A Manhattan man being charged in an indictment with 10 other people for alleged involvement in an oxycodone ring tried to evade arresting officers Wednesday, leading police on a car and foot pursuit along a New Jersey highway before he was apprehended, authorities said.
Kevin Frye, 37, was taken into custody Wednesday after the chase along Route 4. He was wanted in connection with an alleged conspiracy to distribute more than a million oxycodone pills, primarily out of purported medical clinics in Manhattan and the Bronx, authorities said.
Police are continuing to search for one other suspect in the case. The nine others have been arrested, including Moshe Mirilishvili, a 66-year-old state-licensed doctor who allegedly wrote more than 13,000 unnecessary prescriptions for oxycodone over a two-year period to facilitate the scheme and made millions off of it.
The scheme also involved drug traffickers who oversaw crews of paid “patients” sent into the clinics to get unnecessary oxycodone prescriptions that would be used for resale, authorities said.
Mirilishvili allegedly charged $200 cash for those "patient visits," which typically involved little, if any, examination and almost always resulted in a prescription for a large amount of oxycodone, prosecutors said. Most prescriptions were for 90 30-milligram tablets. A single bottle of those has an average resale value in New York City of $2,700 or more, authorities said.
Clinic staff are accused of selling access to Mirilishvili and the allegedly fraudulent prescriptions. Some also allegedly created fake documents, including MRI records, that showed injuries or urinalysis reports indicating the patient was taking the oxycodone instead of selling it, and authorities say Mirilishvili regularly asked for the alleged fake medical records in an ongoing attempt to avoid law enforcement detection.
The 13,000-plus alleged unnecessary prescriptions the doctor wrote between October 2012 and December 2014 converted to about 1.2 million oxycodone tablets with a street value of at least $36 million. Mirilishvili allegedly collected more than $2.6 million in fees for "doctor visits" during that two-year period.
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The alleged traffickers recruiting and paying the "patient" crews also sent them to see other doctors operating out of similar allegedly fraudulent medical clinics, including one on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx and one in Upper Manhattan. Doctors at the clinics allegedly wrote more than 35,000 oxycodone prescriptions, most of them unnecessary, according to prosecutors.
All of the 11 suspects named in the indictment are charged with one count of conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute oxycodone.
Frye was one of the alleged traffickers. Information on attorneys for him and Mirilishvili wasn't immediately available.
