Doctor’s Orders | 3. Dirty and Scummy

While detectives are investigating Juliana’s murder, they stumble upon a whole other web of crimes occurring all over Southern California, involving, they say, botched surgeries, fake doctors, and fraud to the tune of $150 million. Doctor’s Orders is produced by Western Sound for Sony Music Entertainment’s The Binge. Binge all episodes of Doctor’s Orders, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm Sarah Kalin. This season of ID's Who Killed Angel Harris investigates the 2011 unsolved murder of a 31-year-old woman in Gainesville, Florida. It was definitely shocking.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Either it's a bullet hitting a bullet, or there's a lot of really strong coincidences here.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  More likely than not, this is a serial killer. Listen to Who Killed Angel Harris wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  The wilderness can hide a lot, but it can't hide the truth forever. I'm Delia D'Amber, host of Park Predators. And every week, I investigate true crime cases hidden in national parks, forests, and beaches. I follow every lead, every clue, and every overlooked detail. Because even when a trail seems to disappear, the truth has a way of resurfacing. Listen to Park Predators wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Listen to all episodes of Doctor's Orders ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit Subscribe at the top of the page, or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge: Feed your true crime obsession.

• 1:22Speaker 04

  The Binge.

• 1:33Speaker 05

  I was at a trade show for work, and I fell down. And I needed to let my boss know that I wasn't going to go into work on the following Monday.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  This is Jenny Malone. In 2008, she was a 42-year-old working mom with three kids, living in Northridge, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. What she's about to describe happened in the months just after Juliana Redding's murder. And this is the first time she's ever spoken to a journalist about what she experienced.

• 2:04Speaker 05

  So that's pretty much how the whole thing started.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Initially, she didn't think too much about it.

• 2:09Speaker 05

  It wasn't even an injury at the time.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  But she had a little back pain, and her wrist was still sensitive from a previous injury.

• 2:17Speaker 05

  So I just wanted to go get it checked to make sure that everything was still OK.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  So in California, if you get injured on the job, you don't go to your regular doctor. There's a whole, parallel workers' comp medical system. Employers pay for it, injured employees don't. Injured employees who can't work get a certain percentage of their pay while they're healing. Workers' comp medicine might happen in a hospital you recognize, but most of the time, the appointments and procedures are in a kind of separate medical world. Medical offices and doctors that mostly just handle workers' comp patients. And also different insurance companies from the ones you're probably paying premiums to. So Jenny talks to HR, she gets a list of workers' comp medical offices. She's like, I don't know, which one's closest?

• 3:05Speaker 05

  I live in the city of Northridge, and this was in San Fernando, which is not a very far drive. It was called Frontline Medical Clinic. There was nothing particular that attracted me, other than the closeness.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  But Frontline Medical didn't look like her regular doctor's office.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  Well, I thought it was kind of dirty and scummy.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  She walks in, meets with the doctor, and they jump into action.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  The doctors there, after they did all of these x-rays and then the MRIs, they told me that I'm going to need surgery. And I was like, oh, my God, why? I knew that I had a pain, but I just didn't understand why I had to have a surgery and why on earth would that surgery be on my shoulder when I was feeling pain in my back?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  But she met with the surgeon, and he explained that, you know, everything in your body is connected, just because you have some pain in your back that could be coming from your shoulder. And she believed him, you know, he's a doctor, he knows what he's doing. So she went ahead with the surgery. But then, the pain didn't go away. Weeks later, she was back at Frontline Medical and she got a new x-ray. She noticed the doctors and nurses, or those she assumed were doctors and nurses, they were whispering about her in private.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  I said, "What is going on?" Because I had been there, inside that room, waiting for a long time, thinking that I'm gonna get some kind of answer. And I said, "What's going on? What's going on?" Because they were talking real quietly and whispery-like. The two of them were... One was on one side of a counter and they were kind of leaning in, talking quietly. And I was, I don't know, I just thought it was strange. When I went out there and I said, "What's going on?", the doctor said, "You know what? We don't know exactly what is happening."

• 4:49Speaker 03

  But, they say, "The doctor's at a hospital right nearby. Why don't you just pop over there and he can take a quick look?" They gave her her x-rays and some other papers. She can't drive herself, so her father-in-law drives her over.

• 5:04Speaker 05

  And I was like, "Oh, okay." I mean, I just wanted the pain to go away. They had me go to a back door of the hospital. I did not go in through, admitting. And they positioned it that the doctor's so busy, rather than going through all the paperwork in the front of the hospital, lucky me, I get to go to the side so the doctor can take a quick look at me to figure out what's going on.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Jenny was met by a man named Peter Nelson, who's a physician assistant. You know, more than a nurse, but not a doctor. And not the doctor.

• 5:36Speaker 05

  And then Peter Nelson brought me back into some kind of a, like, some type of a room. I don't know. It was a medical room. And, um, and I... My father-in-law hands me the papers. I hand him the papers. And then he says, "Oh, no, we don't need that. We don't need that. I'm looking at your arm and I can see exactly what it is. It's just a little stitch sticking out." And then he proceeded to go and get some kind of medical equipment and one of those little pincher-type things. And he's trying to pull the stitch out. And I saw the stitch that he was talking about. And I said, "Oh, my God. You know what? That wasn't there this morning." So I'm excited. Maybe it is a stitch, right? And so he proceeds to try and pull out the stitch, but the stitch wouldn't come out.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  So he pulls a little bit harder and it wouldn't come out. So then he goes and he gets some more and then some more equipment. And then he has me sit down now because he thought I was just standing up. He was just going to pull the stitch. Has me lay down in like a gurney type of thing, you know? And then he starts, he grabs the stitch and he begins to pull. And he's pulling and pulling and pulling. And I'm like, this hurts. This really hurts. I didn't have any Vicodins today. Please, this really hurts. So I'm telling him it really, really hurts. And so he says, just be strong, just be strong. Hang on, just hang on. And then he keeps pulling and pulling and I'm starting to scream.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  And he pulls and he pulls and then there's this bloop that pops out of my arm. And you've got to imagine my shoulder is healing. It's healed up, not totally, but it's starting to have a scar. And you just feel it rips through my skin. And there's this big bloop of stuff and it's yellow and pussy. And I didn't know what it was. I'm looking at it as he's pulling and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. And I'm like, this hurts, this hurts for God's sakes. What is it? Is this my muscle? Is that a muscle coming out? Is that a tendon? Because it was yellow and gross and bloody. I didn't know what it was. And then after he starts pulling a little bit more, then I see this little square.

• 7:46Speaker 05

  And I'm looking at my shoulder. I see another little square. And then I just started screaming, you idiots. What the hell did you do to me? You left gauze in my arm, you fucking idiots. Excuse my French. And that's what I was saying. And I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. I said, I need to see the doctor and I need to see the doctor right fricking now. This is wrong. What you did to me is just absolutely wrong.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  The doctor overseeing Peter Nelson, the doctor who convinced Jenny to have the surgery, is the same doctor we've been talking about all along. And things are about to heat up for Dr. Munir Ueda. I'm Benadere. From Sony Music Entertainment and Western Sound, you're listening to Doctor's Orders.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  This is episode three, Dirty and Scummy.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Janey Malone's surgery was in August 2008, five months after the murder of Juliana Redding and years before Kelly Sue Park and Munir Yewedah would make national news. That timeline is relevant because while the murder investigation was happening, there was a whole other team building a case against Dr. Munir Yewedah. Lance Lamont is the journalist who runs AdjusterCom.net. We heard her in the last episode. And before she was a journalist, Lance began her career as a recruiter for medical claims professionals in Southern California in the insurance industry.

• 9:33Speaker 06

  And the claims adjusters knew me because I had recruited many of them and found jobs for many of them. And I had my newsletter that evolved into a magazine that was all about insurance claims, workers' compensation claims, automobile claims, liability claims. So these claims people knew me.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  They knew her. They read her work. So when she published the article, "Where's Munir?", which mostly centered around the murder case and Munir's background, she started hearing from her readers. They said, "The alarm bells had been ringing about this guy for a while."

• 10:11Speaker 06

  So that was how I got sucked into it. I went to this case through that avenue of insurance fraud. And at the same time that I was writing about insurance fraud and hearing the investigators tell me about Yewedah's fraud and how flagrant they were, I was also getting the scoop on the murder. So it all enmeshed together.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Later, she would learn that many other insurance fraud investigators were also on the case. What did you call it?

• 10:46Speaker 06

  The criminal organization Munir Yewedah.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  We reached out to five separate insurance investigators for this story, and most of them did not want to talk. Nevertheless, we obtained stacks of documents from various sources, including investigation docs, and we were able to piece this story together.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  In 2004, Munir Uweda and Paul Turley, a chiropractor, founded a medical company called Frontline Medical Associates. For six years, it grew to include more than a dozen medical clinics across Southern California, including the one Jenny Malone walked into in 2008. Kind of dirty and scummy. Frontline's patients were mostly workers' comp cases, and so many of those were injuries from manual labor. Think gardeners, construction, roofers, ag workers, things like that. Most of the patients did not speak fluent English. As early as 2005, the year after Frontline was founded, the California Medical Board opened an investigation into Munir

• 11:54Speaker 03

  that would eventually lead to his medical license being revoked. It alleged that a physician assistant was performing Munir's surgeries without Munir in the room. Sometimes, not even in the building. Physician assistants have more training than nurses, but they don't usually go to medical school. So while it's normal for a physician assistant to do more advanced medical procedures under doctors' direct supervision, it's illegal for a PA to perform surgery without a doctor present.

• 12:27Speaker 06

  He didn't have the skills. He didn't have the credentials. He didn't have a license. He was not a surgeon. But he did surgeries. He did a lot of shoulder surgeries that were botched. People suffered.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  In court documents, prosecutors allege that the physician assistant, Peter Nelson, performed over 100 knee and shoulder surgeries for Munir, with his consent and without his presence.

• 12:56Speaker 06

  In many, many cases, they were unnecessary surgeries.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Frontline was just the beginning of Munir's growing medical empire. In 2007, when Julie Anna Redding and her friends got on that plane to Vegas, they had just found out that Munir had been lying about his age and his marriage. What they didn't know was that multiple investigations of fraud and deception were going much, much deeper.

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• 13:57Speaker 04

  I counted on Workman's Comp to at least vet the people that operated and took care of the people, because the more incompetent they are, the more it costs them, I would think.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  This is Kim Pope.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  And I had a work-related injury, and through various unhappy ways, I ended up in the care of Dr. Yoiden and his group.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Kim is a nurse, and in 2009, she injured her shoulder while she was grabbing for some falling medical equipment on the job. Like Jenny, she's also been very media shy over the years. What happened to her was a nightmare that she does not like to relive. Just her timing, this happened a year after Peter Nelson pulled inches of gauze from Jenny Malone's shoulder and a year before Kelly Sue Park was arrested for the murder of Juliana Redding.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  I really didn't have a choice.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Kim had a rotator cuff tear, so she got a list of approved Workers Comp doctors, and like Jenny Malone, she chose the office closest to her. This one was in Indio, California, another frontline medical clinic.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  They were the closest, and I could get there and then get back. There was just maybe three or four blocks from the hospital where I was, so it was very convenient.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  As a nurse, she knew what a medical office should look like. This wasn't it.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Dirty, dirty, dirty. Smelled like mold, old furniture, hard, you know, those folding metal chairs. That's what the office had. It was just very uncomfortable and just very dirty.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  There she met a doctor. Well, looking back, she's not totally sure that it was a doctor, but he held up an x-ray and said.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  He said, "Well, it looks like you're going to need surgery. So we'll just schedule that and we'll let you know." He didn't even touch my shoulder. They would have probably operated on my shoulder if I showed them. My back was hurt. I don't know. They would have operated on something, I think, you know?

• 16:01Speaker 03

  The surgeon who was going to operate on Kim was, you guessed it, Dr. Munir Uweda. And while it's normal to meet your surgeon ahead of your operation, for both Kim and Jenny, meeting this man was hard.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Well, they told me that he had a really busy schedule and I said, "Well, that's okay, but I need to meet the person that's going to do surgery on me."

• 16:25Speaker 03

  This is Jenny again. Remember, she wanted to speak with her surgeon to better understand why she needed shoulder surgery for back pain.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  I chose a date and I waited for him for about three to three and a half hours to get out of surgery, just because I, well, I felt like it was really important to meet the person. And, and so I, I just sat there waiting and then finally he came out and he was very, very nice and kind, as you would expect a doctor to be. He explained everything to me, which I can't re-explain. He used all of his medical garb and I didn't really understand it, but he kind of made me feel like he knew what he was talking about and this connects to this and this is why this is happening and that's why I feel the pain

• 17:15Speaker 05

  in the lower part of my back and not necessarily on the top of my shoulder or in the complete shoulder vicinity. So I believed him.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  But on the day of her surgery, Jenny says, she still felt uneasy.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  I just got the creeps in this place because of the way that they were pushing papers on me to sign. And I know that that's normal. It is, it's normal, but I, something, something just grabbed me the wrong way and I didn't sign the arbitration agreement because I just felt like something was just weird in this hospital. Just the way that the nurses were. Yeah, I got a bad vibe and I should have just gotten up and walked away, but I didn't. And then I was in the, I guess, the pre-op room. There was nurses there and I'm sitting there and they, they put my arm out and these two nurses were just talking back and forth and back and forth. And I had already had some kind of a drowsy pill.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  So I'm sitting there and then they take my arm, they lay my arm out and they put my left arm out on, because they have like a board that comes out for, that I guess the doctor is going to end up doing surgery on to keep your arms straight. And they put my left arm on and I was saying, "Excuse me, excuse me, it's my right arm. Excuse me, it's my right arm." And finally, one of the nurses turns around and says, "What?" And I said, "No, you've got my left arm out, it's my right arm." "No, honey, it's your left arm." I said, "No, it's my right arm." And I'm, like I said, got some, some kind of drug in me, I don't know what. And then she takes the book that they have and she's flipping through it and she goes, "Oh, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, it flipped back to the prior patient."

• 18:57Speaker 05

  And then, and then they switched it and they put it to my right arm.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  So my intuition was right about everything.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Kim, on the day of her surgery, was told to arrive at 5:30 a.m. to a place called South Bay Surgical and Spine Institute.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  And I was like number 10. I was way down there. And I went up and complained several times and I, they said, "Well, we bring people in because we don't want them to eat or drink anything or the case get canceled."

• 19:28Speaker 03

  She says, as a nurse, she knew this was not common practice.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  I said, "Do you have any idea what I am and anything about me? I'm a nurse, I, I'm a work in the operating room. I would not have done that. You know, if I had have known this, I could have slept in my own bed, we could have driven down this morning. There's no apology."

• 19:50Speaker 04

  They tried to disguise the time that everyone was sitting there by, they would take you back and draw your blood, send you back out. And then they would take you back and ask you medical questions and allergies. And they'd take you back and send you out. So you would felt like you were getting stuff done, but I knew we weren't. You know, all that could have been done in 30 minutes at the most and gone on to surgery. But that's not the way they did that. I did sign the consent, but I did tell them that I would not go back to surgery until I actually met Dr. Yoweda. I had not ever met him at that point.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  And they said, oh, well, oh, he'll definitely come see you before you go to surgery. And then it was really late in the day. I really, I couldn't guess, but it was afternoon. I mean, it was probably 3:00 or 4:00 o'clock.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Dr. Yoweda never did come out, but it was late. She'd been there all day. She didn't want to have to come back.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  I think I was, I think I was the last patient. I do think I was the last patient.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  When she woke up from the operation, she said, again, where's my surgeon?

• 21:14Speaker 04

  And I asked to see the doctor to see if, what, you know, do I need to be checked out or anything? And they said, oh, you're fine. You're fine. And I said, okay. Just let, just get me the hell out of here, were my last words in that place.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Both Jenny and Kim would later learn that holding out to meet their surgeon was pointless. Dr. Yoweda never operated on either of them. Instead, it was the PA, Peter Nelson, the one that never went to medical school.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  About a week after her surgery, Kim returned to the India medical office asking for help because her pain did not subside. The office was as she remembered.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Just dirty, very dirty.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  She met with a Dr. Johnson, who looked even worse than that.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  His left pocket was just about ripped, six inches. You could see his underwear. He had food in his beard, food on his white shirt.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  She said, "What can I do for all this pain?"

• 22:22Speaker 04

  And he looked around and there was a pillow on the exam table there. He pointed at the pillow and he said, "I can sell you that pillow for $500." And I said, "I need to leave now." And I stood up and left.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Kim complained to the workers' comp office after her surgery, but it would take a long time for her to get any kind of resolution.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Shortly after her surgery, the medicine started showing up.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  After their first appointment, I got this box of all these pills, pain pills, pills for nerve damage. It was just a box full of pills and they just kept coming. I had a drawer full and my dresser was a drawer full of medication.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  She says no doctor ever talked to her about any medications.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  I knew what they were for, but they would never prescribe to me, talk to me about I was supposed to take, not take, take when needed, whatever I was supposed to do. I just put them in the drawer.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  But even those didn't help.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  There was nothing that helped the pain, nothing. I mean, they didn't do anything for me.

• 23:36Speaker 03

  With so much pain and limited movement in her arm, Kim couldn't work. Workers' comp paid her a percentage of her base pay, but she was used to hours and hours of overtime a week.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  So I was making a tremendous amount of money, and then it was suddenly cut.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  And after a year of not working at all, she lost her job.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  I mean, my parents supported me. And here I am, a nurse, and my parents were supporting me.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  I couldn't leave. I couldn't drive home. There was no way I could drive.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Then she lost her health insurance. It hit her really hard.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  I called my parents and told them. And I was crying, crying, really crying hard. And I went into my room. I was just really crying hard. And to have gotten to that point where you do that, trying to stop crying. And I just opened that drawer and took pills.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  All I could swallow. And I didn't know what I took.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Her roommate heard her crying and got worried.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  She later told me that I could barely talk. My words were mumbly. She couldn't hardly tell what I was saying. So she called 911. And the hospital was right next door. They were there in a second. And the last thing I heard was them saying, "We don't have a blood pressure." And I thought, "Good." I thought, "Good."

• 25:31Speaker 04

  And then I woke up.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  Stayed in the ER for a few hours. And then they took me by ambulance to a...

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Some kind of psych place, I don't know. And it was around midnight when I got there. I can't... My mom doesn't know. My dad, no one knows.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Kim is a suicide survivor. With the help of friends and family, she was able to get her life back together. Today, she's a practicing nurse again. She needed three additional surgeries to reverse the damage done by the first one. The doctor who corrected it said the first operation never reattached her deltoid muscle, a procedure generally needed to repair rotator cuffs.

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• 27:29Speaker 03

  After Peter Nelson pulled gauze from Jenny Malone's shoulder, she was livid.

• 27:35Speaker 05

  I said, I need to see the doctor and I need to see the doctor right frickin' now. This is wrong. What you did to me is just absolutely wrong. Then the doctor comes in a little bit later, Dr. Uweda, because we were at the hospital and those are the only times that I saw Dr. Uweda. So he comes in and he says, I said, you guys left gauze. And he said, well, you know, sometimes things happen. And I was like, sometimes things happen? And he's like, well, you know, I mean, life isn't perfect. Sometimes things happen.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  And that was, that was, that was just, that was his reasoning. Sometimes things happen.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  But Jenny had two things. First, she had the bundle of x-rays and papers that the clinic had given her when they sent her over to the hospital. Second, she had her father-in-law.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  My father-in-law, he was a man from Italy. Barely spoke the language. Has no idea how to use a phone. Every time you go to visit for dinner or something, "Can you fix up my phone? Can you fix up our phone?" So, so my father-in-law comes in and he figured out how to use the camera on his little flip phone. And he's taking pictures. And he got a couple of good pictures of the gauze and everything. And I'm, I'm still screaming. And then finally, now, keep in mind, it's not all out of my arm yet. It was about 24 inches long that came out of my arm. The first part, that really gross gloopy part, just blopped out. And I don't even know what happened to that part. But the other part is probably, you know, when you look at it, probably about 12 or 14 inches.

• 29:04Speaker 05

  And anyway, they, then immediately when it was out, it, the pains started to subside. It really did. Yeah, I mean, it's still hurt, don't get me wrong, but you could feel a difference almost immediately in how, the heat that was in my body.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  They left the hospital.

• 29:24Speaker 05

  From there, they wanted me to come back to the clinic in a couple of days.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  They had the photos, they had the x-rays, they had the paperwork. She skipped her next appointment.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  So my husband spoke to a friend of a friend and we went to a different doctor that was kind enough to see me. And that's where I learned that, my God, the way that that happened in that room was just so wrong because a person, even if it was a tiny piece of gauze, what a normal hospital would do is keep you for a minimum of 24 hours with a fluid IV. So it was just kind of a terrible situation. Yeah, it was terrible.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  But then she started getting phone calls. A woman calling her. At first, every few days, then every day. They wanted their paperwork back from Jenny. They wanted the x-rays showing gauze in her shoulder. She said, "That's their property. She's stealing it." The woman calling her was an associate of Munir's. Her name was Kelly Sue Park.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  She was just a nasty, mean lady in the front office. And she was calling me, threatening me, that I need to get back in there. I need to get back in there immediately, that I stole their property.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Remember, this is just a few months after Juliana Redding was killed.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  And she was just going crazy. "You are stealing property. It's our property. You need to give this back. You have this much time to give it back. Otherwise, you will not receive another payment."

• 31:01Speaker 03

  She's talking about the workers' comp payments she was entitled to because she wasn't working.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  And that was kind of scary for me because, you know, I was a little younger at that time. And I've got young kids, and I needed my money. I needed to have, even though it wasn't a lot, it was something. And so it truly was a threat to a family, you know what I mean? And it was scary, just the way that she would talk to you. And she told me that she would, she said, "Where is your father-in-law? I will go meet him." And he is in Westlake doing construction. "I'll go meet him." And I'm like, "I don't even know where he is." "Oh, so you're lying. You're lying to me. Where is your father-in-law? Where is the x-rays?" Then she got to where she was calling every hour.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  That's when we knew that something was really, really off. And when I did see the new doctor, he made copies of the x-ray for me. So I was able to give hers back, so that I could get my money.

• 32:05Speaker 05

  It was strange. It was just a little bit borderline scary.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Jenny ended up filing a medical malpractice suit. She says, in the beginning, her lawyer was excited.

• 32:17Speaker 05

  So he called me up and he was like, oh, man, we're gonna get him. And I'm gonna figure out a way to get money. We are gonna get this guy. It was really very encouraging that something good was gonna end up happening.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  But then something strange happened.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  The lawsuit was dropped, and it was funny. It was dropped on the day that Dr. Uweda and his team were coming to my attorney's office for the deposition. So I met him early and had everything planned. We sit down in the deposition and he's asking all of the questions. And then we're gonna break for lunch, okay? So we break for lunch. I walk out down in Beverly Hills. I'm looking for a quick place to eat. And I was by myself. And I don't know what everyone was doing. I just assumed that everyone was going to lunch. But when I came back from lunch,

• 33:15Speaker 05

  the attorney called me up to his office, which was upstairs. And he says, you know what, Jennifer? I need to let you know, there's no reason for us to continue on with this deposition. We can just be finished. There's nothing, because the truth is, this man has no money. There's nothing that we can do to go after him. And I'm just sitting there going, what happened to our conversation this morning, where you are all pumped up and ready to go? Anyway, my gut feeling is that something happened while I was gone. And he made a decision that it would be in his best interest to go ahead and drop the case. For whatever reason, let your mind get creative.

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Jenny let the suit go. She just wanted to move on. Even though she couldn't move her shoulder freely for several years. It stopped her from returning to her job, making the income she once made. And maybe most importantly, it stopped her from playing with her little kids the way she wanted to.

• 34:11Speaker 05

  Didn't get anything. Didn't get anything, except for losing my job, losing a lot of money, a lot of time. And two and a half years before I could get mobility back.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  But this wouldn't be the end of it.

• 34:26Speaker 05

  Well, it was probably maybe a year or two after the surgery, the medical board wanted to get involved. And I met with them. They came to my house. They were looking through. I just gave them my whole entire file. They were going through everything.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Behind the scenes, in the shadows, investigators were working slowly, methodically, examining the many different businesses and doctors that seemed to be associated with Munir Uweda.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  And I believe it was the people from the medical board that were sharing it with the DA's office.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  But by now, Jenny's anger had turned into something else.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  It was just coming out that he was up for a murder-for-hire. And I said, I don't want my name on the record of anything to do with this man. I'm not going to testify against him because I have little kids at that time. And I just, I thought, my God, if this is true, which was hard for me to believe because I thought the doctor was a nice guy and maybe he really did just make a mistake, you know? I just thought it was so hard to believe that my doctor was up for a murder-for-hire. It was just the weirdest, scariest thing.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  A decade after the first red flags against Munir, seven years after Juliana Redding was murdered, and two years after Calle Sue Park was acquitted for that murder, new indictments were announced.

• 35:59Speaker 10

  Good morning. Two grand jury indictments revealed what California prosecutors called "an organized criminal enterprise", with Dr. Munir Uweda as the ringleader. He and his staff are accused of putting greed over the health of patients with allegations of conspiracy and insurance fraud spanning more than a decade.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Prosecutors alleged one of the biggest health insurance scams in California history: botched surgeries, fake patients, unneeded care, unwanted prescriptions. The size of the fraud? Over $150 million, they say.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Kelly Sue Park was again arrested, along with physician assistant Peter Nelson. A total of 15 people were indicted.

• 36:42Speaker 10

  One by one, associates of Dr. Munir Uweda pleaded not guilty this week to lying to patients, disfiguring some in botched surgeries, and cheating insurance companies out of millions.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  But even with these new arrests, one thing was still the same: Munir Uweda, this time named and charged, was still MIA.

• 37:05Speaker 10

  But the biggest question in the case: Where is Dr. Uweda?

• 37:14Speaker 03

  Next time on Doctor's Orders.

• 37:17Speaker 11

  I know doctors who date models, I knew doctors who have show dogs, and I knew how to know doctors who have horses. Now, I'm not sure I know a doctor who has all three, but not unusual hobbies for doctors.

• 37:31Speaker 12

  You know that with any love triangle involving two misses, it will create quite a bit of attention and then people will be talking about it.

• 37:41Speaker 11

  He was not a great person to be associated with, but we figured, you know, it was mostly about the money. But then some of the things revealed a possibly greater diabolical person than we had imagined.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  That's coming up on episode four, Wheel of Fortune.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Doctor's Orders is produced by Western Sound for Sony Music Entertainment's The Binge. The executive producer and host is me, Ben Adair. The executive producer for The Binge is Jonathan Hirsch. Doctor's Orders was written and produced by Neda Salem. It was edited by Ben Adair. Laila Hassan is our fact checker. Legal review by Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP. Michael Rayfield is the mix engineer. Next up, episode four, Wheel of Fortune.

• 38:45Speaker 13

  Welcome to The Haunted Library. Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

• 38:55Speaker 13

  A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human.

• 39:05Speaker 13

  Listen to The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube.