A former college All-American football player who played pro is headed to prison.
On May 7, a federal judge sentenced Joel Rufus French, a former tight end at Ole Miss who later signed and played with two NFL teams, to more than 16 years in prison. Authorities said that French orchestrated a health care fraud scheme that stole nearly $197 million from Medicare and a Department of Veterans Affairs program that covers the families of disabled and deceased veterans.
French, 47, must also pay back more than $110 million and give up roughly $17 million the government already seized from his accounts, accoridng to the Justice Department. He was found guilty in February by a federal jury in Tampa following a six-day trial.
Among the programs French targeted was the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs. CHAMPVA provides medical coverage to the spouses and children of veterans whose service-connected disabilities are permanent and total, or who died because of those disabilities.
Federal prosecutors said French exploited CHAMPVA alongside Medicare to bill for medically unnecessary devices that patients never requested.
“This defendant’s conduct was egregious,” acting Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said after the February conviction.
Overseas Call Centers and Fake Medical Orders
The charges stemmed from an elaborate criminal playbook.
French owned a marketing company and secretly controlled eight medical supply businesses. He kept his name off the paperwork by using frontmen and falsified documents, according to the DOJ.
The fraud also ran through overseas call centers. Telemarketers working from abroad contacted elderly Americans, pressured them into providing personal and health insurance information, then pushed them to accept orthotic braces they had no medical reason to receive.
Prosecutors also said some of the people targeted in those calls suffered from Alzheimer’s or dementia. When a person refused or did not clearly agree, the call centers sometimes edited the recordings to make it appear as though the patients had consented.
French paid kickbacks to fake telemedicine companies in exchange for signed orders from doctors and nurse practitioners who never examined the patients or never spoke with them.
He then sold those signed orders to other companies in the medical supply chain, which used them to bill the government. His own eight supply companies did the same, sending invoices to both Medicare and CHAMPVA for braces that were never medically justified.
In some cases, claims were filed for amputees as well as people who had already died.
French also used cash to pay the people who supplied him with stolen patient data, withdrawing approximately $225,000 from a Mississippi bank during the conspiracy. In one instance, he used a bag to transport more than $10,000 to Orlando, Fla., to make one of those payments, according to prosecutors.
Sentencing and Accountability
The jury convicted French on every count. The charges included conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud, conspiracy to launder money, and conspiracy to pay and accept illegal kickbacks.
His attorney, Sean Buckley, told the Daily Business Review after the February verdict that French maintained his innocence and planned to appeal. Buckley said his client had trusted “the wrong people” to run his health care business.
The judge imposed a sentence of 196 months earlier this month, also ordering French to pay $110,753,619 in restitution. The government also kept approximately $17 million it had already confiscated from his financial accounts and other holdings.
Acting Deputy Inspector General Scott Lampert, of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, said French had taken advantage of “some of the most vulnerable people these programs were created to protect.”
Acting Special Agent in Charge Greg Wentz of the VA Office of Inspector General’s Southeast Field Office said the operation siphoned resources away from veterans and their families and damaged the programs built to serve them.
The FBI, the HHS Office of Inspector General, and the VA Office of Inspector General investigated the case. Acting Assistant Chief Catherine Wagner and trial attorney William Hochul III of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section prosecuted it.
The conviction falls under the Justice Department’s Health Care Fraud Strike Force, a program that has charged more than 6,200 defendants and identified more than $45 billion in fraudulent billing across the country since 2007.
Before his name appeared in federal court filings, French was one of the best tight ends in college football.
He grew up in Amory, Miss., where he played both football and baseball at Amory High School. The San Diego Padres selected him in the 30th round of the 1996 Major League Baseball draft, but French chose to pursue football and enrolled at the University of Mississippi.
He played three seasons for the Rebels, from 1996-1998, starting 20 of 32 games. By the time he left Oxford, he had 84 catches for 814 yards and 4 touchdowns, according to Ole Miss Athletics.
The SEC named him to its first-team All-SEC squad in both 1997 and 1998. In 1998, every major All-America selector chose him as the best tight end in the country, making him a unanimous All-American. He was also a finalist for the Conerly Trophy, an award given to the top college football player in Mississippi.
French left after his junior season and entered the 1999 NFL Draft. No team selected him. He later signed with the Seattle Seahawks as a free agent, but a knee injury kept him off the field for the entire 2000 season. Seattle released him in August 2001.
He signed with the Green Bay Packers the following spring though was released four months later without appearing in a regular-season game.
His son, Charleston French, plays running back at the University of North Carolina.
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