With latest plea, a dozen former NFL players have admitted guilt in KY fraud case
With a guilty plea this week from former Washington Football Team cornerback Carlos Rogers, a dozen former National Football League players have pleaded guilty in Kentucky in a health-fraud scheme.
Rogers pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Lexington to one charge of conspiring to defraud a program set up to reimburse former players for out-of-pocket medical expenses.
The top sentence on the charge is 10 years in prison, but Rogers is likely to receive a lesser sentence under advisory guidelines. He is to be sentenced in March.
Rogers was a top defensive player at Auburn before being drafted in 2005. He spent 10 seasons in the NFL, first in Washington, then with the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders.
Rogers is among 15 former NFL players charged in the case.
The charges allege that the players took part in a scheme to get reimbursements for expensive medical equipment such as hyperbaric oxygen chambers, ultrasound machines designed to be used in women’s health examinations, and electromagnetic therapy devices designed for use on horses, according to court records.
The fund at issue in the case is the Gene Upshaw NFL Player Health Reimbursement Account Plan, set up in 2006 to reimburse eligible former players for medical expenses not covered by insurance.
NFL teams finance the plan.
The former players didn’t actually buy or receive the equipment, according to court records, but rather used fake prescriptions and invoices to justify the requests for repayment.
When the U.S. Justice Department initially announced charges against 10 former payers last December, it said they had submitted more than $3.9 million in false claims during the conspiracy. More players were charged later.
No one charged in the case lives in Kentucky, though one, Robert McCune, played college football at the University of Louisville.
The connection to Kentucky is that the fraudulent claims were processed through an insurance data center in Lexington. That allowed federal authorities to consolidate the charges in Kentucky.
In his plea agreement, Rogers acknowledged that he helped recruit other former players to join the scheme and provided identifying information about them to others, including Correll Buckhalter, to use in claims.
Other former players paid Buckhalter to submit claims. Buckhalter passed on $6,500 to Rogers, his plea agreement said.
The plea document hints that former players not yet charged were involved in the scheme. It cites three who had claims submitted for them with the help of Buckhalter and Rogers, but identifies them only by initials.
The initials don’t match the names of any of the 15 players publicly identified in charges so far.
One of the unnamed players paid back $56,821 for a claim filed under his name, according to Rogers’ plea agreement.
In addition to Rogers and Buckhalter, who spent a total of 10 seasons in the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles and Denver Broncos, the others who have pleaded guilty in the case are John Eubanks, Ceandris Brown, James Butler, Fredrick Bennett, Etric Pruitt, Antwan Odom, Anthony Montgomery, Darrell Reid, Joe Horn and Reche Caldwell.
Caldwell, a University of Florida standout who played for the San Diego Chargers and New England Patriots, was shot and killed in June in an apparent robbery attempt before being sentenced in the health fraud case.
The only former player in the case sentenced so far, Brown, was sentenced to 12 months and one day in jail and ordered to make restitution of $84,777 to the health fund.
Prosecutors said in a court document that Brown paid McCune $11,000 for submitting false claims for him, disguising the payments in wire transfers as payments for a car and a car part.
Brown “committed an intentional and significant fraud on a health care plan that was established specifically to help his fellow retired NFL players and their families pay for out-of-pocket health care costs,” prosecutors said in the memo.
The other three players charged in the investigation are McCune, Tamrick Vanover and Clinton Portis.
They are scheduled for trial next April.
