A brother of Anthony W. Albanese, who partnered with a doctor to profit off free prescription samples, says the 37-month sentence is too lenient.

01:00 AM EST on Saturday, November 6, 2004

BY TRACY BRETON
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Anthony W. Albanese, the former owner of Cameron's Pawtuxet Pharmacy in Cranston, was sentenced yesterday to serve 37 months in federal prison for selling prescription drug samples to customers at his business as part of a scheme with a now-jailed doctor to make extra money.

Albanese, 48, of 11 Kristen Drive, North Providence, was also ordered to forfeit $431,410.62 to the government and to pay a $45,000 fine -- half of which will go to the whistleblower in the case, Kelly Walsh, who worked as an assistant in the office of Dr. Wallace E. Gonsalves Jr., Albanese's partner in crime who is serving 10 years in prison.

In imposing the 37-month prison term on Albanese -- 3 months more than the government had recommended -- U.S. District Judge Mary M. Lisi called the defendant's crimes "despicable."

"This case, as with the case of [Gonsalves], is a tale of greed and lack of concern for innocent people who relied on this defendant and his codefendant to provide medical care," said Lisi.

Although Albanese is not a pharmacist and did not personally fill prescriptions for the customers of his Broad Street pharmacy, the judge said his decision to sell medication that in some cases was outdated, below full strength and manufactured in other countries "put in jeopardy the lives of innocent people."

"Not only did you cheat" the health insurance companies that were billed for the full cost of the prescription drugs, Lisi told Albanese, but the customers of Cameron's will never know whether they received medicine that was too old or below normal potency.

Albanese pleaded guilty in July to four charges of a 72-count indictment: unlawfully selling to unwitting customers drugs that Gonsalves had received for free as promotional samples, conspiring with the doctor to sell the drug samples, health care fraud and money laundering.

Prosecutors Luis M. Matos and Lisa Dinerman told Lisi at the time of the plea that from July 2000 to August 2002, Gonsalves -- a millionaire Cranston doctor who worked out of an office at 1596 Broad St. -- regularly sold free drug samples he'd received from manufacturers to Albanese, who would pick up the samples and stuff them into plastic garbage bags. Albanese would then mix the samples in with regular stock at his pharmacy and sell the pills to customers, according to the prosecutors.

The government says that Cameron's sold 209,797 of the sample pills -- including Lipitor, Celebrex, Vioxx, Paxil, Avandia and Prilosec -- and then illegally received $431,410.62 from health insurers by filing fraudulent reimbursement claims. It is illegal under federal law to divert patient samples for sale.

Gonsalves, who pleaded guilty to the same charges, except money laundering, as Albanese, was also convicted at a separate trial of diluting vaccines that he injected into more than 600 immigrant patients. In September, he was sentenced by Lisi to serve 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $510,000 in fines to the U.S. government and $431,410.62 to the various health insurers who were bilked as part of his scheme to sell the free samples he'd received from pharmaceutical companies. Albanese is responsible for the latter fine if the doctor does not pay the full amount. The doctor, who no longer has a license to practice, was also ordered to pay $157,425 in restitution to the 627 patients to whom he administered the diluted vaccines, and $3,400 in special assessments.

Albanese no longer has an ownership interest in Cameron's. His wife, Mona, and son, Anthony Jr., are now the sole stockholders, according to a Health Department official who was present at today's sentencing.

Asked before his sentencing whether he had anything he wanted to say, Albanese apologized to Lisi and to his wife and son, who were sitting in the courtroom.

"Truly I'm sorry," he said. "Never did I ever think I was putting anyone's life in jeopardy."

Albanese said he got involved in running the pharmacy after the death in 1998 of his father, John Albanese Sr., who owned Cameron's and was a pharmacist there. "I've got a 12th-grade education," he told the court.

Albanese will have to report to prison by Nov. 26. He is free on bail until then. Upon his release, he will be on three years' probation. In addition to the forfeiture and the fines, he was ordered to pay a $400 special assessment.

After court, his brother John Albanese Jr. called Anthony Albanese's actions "an abuse of trust" and decried the sentence as too lenient. "It was a slap on the wrist," he said. "In my opinion, whatever he got would not be enough. He ruined the pharmacy name, the family name, my name. We live with it every day, running into customers of the pharmacy all the time."

John Albanese Jr. also asserted that the forfeiture order and the fine, while seemingly onerous, weren't much to his brother, who, he said, owns considerable real estate throughout Rhode Island. He said that after his father died, he and his other brother, William, owned Cameron's with Anthony, but that Anthony bought them out in 1999.

Mark Dragonetti, a Food and Drug Administration agent who investigated the case, said after the sentencing that there was no wrongdoing on the part of the pharmacists at Cameron's and that former employees at the pharmacy had cooperated with the federal investigation.

"We talked to a lot of former employees who were aware there were improprieties with regards to the drug stock in the form of overflowing bottles and the makeup of the stock," he said. Some of the drugs being sold to customers were made out of the country, Dragonetti said.