminals in the industry from USA TODAY earlier this month, said she hoped the revelations would help her win over fellow lawmakers.
Veterans of the Legislature say even deaths may not be enough. When a House member stepped forward last year to propose yet another bill to screen operators of all surgery offices – the fourth attempt – it didn’t survive its first committee.
Already, the bill being considered has been softened. Lawmakers removed a mandate that the state screen all plastic surgery center owners for criminal records because of concerns over the cost.
Dr. Grant Stevens, president of the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, said he was perplexed at the past legislative failures.
If lawmakers “fail to step in and help” again, he added, “then, I’m sorry, they have the blood on their collective hands.”