By Pat Beall
When Delray Beach osteopath Michael Ligotti was sentenced in January to 20 years in prison, Department of Justice officials heralded his conviction and sentence.
Ligotti, they said, had been at the center of a $746 million addiction treatment fraud.
His arrest and guilty plea represented the largest such case ever charged by the Department of Justice, DOJ wrote in a news release.
Then it let him go.
Court filings confirm Ligotti, 49, remains out of prison because he has turned informant, providing evidence in other health care fraud cases.
Ligotti is not home free: Prosecutors have ordered him to pay $127 million in restitution in addition to his 20-year sentence, now postponed to Dec. 1.
Until then, he is free for limited travel. A federal judge cleared the way for Ligotti to go to Universal Studios this month for a family vacation at the Loews Royal Pacific Resort.
“We tried to understand the need for him to be available to testify in other cases,” said Lisa Daniels-Goldman, who was at Ligotti’s sentencing. Her son, Jamie Daniels, died of an overdose in a Boynton Beach sober home. “We were all for getting evidence against others and saving lives.”
But, she said, “That doesn’t mean I can’t be angry and mortified that not only is he staying out of prison, he has been given the opportunity to travel with his family. I don’t care if it’s a fleabag motel or a four-star hotel.
“Our son doesn’t get to travel with his family anymore.”
Ligotti’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
Cash bonanza in drug tests
At their height in 2015, Palm Beach County addiction treatment fraudsters were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Delray Beach was the epicenter of the schemes and Ligotti was in the thick of it, said federal prosecutors.
Unscrupulous sober home operators didn’t need people seeking treatment to stay drug-free. Many sober homes became sites for drug use.
What they did need were doctors to sign off on expensive urine drug tests for people with insurance.
Drugstores sell $25 tests confirming the presence of a drug. But local treatment centers, sober homes and their labs were billing for sophisticated and unnecessary “confirmatory” urine tests.
A single test could yield up to $5,000 in insurance billings. In one case reported by The Palm Beach Post in 2015, nine months of urine testing totaled $304,318. In another instance, the parents of a young woman who overdosed in a sober home after four weeks received urine test bills topping $30,000.
Ligotti was medical director for more than 50 local sober homes. In addition to asserting he fraudulently ordered millions of dollars in tests, prosecutors charged that Ligotti prescribed addictive drugs to patients from his Whole Health clinic in Delray Beach. That included benzodiazepines, which are frequently — and lethally — mixed with opioids by people who are addicted.
Even after a federal subpoena issued in 2016 put Ligotti on notice that he was under investigation, he continued ordering tests, an FBI agent testified. There was one noticeable change: Health care practitioners he employed at Whole Health were putting their names on the test orders.
From denial to guilty plea
That same year, Jamie Daniels arrived in Palm Beach County, one of thousands of out-of-state people seeking addiction treatment here.
Ligotti was one of his doctors.
Daniels had struggled to stay sober. He got a job at a law firm as a clerk. He started studying for his law school entrance exam.
In December 2016, Daniels died at age 23 after he overdosed in a sober home.
Within weeks, the Daniels family began receiving records showing their insurance company had been billed tens of thousands of dollars for urine screens and blood tests, including tests ordered by Ligotti over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Daniels’ father, Ken, is a sports fixture in Detroit, a play-by-play announcer for the NHL’s Red Wings since 1997. When Daniels family members began unraveling the treatment bills, they went public with the story of Jamie’s death, attracting the attention of ESPN.
An ESPN documentary confirmed that Jamie Daniels had not been in Florida on those days. He was with his family in Michigan.
Confronted by the documentary crew outside his Delray office, Ligotti denied ordering the tests, insisting his identity had been stolen.
“I’m the victim,” he said.
Ligotti was indicted in 2020 on 12 counts of health care fraud and money laundering, and one count of conspiracy to commit health care and wire fraud. In total, Ligotti charged health care benefit programs approximately $746 million over the span of nine years from 2011 to 2020, prosecutors said. Of that, he and his co-conspirators bagged around $127 million.
In January, Ligotti was sentenced to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to the conspiracy charge. Other charges were dropped.
Help in other cases cited
At sentencing Ligotti expressed remorse, said Maureen Kielian of Southeast Florida Recovery Advocates.
“He said he lost his way,” recalled Kielian, who had filed a complaint against Ligotti with the Florida Board of Medicine three years earlier.
But after the sentence was handed down, she was shocked to see him walk out of the courtroom with his family.
“What just happened?” she said. “One kid has a pill in his pocket, and he is in prison for seven years. And Ligotti is walking out free.”
Ligotti was expected to report to prison June 12, enabling him to provide evidence in other federal cases.
But that month, prosecutors asked to further postpone his imprisonment to Dec. 1. Ligotti, they said, has cooperated in multiple cases. He has provided documents. He was a witness in a Central Florida case involving rural hospitals, fraudulent urine drug tests and three Miami-Dade men. Prosecutors still needed his help on open cases.
The court agreed to the extension. The next month, Ligotti’s attorney asked court permission for Ligotti and his family to travel to Universal Studios in October for three days.
There were no objections.
Pat Beall writes for Stet Palm Beach. You can read more of her work at https://stetmediagroup.substack.com
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