Doctor’s Orders | 4. Wheel of Fortune

With our main suspect on the lam, we fan out across the globe to dig into the past, present and potential future of the man prosecutors call, the “Mastermind of Fraud.” 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

  Two Girls, One Ghost. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. Where each week we dive into all things strange, spooky and supernatural, and share stories of paranormal encounters from our community of listeners. Satisfy that spooky itch and entertain your inner witch with Two Girls, One Ghost. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts and check us out on YouTube at Two Girls, One Ghost. But be warned, side effects might include a haunting or two. Listen at your own risk.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I haven't seen my son since 2012.

• 0:32Speaker 02

  This is Deborah Tice. The disappearance of her son, Austin, is one of the biggest missing person cases in the world.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  What do you want from me? I should solve the mystery.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  I know that my son is somewhere alive.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4, on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:27Speaker 04

  Where is Munir? Where is Munir? But the biggest question in the case, where is Dr. Ueda? For over 15 years, authorities in California have wanted to talk to him, whether as a person of interest in the murder of Juliana Redding, or as a named defendant in a mega health insurance scam.

• 1:46Speaker 05

  OK, we didn't really know where Ueda was. So we went about trying to find Ueda.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  It's a decades-old occupation. This is Mark Minnick.

• 1:56Speaker 05

  And as we tried to find Uweda through different sources, investigative sources, we popped up all kinds of stuff.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  In 1999, Mark was the CEO of Van Wert County Hospital in a really small town in Ohio.

• 2:11Speaker 05

  Probably about hour and 15 minutes south of Toledo.

• 2:14Speaker 04

  And for a while, in the early 2000s, he and a team were trying to track down Munir Uweda.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  You know, we popped up articles from magazines from Eastern Europe where he's judging beauty contests. You know, we see pictures of him and other beauty pageant people who eventually ended up in Van Wert, Ohio. Amazingly enough, we found out the supposed Harvard rumor, found out more about the Stanford Fellowship. We found out more of other hospitals he had dealt with. In there, I had the California Bureau of Investigation calling me along with other people. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. It's just absolutely amazing. The guy has left this kind of trail over, you know, 25 years.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  The path Dr. Munir Uweda took, from growing up in Lebanon to a small town in Ohio to global capitals around the world, is the same path. He took from small-town surgeon to accused criminal mastermind.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  We figured, you know, it was mostly about the money.

• 3:22Speaker 05

  But then some of the things revealed a possibly greater diabolical person than we had imagined.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  I'm Ben Adair. From Sony Music Entertainment and Western Sound, you're listening to Doctor's Orders.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  This is episode four, Wheel of Fortune.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  Everyone, whether you're a superhero or a supervillain, or anything in between, everyone has an origin story.

• 3:55Speaker 06

  Now, Munir's father. The family is originally from Tripoli. Now, this is kind of a known, more impoverished area in the country.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Munir Yoweda's origin story starts with a father who was, by most everyone's account, a superhero.

• 4:11Speaker 06

  Marwan Yoweda, who is Munir Yoweda's father, trained in internal medicine at the American University of Helmut.

• 4:18Speaker 04

  This is Mayan Imzad. She's part of an investigative reporting duo based in Beirut, Lebanon. And she told me that Marwan Yoweda is kind of a big deal. After training in the United States, he returned to Lebanon in 1966 and was a pioneer in Lebanon's healthcare system.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  That was the year that Munir Yoweda was born. And that is when he introduced the specialty of infectious diseases, the practices of infection control and antibiotic utilization. So you have this man who is very, very talented and clearly kind of pioneer in his field, right? This very, very impressive man. It's kind of very interesting to see how far the apple fell from the tree.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  We don't know too much about teenage Munir, but we know that he and at least one of his sisters followed in their dad's footsteps, attending the American University of Beirut. Munir graduated from AUB's Medical School in 1991. One of his sisters is still at AUB. She's a professor there. Her specialty is in anti-corruption and ethical business practices for accountants worldwide.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  From 1991 to 1999, Munir's resume shows several things: a medical internship at NYU Medical Center in New York, Harvard and Albert Einstein Medical College for orthopedic training, a fellowship at Stanford for spinal surgery. And maybe it was in New York that Munir met a woman named Eha Erbsalu. She's the oldest romantic relationship that we could find for Munir. Eha was the runner-up for Miss Estonia in 1988. And she was also in New York in the 1990s. After all that, a job in Van Wirt, Ohio.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  We were looking for an orthopedic surgeon, probably 1998, 99. And we had put out a recruitment contract and he was one of our candidates. We did a visit to Van Wirt.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  This is Mark Minnick again, former CEO of Van Wirt County Hospital in Van Wirt, Ohio. I just really like saying Van Wirt.

• 6:29Speaker 05

  Well, I would say we're a typical Midwestern community. Van Wirt County is probably a population base of about 31,000. Van Wirt city itself is about 11,000. You know, the county fair is one of the big events of the year. All the things you kind of see about the Midwest in the movies kind of epitomizes Van Wirt.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Munir seems into it. He takes the job, moves into a house right across the street from Mark with a couple of show dogs, his former beauty queen, now fiance, along with an avid interest in horses, like really fancy horses.

• 7:05Speaker 05

  I mean, he had dogs, he had horses, he had models. And people always ask me, hey, did you think of anything? No, I know doctors who date models. I knew doctors who have show dogs and I knew no doctors who have horses. Now, I'm not sure I know a doctor who has all three, but not unusual hobbies for doctors.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  The year Aha and Munir moved to Ohio, they also started a modeling agency called E and M Model Management. According to media reports, the agency was offering foreign models, potential work in America.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  So I think we had like 18 kids in our neighborhood. I think 17 of them were boys and they were all under 14 years of age. So when they saw the models out jogging or whatever, I mean, they could draw attention. And then there was another one, and I think I've seen her on the internet as maybe another Miss Estonia or another Miss Estonia contestant. But they were there for a while too. And their appearance eventually led to Aha's disappearance, so to speak.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Soon, Aha, the now former fiance, had left. And Miss Estonia 1998, Kadri Valhutz, had arrived. She was also Miss Baltic Sea 1999.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  So the way doctors and hospitals operate does not make sense to me. I had Mark explain it. Van Wert County Hospital needed more orthopedic surgeons, so they recruited Munir.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  And we're thinking, well, Harvard's the gold standard. We're thinking Stanford's the gold standard.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  But hospitals rarely like hire doctors, like on a W2. When Munir arrived in Van Wert, Mark's hospital helped him set up a little company. Then the doctors at the hospital started referring their patients who needed an orthopedist to his new practice. And since it can take a minute for a new practice to get established, the hospital guaranteed Munir's new company an income, with the expectation that, once it was all up and running, Munir would pay that money back. It was like an advance.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  And then we watch and see when that revenue is sufficient enough to support the practice. And so we basically asked for financials on a monthly basis. And we found, basically, that he was doing much better than our guarantee.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Mark says he'd billed almost $2 million in under six months.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  And I would be the first one to say he built it up very quickly.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  But billed does not mean collected. So this is where things get a little confusing, but it's important, so I'm going to explain. As you know, if you've been to a doctor, when you get a bill, there's so many different things on it, and the rates can be, well, crazy. Sometimes you're all, did that really happen? And it cost how much? The thing is, doctors never expect to get all that money. They know they're usually just paid a fraction of it. Like, one insurance company might pay, say, 45% of what's billed. Medicare might pay, like, 80%. So what doctors bill and what they get can be really, really different.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  And it causes this very real temptation to overbill.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  Because they're the ones who order all the tests. They're the ones that order all the admissions. They do all those things. If physicians weren't honest, they could write their own paycheck.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Though hospitals like Van Wert County Hospital have a layer of oversight called peer review to make sure doctors aren't ordering unnecessary things.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  In other words, is what he's doing appropriate?

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Insurance companies do their own reviews, too. And this is maybe where some of that whole insurance companies deciding what's appropriate care and what's not appropriate care. This is where some of that comes from, just some. Doctors pushing the envelope and overbilling. So here's Munir Uweda, moving to Van Wert, Ohio with his beauty queen and suddenly billing a lot of money. And the hospital wanted to see what's going on here.

• 11:22Speaker 05

  So at that point in time, we wanted to reconcile with him. And he basically stonewalled us on that. Basically, what he did is he filed suit against us. And not only the hospital, but me specifically. So, you know, we were trying to work, work with him. And all of a sudden, we get slapped with a lawsuit. So as this stuff is going along, we're starting to figure out that we're dealing with a fairly sophisticated person. Not sophisticated in a good way, but probably sophisticated in ways that we typically don't deal with.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  It took 18 months to litigate.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  I think he went through five different attorneys in the process. He kind of used attorneys as a fungible good.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  In the end, Mark and the Van Wert County Hospital prevailed. The judge ordered Munir to repay over $400,000. But remember what gets billed versus what gets collected?

• 12:21Speaker 05

  So we had put the money in escrow. And the only people that could get access to the escrow were the attorneys. We went to the escrow, the money was gone. Dr. Uweda had forged his attorney's name and taken the money and it's gone with it. Judge Carr had some kind words for Dr. Uweda's attorney, who Dr. Uweda hoodwinked along with everybody else. So we had the judgment, but we didn't have the money.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, Munir had already like disappeared like months ago.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  He kind of vanished in the dead of night.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  When faced with that peer review for his almost $2 million in charges, Munir resigned his hospital privileges, which effectively squashed any inquiry.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, that squashes that because I don't, you know, my peer review is about me. I'm reviewing what's going on in my institution. And if he's out of there, then I don't have the right to review him anymore.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  Mark still doesn't know how much money Munir made while working in Van Wirt.

• 13:24Speaker 05

  I guess our impression of Uweda was, okay, he was not a great partner. He was not a great person to be associated with. But then some of the things post-wise, I mean, I think one of the things that the California Bureau of Investigation asked me that really kind of said, holy crap, you know, maybe I'm, maybe we avoided a really bad situation when they asked me if I ever feared for my life.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  You know, it's like, okay, why would I fear for my life? Should I have been worried? You know, my family lived there, all those types of things. But I don't know that he had advanced that far. I don't know that he was into it to the hundreds of millions of dollars, you know? And then the whole Juliana Redding thing. You know, maybe he just got deeper and deeper. But we just thought he was, you know, a basic crook.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Mark and his lawyers did eventually track Munir to California, and they did get their money. They may be the only ones to have gotten any money back from Dr. Munir Uweda.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Before the murder of Juliana Redding, before the alleged empire of corruption, Munir Uweda first made headlines in the gossip pages in Estonia.

• 15:12Speaker 07

  My name is Holger Ronnema. I'm an investigative reporter from Estonia. And the first article that I found mentioning Munir was published in October 1999.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  So this is right at the same time things are going sideways in Venvort.

• 15:29Speaker 07

  Definitely, they were local celebrities.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Where is Estonia? Just south of Finland, bordered by Russia in the east, Latvia in the south, and across the Baltic Sea from Stockholm, Sweden. It's a small country.

• 15:43Speaker 07

  The entire country is 1.3, 1.4 million people. So it's super tiny.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  Tallinn, the capital, was an old medieval town. Today, it's close to a half million people.

• 15:55Speaker 07

  It's a very lovely place where to be. And today, it's known a lot for its really vibrant startup community.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  So you got the boyfriend of two misses, Miss Estonia 1988 runner-up, now being seen around town with Miss Estonia 1998. People are gonna start talking.

• 16:15Speaker 07

  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. So media did write about it quite a lot at that time.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  The headline from November 15, 1999, reads, very direct, "Kadri Valhauts with Eha Erbsalu's Partner." Then, not two months later, on January 4, 2000, "Did Kadri Valhauts secretly get married abroad?" The article says, "From one Missus Cuddle to another, in recent months, Kadri Valhauts, who won the Miss Estonia title two years ago, has been in front of the lenses of photographers in the social media, and not alone. She is still in the photo series with a dark-blooded man. The mysterious companion is former Miss, Eha Erbsalu's Lebanese partner, Munir."

• 17:11Speaker 04

  And I'm just going to say this. Certain outlets in the Estonian press do not seem to give a F about certain journalistic standards. They call Munir at different times a "womanizer," "an exotic charmer," "an evil genius," and pretty much just assume all the charges against him are true. Different country, different rules, I guess.

• 17:32Speaker 07

  It took just two months. In the first reports, they were denying any romantic connections. And then later, it was confirmed that, yeah, they actually did get married really fast.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  I traded an email with Aha, but she didn't want to comment for the story. We also emailed Kadri, but never heard back. After the drama of the love triangle settled down, Munir and Kadri got down to business.

• 17:57Speaker 07

  I think it was in 2000 that they started buying up real estate in Estonia.

• 18:02Speaker 04

  Holger's research shows they bought an apartment in the luxurious and exclusive Old Town Tallinn. A nearly 2,000-square-foot apartment that would cost in the neighborhood of, say, 3/4 a million bucks today. Then, they bought an historic country manor. Think like Bridgerton, big house with a collection of buildings, sprawling grounds, like an historic estate.

• 18:24Speaker 07

  They bought it for 10 million Estonian crowns.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  That would be about 1.5 million in today's dollars. According to media reports, their goal was to turn it into a horse farm.

• 18:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, it looks like it was never properly developed into a horse farm. What I can find from one media report from 2004 is that allegedly, they brought, was it 10 or 12 Brazilian Mastiff dogs as well. They intended to bring a chimpanzee, they needed special permission to bring a chimpanzee from Lebanon to their farm.

• 19:01Speaker 04

  The Estonian press also reported that around that same time, Munir was leaving Estonia quite often, leaving Kadri at home.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  An article in the paper's "Stars" section is headlined, "Munir and Kadri Believe That The Separation Is Temporary." Kadri is quoted, "The family is in Estonia, and being with the family makes Munir happier than anything else."

• 19:26Speaker 07

  So Kadri used that opportunity to express that she didn't really understand what that fuss was about, that we are clearly in love, we were looking into each other's eyes, even when Munir is in the United States doing his MBA, that we are calling each other two times a day, but we are clearly, clearly, clearly in love.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Sounds very much like what you'd see in Hollywood, celebrities trying to quash rumors about whatever, you know?

• 19:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, I wouldn't know much about it.

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Just gonna say, Holger is a very accomplished investigative journalist, usually focused on Russia, financial crimes, stuff like that. I did get the feeling that this celebrity gossip stuff was kinda beneath him. During this period, Munir also pursued an MBA program at the very prestigious Morton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, he started establishing a new medical practice, this time in California. Holger dug into what was going on at the country manor in the early to mid 2000s. What he found was that it seemed like, at least at first, Munir and Kadri had big plans for rehabbing the estate, turning it into a state-of-the-art equestrian center.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Think million-dollar horses, genetic breeding program, very high-tech, very expensive, and potentially, very, very lucrative. But then, something changed.

• 20:55Speaker 08

  So I've just arrived at Fjerdan and der Alle. Fjerdan and der Alle is basically Fjerdan on the river Alle.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  And as soon as you arrive in Ferdin, and you look at the train station where I am now, it says "Rider's Stadt", which literally means rider's city or equestrian city.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  This is Rob Hyde. He's a freelance investigative reporter who's lived in Germany for over 20 years. Sometime around 2002, so a year or more after that last article about family making Munir happiest, Munir was spending time in the German countryside, in a small town called Ferdin. Ferdin is smack dab in the middle of Germany's ancestral centre for horse breeding and equestrian sports.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  It's incredibly scenic. You're riding through farms and you're seeing the windmills, all the fields, and then the horses, and it kind of gets you in the mood of it.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  According to German media reports, Munir's relationship with Ferdin was deeper than a simple love for horses. There is, you may have guessed it, a woman involved. Her name is Julia Koffler. She was 19 at the time. He was 35.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  And she was a real horse lover, but she was actually a waitress. She was about to graduate from high school in 2002. And then suddenly, this American businessman comes over and he puts a lot of effort, she said, into charming her. So she said, quoting, "He kept coming to town. He took me out. He was very charming. And I liked him a lot." And she was completely unaware that he had already married.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Rob's quoting from an interview with Julia published in 2016 in the German newspaper Kreuzzeitung. The article says that Julia identified a property near Ferdin similar to the Estonian estate. Julia says, quote, "He wanted to buy something. I found it with my contacts in Ferdin. This is it. I knew immediately. I talked him into it. It was our project. We both enjoyed it." They named the horse farm Gestut Eikenhain, or Oak Grove Stud Farm. Then Julia moved to California to be with Munir. In June 2006, they had twins. But by late 2006, according to court records,

• 23:21Speaker 04

  they already were in a child custody battle that would last several years. We reached out to Julia for this podcast, but she didn't want to comment.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  I just want to stop and point out that everything we've been talking about so far in this episode, none of it is illegal. Munir was buying real estate. He was having romances and children. He was having contract disputes. He was living in Estonia, spending time in Germany, getting a fancy business degree, and, starting from 2002, practicing medicine and starting to build a medical empire in Southern California. All this is leading up to the summer when he met Juliana Redding. Nothing here is illegal. But it is expensive, which leads to two very interesting and very pertinent questions.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  How could Munir afford all this? Where was the money coming from?

• 24:28Speaker 09

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• 24:52Speaker 09

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• 24:59Speaker 10

  One day last year, police entered a mansion in LA County and discovered the couple that live there had almost two dozen children, nearly every one of them born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 25:15Speaker 11

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 25:20Speaker 10

  I'm Eva Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.

• 25:36Speaker 12

  The one thing I could say was absolute certainty. California is the training center for all healthcare fraud and abuse.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  I want to introduce you to a guy named Bill Reynolds. Bill's been investigating medical fraud for 33 years. He's been studying Munir Uweda for over a decade now.

• 25:55Speaker 12

  My primary responsibility is California Work Comp. The fraud and abuse is just rampant. I had no idea.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  He has stories for days about the depth, dangers, and outrageous characters in the workers' comp fraud world.

• 26:11Speaker 12

  There was one doctor who, he traveled from facility to facility and he'd bring three physicians assistants with him. And each person, the doctor and the three PAs, would see 80 to 100 people in a day. It was just a mill operation. It was a traveling dock in a box. They would hand the patients, anywhere from 320 to 400 patients, five pharmaceuticals. And so they were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. And this is just one individual in there.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  It might sound super dry. Yes, a lot of money, but at the end of the day, it's, you know, insurance fraud, ripping off insurance companies. I mean, who likes those guys? But Bill's all, nah, man. This is actually life and death.

• 27:04Speaker 12

  Like, I had one individual who came to me. I think I reviewed 500 surgeries. I think it was 12% of the people died within six months of having the surgery. They would target Hispanics. Hey, let's recruit these patients from Mexico. So they'd offer them a pathway to citizenship. Come here, file a work comp claim. They would deplete them of a half a million dollars of healthcare benefits, hand the person a check for $25,000, and send them back across the border with a disability from a spinal surgery. Work comp patients are like an ATM card.

• 27:46Speaker 12

  They are a money generator for them. They want to push them into all those business units and deplete them of all his benefits, and they don't care if he rehabs or not.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  Bill says in the 2000s, most of the action in California was in pharmaceuticals.

• 28:06Speaker 12

  During this period of time, from 02 to 09, pharmaceuticals was the big dog. 50% of work comp, $13 billion.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  They'd see doctors, clinics, and other medical providers billing insane amounts. For example, take this drug, ranadine.

• 28:24Speaker 12

  This is a drug that they bought for $18, or paid $18 for, but they billed $532 for it. Every single patient got this drug plus four additional. And so you can see how much money is made off of that.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  But it was also everything else.

• 28:45Speaker 12

  What I call the Wheel of Fortune.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  The truly sophisticated operators would get business all around the wheel. Transportation services to take patients to and from appointments. Translation services for non-English speakers. Prescriptions and pharmaceuticals. And also, all the regular medical services, from doctor's appointments to imaging and diagnostics, all the way up to full-on surgeries.

• 29:10Speaker 12

  You just can't drop your guard around these guys because you're dealing with so much money. So much money. I mean, a typical back surgery is $80,000 to $82,000. On the average, these guys were $450,000 to $475,000. Just the one corner of the Wheel of Fortune was almost a half million dollars.

• 29:35Speaker 04

  Another example is that doctors would find loopholes in order to bill more. Say a doctor wants to give you an injection for pain. In his office, he could bill, say, $800 for that. But if you happen to have another office right across the hall that has an EKG machine, some oxygen in the corner in case something happens, suddenly it's an ambulatory surgical center and you can bill $15,000 for the exact same procedure.

• 30:03Speaker 12

  But nothing never, ever happens. It's just a loose nugget in the law that allows them to capitalize on that.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  So we're talking about lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars. And patients, some of whom actually need real care, are unknowingly slipping into this medical netherworld where they become, well...

• 30:35Speaker 12

  Like an ATM card.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  So this is the Southern California workers' comp world that, after leaving Ohio, hanging out in Estonia for a little while, a little German vacation, an MBA from the Wharton School, Munir Uweda decides to set up shop in. In 2004, Munir sets up a company called Frontline Medical. His empire would eventually grow to include over 30 different companies, all of which authorities allege were controlled by him in some way or another. Even though the actual names on the companies, the majority owners, the directors, the officers, et cetera, were not him. These companies were all around that Wheel of Fortune. MRI and imaging companies, a surgery center, a pharmaceutical company, a transportation

• 31:22Speaker 04

  company, the list goes on. Bill says back then, there were two players who were just milking the hell out of the workers' comp system. And through his investigation, he can see when Munir started working with them.

• 31:37Speaker 12

  I know that one of the contracts he had was dated back in 2002. So that's probably the start of his transition into the California fraud scheme.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  What I can tell you is that in 2005, there were complaints about Munir, that he wasn't performing his own surgeries. I mentioned this in an earlier episode. It eventually turned into an investigation by the California Medical Board that became a formal disciplinary action and would eventually lead to his medical license being revoked.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Why would he do this? Well, it could be any number of reasons. Maybe he wanted more billings. There are examples in the early 2000s of doctors claiming to do multiple surgeries a day, some by their physician assistants. And then billing for over a million dollars for one day's work.

• 32:27Speaker 12

  It's just unconscionable when one of the individual doctors, he started at 5 o'clock in the morning, and my partner went over and finally got him to come out around 9 o'clock from the operating room in his scrubs. And while he's talking to him, the guy's drunk off his ass. He's doing these surgeries drunk. And the hospital was turning their head to this because he's bringing in too much money.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Maybe Munir was just too busy to do the surgeries himself. He was growing a medical empire after all, and that takes time. It takes a lot of phone calls. You're managing a whole staff, multiple staffs. Regardless, Bill says, each innovation and fraud quickly spread. Everyone was learning from each other, working together, referring to each other, getting kickbacks for those referrals. You figure out a unique, new way to bilk the system?

• 33:28Speaker 12

  Well, once one individual does that, oh man, the train has left the station, it's being replicated by provider after provider. The greed you are, the deeper you're gonna go.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  He thinks Munir learned from these fraudster bigwigs. And soon, he says, rose to the top.

• 33:47Speaker 12

  It was follow the money. I equate it just like a drug dealer. You got a drug dealer who's dealing grams, and then you go to the next guy who's dealing an eight ball to a pound, and the guy who's dealing a kilo, and then sort of multi-kilo. Well, that's how I equated Yoweta. He followed that money to get up to be the top of the pyramid.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  And for the most part, it was fine. Business was humming. Sure, some other insurance investigators were digging into frontline medical and Munir, but the authorities? They had murderers to catch, thieves to deal with, crimes where there was a clear victim, a clear perpetrator, and cases that opened and closed. Until...

• 34:37Speaker 13

  Juliana Redding was found brutally murdered. This was a slow, brutal murder.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  A Santa Monica detective investigating the murder of Juliana Redding started hearing things. Not about the murder, but something with even more victims. And money. Lots of money. Her investigation led her to a Santa Monica storage facility. She opened a door, she looked inside, and found boxes. Boxes and boxes and boxes.

• 35:12Speaker 14

  It became obvious that these documents related to dozens and dozens of shell companies or other companies that were related to Ueda, that touched on what the homicide detective was hearing from witnesses. Allegations that he was engaged in massive healthcare fraud.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Next time, on Doctors Orders.

• 35:35Speaker 15

  From that point on, I was going to the medical clinic at least twice a week. It just hurt so bad, I can't even describe it. And I was like popping pills.

• 35:44Speaker 14

  Had a real estate empire. He had racing cars. He had dogs. He had horses. He was running all these things. How does one person do all that?

• 35:53Speaker 16

  One of the first pieces of evidence that we found was a bill that was submitted to an insurance company for treatment by a doctor. Well, that doctor on that date was in jail.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  That's in episode 5, Ashes to Ashes.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  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 Nada 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 five, Ashes to Ashes.

• 36:54Speaker 17

  Welcome to The Haunted Library. Join me, Colin Morgan, as I read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. A story of science and ambition, loneliness and longing, and what it truly means to be human. Listen to The Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts, or find us on YouTube.