Florida man faces 100+ years in prison for allegedly distributing $230M in adulterated drugs
A Florida man allegedly set up an illicit network of drug wholesale operations in the US and used them to harvest $230 million from the sale of adulterated and mislabeled HIV meds.
According to the US Department of Justice, 51-year-old Lazaro Hernandez was charged with obtaining a large supply of HIV meds illegally, then creating false drug labels and documents to make it possible to sell them at a deep discount to co-conspirators at “wholesale pharmaceutical distributors in Mississippi, Maryland, and New York.”
The drugs were then sold to pharmacies and billed back to a number of insurers, including Medicare. Says the DOJ:
As alleged in the indictment, between approximately 2019 and 2021, the wholesale pharmaceutical distributors paid Hernandez and his co-conspirators more than $230 million for the illegally acquired and adulterated prescription drugs. Hernandez allegedly laundered those hundreds of millions of dollars through the use of several corporations in Miami.
Now Hernandez is facing a laundry list of charges covering false documentation, money laundering and a conspiracy to deliver adulterated and mislabeled drugs. Altogether, he faces more than 100 years in prison. He was also indicted by a grand jury in Miami a few days ago.
