A doctor, her staff and a group of pharmacists ran a $24 million drug ring out of a Brooklyn medical clinic that doled out more than 1 million oxycodone pills with bogus prescriptions, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
From December 2018 until October 2022, the scheme operated out of Dr. Somsri Ratanaprasatporn’s clinic on Linden Blvd. near Schneck Ave. in East New York, said Brooklyn federal prosecutors.
Ratanaprasatporn is a pediatrician and general practitioner, the feds said. She and her crew illegally doled out more than 11,000 prescriptions for oxycodone, adding up to over 1.2 million pills, prosecutors charged.
On the street, dealers could have made than $24 million selling the drugs. The crew made millions peddling the drugs from inside Ratanaprasatporn’s office.
Ratanaprasatporn and her office manager, Leticia Smith, wrote the prescriptions while pharmacists Bassam Amin, Omar Elsayed and Yousef Ennab filled them at pharmacies in Brooklyn and Staten Island, prosecutors said.
Three other suspects — Michael Kent, Anthony Mathis and Raymond Walker — oversaw patients who received the highly addictive prescriptions, despite lacking a need for the medication, they added.
Kent, Mathis and Walker were not identified as medical professionals in the prosecutors’ court papers.
Officers searching the alleged drug dealers’ homes Wednesday found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in Smith’s house and recovered two guns, which he tried to toss outside.
Ratanaprasatporn, 75, Smith, 54, Amin, 69, Elsayed, 28, and Ennab, 25, were charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs and possession of drugs with intent to distribute, among other counts.
Kent, 49, Mathis, 55, and Walker, 70, were hit with the same charges. Smith and Kent are also charged with money laundering.
If convicted of the drug charges, all of the defendants could spend 20 years behind bars. Kent and Smith could serve an additional 20 for money laundering.
The arrests come as the U.S. continues to battle a devastating opioid epidemic.
In 2020, 68,630 fatal overdoses involved opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The figure made up 74.8% of total overdoses across the country.
More than 16,000 of those opioid overdoses were from prescription medications, prosecutors said.
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