The Omidi Family In 2020, the Omidi family tried to sell
their Southern California home for $30 million. The house was three stories tall and featured a
full-sized tennis court. It had 18,000 square feet of indoor space and a full view of Los Angeles.
The SoCal mansion had a long history of upper-class tenants long before the Omidi
brothers. Elizabeth Taylor once called it home, and Mike Tyson even made moves to buy
the property in 1997. But then he bit off someone's ear, and the deal fell through.
The estate changed hands between Hollywood directors and retired NBA stars before
finally falling into Prince's lap in 2005. He was renting it for $70,000 per month,
but when he replaced the carpets with monogrammed purple shag and painted the driveway purple,
the Landlord kicked him out. The property changed hands again, being purchased by the founder of
Rockstar Energy Drinks. However, when the housing market collapsed in 2010, he offloaded the mansion
to two multi-million Beverly Hills doctors running the most popular weight loss program in town.
It soon became the Omidi's turn to sell the house,
but why sell a home this extravagant? Well, the family couldn't use it anymore. In 2020,
the Omidi's were in the middle of a massive investigation and facing 20 years in prison
for the most extensive and deadliest weight loss scam in history.
1-800 GET THIN If you lived in the
Los Angeles metro area between 2010 to 2016, you probably saw one of these 1-800 Get Thin
billboards. There were tv commercials too. 1-800 Get Thin was a marketing firm that
contracted its services to private weight loss companies. These companies, in essence,
used Get Thin to market their products on tv and billboards.
Dr. Julian Omidi helped found Get Thin with businessman Robert Silverman in 2010,
though Silverman resigned in 2012. By then, two things were happening:
the authorities were investigating Get Thin, and the Omidi family had taken over the company.
Even though Silverman was the firm's president,
he wasn't really the one in charge. Get Thin was a family business.
Family Business If Get Thin was a family business,
Julian was the patriarch, despite not being the oldest in the family. Julian not only
helped found the company, but he designed the Get Thin system and integrated his family into it.
He first brought his brother Michael, a plastic surgeon, into the company and made
him part owner alongside Silverman. Though it is unclear how involved she was, Julian's mom
Cindy was added to the Get Thin team. Unlike her sons, Cindy wasn't a physician.
Together, they helped build the business. Two years after they founded Get Thin,
the family and the entire company were investigated for defrauding their patients
and insurance providers out of over $355 million.
And, as investigators would discover, Get Thin was only the first act of a much bigger play.
OmidiSurgery Management Remember the weight loss
companies we mentioned earlier? Well, Julian and Michael owned two of those companies.
The primary company they sent patients to was OmidiSurgery Management. The other was called
Independent Medical Services. Both OmidiSurgery and Independent opened most of their locations
around Southern California. Beverly Hills served as the core of their company and culture.
Beverly Hills is a very image-conscious area. It has a reputation for hosting fit
and healthy residents, like famous Hollywood actors and actresses. In other words,
Beverly Hills embodied weight loss; it was a Get Thin billboard on its own.
For that reason, the Omidi's built their business there in West LA,
fitting right in with all the other plastic surgery centers and weight loss clinics.
However, the Omidi's didn't use the same methods as the plastic
surgeons or the nutritionists. Instead, they used Lap Bands.
Lap Band Lap bands aren’t actual bands,
at least not what you're probably thinking of. It's more like an inflatable silicone belt. This
belt gets wrapped around the entrance to your stomach and restricts the amount of food that
goes in. Basically, you feel full much quicker, thus, needing to eat less to satisfy that feeling.
The procedure is simple and very popular. People who struggle with obesity but can't
diet and exercise—or simply don't want to—can force themselves to lose weight with Lap Bands.
However, the surgery plus the Lap-Band itself are expensive. Most people need their insurance
provider to cover those costs, and if they don't, they can't afford the procedure.
But that's not the approach Julian and Michael took while operating their weight loss centers.
Sleep Study The Omidi's
unique Lap-Band procedure required every applicant to participate in a sleep study. Keep in mind,
no other known Lap-Band provider requires a sleep study. The Omidi's argued they
were necessary for testing patients for sleep apnea, a breathing condition that
disproportionately affects people suffering from obesity.
Their logic sounded reasonable enough, but, in reality, there was no medical
reason for the required sleep study. There was, however, a monetary one.
Insurance Whenever a patient called
the 1-800 Get Thin number, the sales team urged them to participate in the sleep study. However,
the Omidi's didn't have time to oversee the day-to-day sales operation. They
couldn't be there to make sure their employees were putting in the effort
needed to reel in a consistent flow of sleep study applicants.
So, the Omidi's offered their employees a commission for every sleep study patient
they sold to. The commissions worked very well. OmidiSurgery
and Independent tricked hundreds of people into participating in their bogus studies.
These studies were a double whammy for both the patient and insurance companies.
Most patients were told that their insurance would cover the sleep study costs. However,
they weren't told how much the study would cost if they didn't qualify.
In other words, if the insurance company didn't get scammed, the patient would. But the Omidi's
didn't care which party got stuck with the bill, as long as someone paid up. And those
payments could get very high, especially for something as simple as a sleep study.
Several patients received $15,000 medical bills from the Omidi's in the mail.
These fees added up to over $38 million when counted by investigators from 2012 to 2016.
Aside from the exorbitant fees, the Omidi's sleep studies also served another purpose:
to funnel prospective patients into the operating room.
The doctors and nurses conducting the sleep studies were instructed by the Omidis to
diagnose the patients with sleep apnea. It didn't matter whether or not they actually suffered from
the disorder. On several occasions, the Omidi's medical staff would falsify the patient's weight,
inflating the number so they'd look more obese on paper.
The goal was for the surgery centers to sell as many Lap Band installations as
possible. The Omidi's knew that if their patients met the coverage requirements,
they could force the insurance companies to pay for the procedures,
even if the patient didn't qualify for the procedure.
Those insurance companies ended up paying hundreds of millions of dollars to the Omidi family.
And most of the companies were healthcare benefit programs like Anthem Blue Cross,
UnitedHealthcare, and Tricare.
The Insurance companies lost a lot of money, and so did the patients, who,
on rare occasions, lost much more than their money.
Patients OmidiSurgery,
Independent, and Get Thin have been sued several times since 2010. One of their most
infamous cases, involving former patient Laura Faitro, was particularly eye-opening. It exposed
not only the mindset of the Omidi family but also exposed some dirt on the Omidi brothers.
Laura Faitro was just like any other Get Thin patient. She saw the ads on tv,
called the number, made the appointment, and participated in the sleep test. However,
when Laura arrived at the operating table, something went terribly wrong.
After waking up, Laura started experiencing severe pain near her stomach. She assumed it
was from the surgery and went home, not realizing that her liver was lacerated.
Laura passed away shortly after, and her autopsy revealed the lacerated liver. Laura's husband
John was told the mortal affliction must have occurred during her Lap-Band surgery.
John filed a lawsuit against the Omidi run weight loss center. The doctor who performed
Laura's surgery, Dr. Ihan Shamaan, was worried. He claimed in court that when he approached his boss,
Julian, about the incident, he said not to worry about it.
He claims Julian told him that a lawsuit wouldn't be a big deal because they made $21 million a
month. Dr. Shamaan never saw his job the same way again. Later, he testified against Julian
and the other doctors involved in the Get Thin scam. But not before
four other victims lost their lives to botched surgeries.
The fifth and last victim was Paula Rojeski. She passed away in September 2011. Her friend asked
her not to get the surgery, telling Paula that she didn't even need it. Nevertheless, Paula wanted
to be thin, like the people in Beverly Hills. She didn't even make it off the operating table alive.
When the police discovered that Paula had lost her life at an Omidi clinic,
they put two and two together. LAPD homicide launched an investigation
into Paula's passing and searched for any evidence that'd lead back to the Omidi brothers.
The detectives and other law enforcement agencies found some harrowing evidence,
mainly from disaffected doctors like Dr. Shamaan and his former coworker Dyanne Deuel.
Medical Support Dyanne led the medical
support staff until she quit after seeing how the Omidi's ran their business. She described
the patient care as well below average, to say the least. Dyanne said the clinic sent
patients home despite complaining about abdominal pain and shortness of breath.
Authorities listened to these testimonies and others by former patients,
eventually deciding to indict the Omidis in 2018.
Besides law enforcement, the media also did some investigating of their own.
Paula's strange passing prompted LA Times journalist
Michael Hiltzik to investigate the Omidi family, specifically. He discovered some
very suspicious background information on the two alleged doctors.
For starters, he found out that Julian and Michael don't perform
any of the surgeries themselves. And, perhaps for a good reason.
Julian got caught trying to steal exam papers to cheat on a test in college,
and his medical license was later revoked. Though he did get it back later on in his career.
Michael also lost his medical license privileges for three years before being reinstated in 2011.
Judging by their record,
these two brothers weren’t highly esteemed medical professionals. But they were expert criminals.
1-800 Get Arrested The Omidi family was arrested in early 2018.
Julian, Michael, and even their mother, Cindy, faced charges. Julian, in particular,
faced several counts, including identity theft, conspiracy to launder money, 28 counts of wire
fraud, and, of course, two counts of making false statements relating to healthcare matters.
In 2021, Julian was convicted on all counts.
He's looking at two years in prison, with a maximum sentence of 20.
Julian and Michael's mother Cindy was charged with
conspiring to launder money and sentenced to probation.
On the other hand, Michael is still practicing medicine in Southern California as a plastic
surgeon. Whether or not he is charged with any crimes remains to be seen.
With all the negative publicity, Michael and his family's future looks pretty grim.
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you’d rather have, a billion dollars but be 80 years old, or have $50k in debt but be 21?