The Justice Department charged 15 defendants, among them six medical professionals, in Southern California healthcare fraud schemes that collectively billed roughly $2 billion, including the largest substance-abuse treatment fraud case the department has ever prosecuted.
The charges, announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, span sham addiction treatment, unnecessary artery surgeries, bogus hospice enrollments, and a nearly $270 million scheme to defraud Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program. Eight defendants were arrested, with five of them expected to appear in federal court in downtown Los Angeles.
Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division said one of the cases was cracked open by billing data.
These charges include the largest sober home fraud scheme the Department has ever prosecuted, and a scheme involving unnecessary invasive procedures that was detected through data analytics. Our message is simple: if you steal health care dollars from the American taxpayer or abuse your position to harm patients, we are coming for you — and the data will lead us to you.
Father and son David and Nathan Young, who used the aliases “Sancho Lopez” and “Pablo,” controlled dozens of purported treatment companies and directed “body brokers” to recruit homeless and addicted people, luring them to California with free flights, cash, and drugs, according to the indictment. Patients were cycled through facilities regardless of need, and some were drugged “to knock the client out” when they tried to leave.
The operation had drawn scrutiny for years. Beverly Hills sued Nathan Young and his Rodeo Recovery in 2020, and insurer Aetna filed a $40 million civil suit in 2023 alleging his sober homes were “little more than drug dens” that encouraged relapse to restart billing cycles.
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In a separate case, cardiothoracic surgeon Harold Tabaie and chiropractor Hany Malek allegedly billed Medicare $135 million for unnecessary atherectomies performed on patients who did not have arterial disease. Prosecutors said data flagged Tabaie as an extreme national outlier. Three other defendants were charged in hospice schemes that enrolled seniors who were not terminally ill.
FBI Director Kash Patel put the losses at $1.8 billion and tied the sweep to the administration’s broader anti-fraud campaign.
“Under President Trump’s leadership with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, stealing from American taxpayers will no longer be tolerated in this country,” Patel said.
The charges follow the Justice Department’s creation of the National Fraud Enforcement Division in April and a nationwide takedown in June that charged 455 defendants over $6.5 billion in alleged schemes. The task force, chaired by Vice President JD Vance, has driven earlier health care fraud arrests in the Los Angeles area, and in May the Justice Department won a $1 billion Medicare fraud conviction tied to the same push.
