Ex-Oregon dentist sentenced for fraudulently seeking $170m in COVID-19 aid and distributing steroids, prescription meds

Published 5:42 pm Thursday, February 16, 2023

A former West Linn dentist who fraudulently applied for more than $170 million in COVID-19 relief money and used his medical position to illegally distribute thousands of doses of steroids and prescription medications was sentenced Thursday to nearly six years in federal prison.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman rejected the prosecution’s call for a stiffer sentence, largely because he said he was deeply troubled by the poor medical care provided to Salwan Wesam Adjaj at Multnomah County’s Inverness Jail over the last year and two months.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ethan Knight had asked for a sentence of seven years and three months for Adjaj, 44.

Mosman instead sentenced Adjaj to five years and 10 months.

The judge also ordered Adjaj to pay $10.5 million in restitution — equivalent to what he stole from the Economic Impact Disaster Loans and the Paycheck Protection Program, according to prosecutors. Both programs allowed small businesses harmed by pandemic closures to apply for the low-interest loans.

Adjaj pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft from one indictment and to distribution and possession with intent to sell controlled substances from a separate indictment.

He filed dozens of fraudulent loan and grant applications from September 2020 to May 2021, sometimes using fictitious restaurant businesses and lying about employees, to the Small Business Administration.

Adjaj engaged in “gigantic and concerted and lengthy serious acts of fraud,” Mosman found.

While Adjaj and his lawyer said he initially applied for the loans to cover a personal debt, he clearly “went far beyond” that, the judge said.

“Salwan Adjaj executed an elaborate ruse to take advantage of federal emergency assistance in a time when so many businesses were struggling to stay afloat,” Kieran L. Ramsey, special agent in charge of Oregon’s FBI Portland office, said in a statement.

Separately, Adjaj used his medical position for more than four years to obtain thousands of doses of anabolic steroids, hundreds of vials of testosterone, more than 3,000 tablets of Xanax and other prescription medications for his personal use and to sell to others, according to prosecutors.

Adjaj’s dental license was suspended in 2020 after an investigation by the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Oregon Board of Dentistry.

The board had received a tip on July 22, 2020, that Adjaj was ordering large quantities of drugs, including the anabolic steroids, from domestic and international retailers. The investigation also showed that Adjaj was practicing dentistry while he was under the influence of a controlled substance that he wasn’t prescribed, according to a board summary.

From March 10, 2016, to Jan. 7, 2020, he ordered 23 different medications from the pharmaceutical company, Seacoast Medical. There was no legitimate medical use for the drugs in Adjaj’s dental practice, according to the board.

Noting that Adjaj came to the United States 28 years ago from Iraq, educated himself and built a lucrative dental practice, Knight said, “he knows more than anyone what was right and what was wrong, and his conduct was demonstrably wrong.”

Adjaj stood slightly hunched over before the judge and apologized to all his victims. At a difficult time in his life, he said he made a series of wrong decisions that led to his arrest.

“I’m extremely ashamed,” he said. He pledged to become a model, law-abiding citizen.

“Salwan Adjaj’s crimes showed both his indifference to those enduring the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and his disregard for the health and safety of those to whom he unlawfully dispensed prescription drugs,” Oregon’s U.S. Attorney Natalie Wight said.

Before he issued a sentence, the judge expressed outrage at Adjaj’s treatment in jail.

Adjaj suffers from neurological ailments including numbness in his limbs and corneal ectasia.

The county corrections health clinic at the jail never got him an appointment as requested to see a pain management specialist and took more than a year to get him to an appointment with an ophthalmologist at OHSU’s Casey Eye Institute.

While in jail, Adjaj has lost vision in his right eye to the point he has difficulty “seeing at all,” said his lawyer, Ronald H. Hoevet.

County health staff appeared to blame the delay in getting Adjaj to an eye doctor or an appointment with a pain management specialist on an alleged failure of the U.S. Marshals Service to sign off on payment for the care, which records showed wasn’t true.

Mosman said when he puts people in custody, he wants them treated honestly.

“This man was lied to,’’ the judge said. “When they start blame shifting, that’s when I smell a rat.”

The U.S. marshals, he said, were “ready, willing and able to fund his care.”

The delays affected Adjaj’s vision and mobility, Mosman said.

“It’s not what I’ll put up with,” the judge said.

The prosecution called Dr. Elaine Marcus of the Multnomah County Health Department to testify about her handling of Adjaj’s medical care at the jail. She testified that no one is able to get a pain management appointment at a local hospital because both OHSU Hospital and Legacy Emanuel Medical Center have been full and not accepting new patients.

Jail medical charts showed that in July an appointment for Adjaj to see a pain management specialist was “pending,” but the jail made no referral for him to see a specialist until November of last year, Hoevet pointed out during his cross examination of Marcus.

While Marcus said she filled out a referral form and sent it to an administrative appointment scheduler for Adjaj to see a pain management specialist, there was no follow-up to see if an appointment ever was made, according to her testimony.

Asked if she told Adjaj that the lack of action on his medical care was due to the “feds’ lack of effort,” as Adjaj wrote to his lawyer in a June email after seeing Marcus, Marcus said she didn’t recall.