Prison for ex-cop who led $9M painkiller ‘pill mill’

An ex-police officer at the center of an online effort that illegally distributed thousands of doses of prescription narcotics has been sentenced to eight years in prison.

Sentenced Friday at U.S. District Court in Seattle, Juan Gallinal was swept up in a Drug Enforcement Administration operation targeting an online pharmacy ring he helped build into a leading illicit supplier of pain medication. Gallinal, 49, of Pembroke Pines, Florida, worked as a police officer in Virginia before getting into the pharmaceutical business.

Federal prosecutors say Gallinal organized the online pharmacy operation. He and others took over a small drugstore and then turned it into a massive online pill mill.

“This defendant is one of the ‘founding fathers’ of this internet pharmacy business that exploited the drug addiction of people across the country for his own gain,” said Annette L. Hayes, U.S. attorney for Western Washington. “Using a sham owner, shell corporations and databases hidden on a server in Switzerland, Mr. Gallinal tried to hide his business and his role from the law.”

Defense attorney Jeffrey Kradel noted that Gallinal’s crimes wouldn’t have been possible without what he described as the “knowing assistance” of drug manufacturers and distributors, among others.

“Those larger entities, whose profits from these enterprises dwarf the dollars Mr. Gallinal generated, walk away with large fines, but no criminal prosecution,” Kradel said in court papers.

One recent effort to win a heavy penalty against FedEx evaporated in July, with prosecutors withdrawing charges that could’ve carried up to $1.6 billion in fines. An attorney for FedEx told Bloomberg News the case “should never have been brought." Federal prosecutors in San Francisco had hoped to show that FedEx profited from illicit prescription drug sales through its prescription drug delivery business.

The city of Everett recently filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, maker of the ubiquitous painkiller OxyContin. According to an (Everett) Herald report, city officials claim Purdue failed to stop selling its drug to pill mills that in turn supplied addicts across Snohomish County and elsewhere.

Gallinal and others operated several online pharmacies – Discount Pharmacy and, later, A-1 Pharmacy among them – that shipped hundreds of thousands of pills of hydrocodone, phentermine, Xanax and codeine to people across the country who did not have valid prescriptions for the narcotics. They brought in more than $9 million during their three years in operation.

Investigators found that the pharmacy operators sometimes concocted prescriptions by picking physicians in the same area as the customer and filling the prescription using the physician’s DEA number without the physician’s knowledge. The pharmacy charged as much as 10 times the usual price for the medications.

In June 2012, the DEA seized the websites, computers and drug inventory associated with the illegal pharmacy. Charges followed against Gallinal and at least four others, all of whom pleaded guilty to federal drug charges.

Gallinal pleaded guilty in June to several drug-related counts and agreed to forfeit $1.9 million in proceeds from the operation.

The sentence delivered Friday by U.S. District Judge Richard Jones appears to be the longest imposed in the matter. According to a U.S. Attorney’s Office statement, Jones remarked that Gallinal was “the orchestrator, conductor, composer and chief engineer making this engine run.”

The prison term will undoubtedly mark a low point for Gallinal, a father of three who appears to have lived a law-abiding life before taking up the drug trade. Statements to the court from his attorney and supporters describe a decent, dutiful man at odds with the figure who made millions off of the addictions of others.

“I am not one to believe that the prisons are full of innocent people who have been victims of the system,” Gallinal said in a letter to the court. “The victims are the people I have hurt along the way, not myself. The victims are family and friends on both sides who are dealing with the aftermath of drug addiction. …

“I lost sight of what was important, and let money drive my choices, and forget about people. People I know and love, and people who would inevitably be hurt by the drugs we were selling. It will not happen again.”

Gallinal served in the U.S. Marine Corps before joining the police force in Alexandria, Virginia. He left law enforcement in 1994 and went to work in a medical business; that road, his attorney said in court papers, ultimately ended in illicit online pharmacies.

Writing the court, Kradel said Gallinal fell in with veteran pill farm operator Vineet Chhabra, who’d served prison time for running an operation like the one Gallinal would foster. Chhabra, Kradel said, introduced Gallinal to “an industry that was operating in an area where criminal and legal conduct were sometimes indistinguishable.”

“In South Florida, it became a thriving business, involving doctors, lawyers and businessmen like Mr. Chhabra, and eventually Mr. Gallinal, who found great profits to be had in what was a murky realm of legal and illegal conduct,” Kradel said in court papers.

Kradel said Gallinal had been put “on notice” that his actions were illegal. But, the defense attorney said, Gallinal reasoned that the rewards were greater than the risks.

Gallinal was abusing drugs himself, said Kradel, suggesting that his client’s addiction impaired his judgment.

Presently free on bond, Gallinal is expected to report to the Bureau of Prisons once space is available for him.