18 former NBA players arrested and charged in $4 million healthcare fraud scheme
(The AEGIS Alliance) – 18 former NBA players consisting of previous Coney Island high-school superstar and former Los Angeles Clipper Sebastian Telfair were arrested and are facing charges of ripping off the sports organization’s health insurance plan out of millions of dollars, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, New York on Thursday.
The federal indictment implicates 18 ex-NBA players in swindling $4 million out of the NBA’s Health and Welfare Benefit Plan that supplies extra insurance coverage to qualified active and retired ballers.
The defendants purportedly used “false and fraudulent claims for reimbursement of expenses for medical and dental services that were not actually rendered,” court documents indicate.
Former New Jersey Net shooting guard Terrence Williams allegedly orchestrated the fraud scheme. It’s alleged that he enlisted other retired professional athletes and provided them with the fake statements and billing information used to receive compensation for a minimum of $230,000 in kickbacks, the indictment shows.
But Williams’ fake paperwork resulted in some warnings, specifically a set of 2019 letters that had been allegedly coming from a chiropractic doctor and had been submitted by 2 of the players facing charges in the indictment.
“The letters are unusual in several respects: they are not on letterhead, contain unusual formatting, have grammatical errors, and one of the letters misspells a purported patient’s name,” the indictment reads.
In an additional glaring inconsistency, Gregory Smith, a former Chicago Bulls power forward, submitted insurance claims for 8 root canals as well as dental crowns that were said to have been conducted at a Beverly Hills dental office on December 20 in 2018, while he had been out of the country that whole month, participating in basketball in Taiwan.
Comparably, Ronald Glen Davis, a former Boston Celtics power forward, also known as Baby Beluga, purportedly submitted a $27,000 dental insurance claim for procedures conducted at the exact same dental office, despite the fact that he was actually taking a trip in Paris on that particular day.
Included in the accused are 18 ex-NBA players, consisting of six-time NBA All-Defensive Team member Tony Allen, as well as former Lakers guard. Shannon Brown Allen’s wife named Desiree Allen is additionally facing charges for the scheme.
Those charged in the scheme include Terrence Williams, Alan Anderson, Anthony Allen, Shannon Brown, William Bynum, Ronald Glen “Big Baby” Davis, Christopher Douglas-Roberts, Melvin Ely, Jamario Moon, Darius Miles, Milton Palacio, Ruben Patterson, Eddie Robinson, Gregory Smith, Sebastian Telfair, Charles Watson Jr., Antoine Wright, and Anthony Wroten.
Telfair, a native of Brooklyn, is the cousin of ex-NBA superstar Stephon Marbury.
The fraudulent scheme, that started in 2017, led to a $2.5 million windfall for the accused, courthouse documents say.
Jeffrey Childers – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.