This post was originally published on this site
A pharmacist and a drugstore technician were arrested Tuesday and charged with using fake prescriptions to divert millions of dollars in oxycodone pills from a Queens pharmacy, officials said.
Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan said pharmacist V. LaPerla and technician B. Martinez conspired to fill hundreds of illegitimate prescriptions for 30-milligram oxycodone pills at the Richmond Hill pharmacy where they worked, and sold additional oxycodone pills in unlabeled bottles for which there were no prescriptions.
An outside partner and others paid cash for the pills, and resold them on the black market, Brennan said.
The pair worked at Dale Pharmacy & Surgical Inc. on Jamaica Ave.
They both pleaded not guilty.
“She doesn’t prescribe pills,” said Martinez’ lawyer, Lance Lazzaro. “She doesn’t give the pills. She enters it into the computer.”
Judge Ann Scherzer ordered LaPerla held on $250,000 or $150,000 cash, and ordered Martinez held on $50,000, or $25,000 cash.
Among the prescriptions they filled were pills for two doctors whose prescription pads were stolen and whose signatures were forged, according to an indictment. Investigators determined that nearly 158,000 30-milligram oxycodone pills had been dispensed as a result of the fake prescriptions — drugs that would have carried a black market street value of between $2 million and $4 million.
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents searched the pharmacy and LaPerla’s Long Island home, where they recovered $186,500 in cash from a safe and a bedside table. He even recorded the illegal cash payments and prescriptions on his phone, records that detailed more than $300,000 in forged-prescription oxycodone sales in 2017 alone.
“Flooding the black market with millions of dollars worth of highly addictive substance is something we have come to expect of international drug cartels,” Brennan said in a statement. “But today’s indictment charges that a pharmacist, working in collaboration with an assistant, can inflict the same damage.”
LaPerla, 64, of Plainview, and Martinez, 33, of Brooklyn, were charged with conspiracy, criminal possession of a controlled substance by a pharmacist and criminal possession of a forged instrument.