Under Florida law, a sober home—a place for recovering addicts to live—operates under a typical landlord-tenant arrangement. The resident pays rent, and the landlord provides a place to live—but not actual treatment. In general, sober homes consist of communities of people who agree to live together in a drug-free environment. A drug treatment facility, however, is much more proactive and offers medical treatment, so it must be licensed.

And that’s where Chatman’s crimes began. Chatman was legally able to have the several sober homes that he owned and operated, but he was not allowed to own a treatment facility because he was a previously convicted felon, having served time for credit card fraud. After opening sober homes, he realized there was more money to be made in a treatment facility, so he opened one in his wife’s name.

Once the treatment facility was up and running, Chatman began requiring patients to provide urine and saliva samples three times per week, even though he knew many were continuing to use drugs in his facilities. If a patient did not show up, he would have an employee give the samples, pretending to be the patient. Chatman received about $5,000 for each sample from patients’ insurance companies for the testing, and he would personally pocket $2,500 of that payment. The labs also provided Chatman kickbacks in exchange for the business, in violation of Florida’s anti-patient brokering law.

The FBI’s investigation began with an insurance fraud tip, and concerns about Chatman grew when a man overdosed in one of the facilities.

“Everything he was doing with this testing had a cloud of potential legitimacy, but experts said these tests were excessive and not in the patients’ best interest,” Gerrity said. “Patients were getting bills of up to a million dollars a year for all of this testing, and he was also billing for ‘therapy’ sessions that were just patients sitting in a room watching a movie.”