Trump commutes sentence of Miami healthcare exec convicted of Medicare fraud

Miami Herald

4 days ago

A South Florida man sentenced to 50 years in prison for ripping off tens of millions of dollars from Medicare was among the more than two dozen people whom President Donald Trump granted clemency to this week.
Lawrence Duran — the former co-owner of American Therapeutic Corp., a Miami-based company that ran seven healthcare clinics between South Florida and Orlando — pleaded guilty in May 2011 to multiple felonies, including defrauding Medicare, healthcare fraud and money laundering.
A judge sentenced Duran, now 63, to the longest prison term in history for Medicare fraud in September 2016. Trump issued Duran's commutation on Wednesday.
Duran and his girlfriend, Marianella Valera, the co-owner of the company and one of its therapists, filed 866,000 false claims with Medicare and received more than $87 million from their scheme, according to court records.
Their case was part of a much larger probe that included 22 other defendants, including senior company employees, psychiatrists and patient recruiters. In all, the scheme involved $200 million in false billings. At the time, it was the nation's largest Medicare therapy rip-off scam in history.
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Valera, now 54, was sentenced to 35 years in prison. Her sentence was reduced to 15 years, and she was released from custody in March 2020, federal Bureau of Prison records show.
The fraud involved billing Medicare for group mental-health sessions that were either not needed or not provided to patients.
The patients at the clinics were not capable of feeding themselves, unable to independently use the bathroom and lacked the mental capacity to respond to counseling, federal prosecutors said at the time. This meant they likely weren't even eligible for the treatment for which the company was billing Medicare, according to prosecutors.
Duran is the second defendant in the case to be spared by Trump. In 2020 in his first term, Trump commuted the 35-year sentence of Judith Negron. A jury convicted her on 24 counts of conspiracy, fraud, paying kickbacks and money laundering in collaboration with Duran and Valera in August 2011.
Negron, now 54, was vice president of an American Therapeutic Corp.. subsidiary called MedLink Professional Management Group, which federal prosecutors said was established with the sole purpose of laundering $83 million in Medicare payments to Duran, Valera, employees and others who participated in the scheme for more than 10 years.
Duran and Valera lived in a Miami bayfront condo and tooled around in a Maserati.
Miami Herald Staff Writer Jay Weaver contributed to this report.