Chiropractor who admitted bribing St. Louis cops sentenced to prison, must pay $1 million

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)

Oct. 11--ST. LOUIS -- A chiropractor who bribed St. Louis police officers to get information he used to solicit clients was sentenced in federal court Wednesday to 30 months in prison and was ordered to pay more than $1 million.

Mitchell E. Davis has already paid $696,000 restitution to 12 insurance companies for elevated settlement amounts caused by his clients' exaggeration of their symptoms, according to court testimony. But U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel ordered Davis to pay a $350,000 fine.

Davis also has closed his practice and forfeited his license.

Davis and his wife, Galina Davis, used nonpublic information from hundreds or thousands of accident reports to solicit clients from 2007 to 2016, according to their plea agreements. Mitchell Davis then pressured some of those clients into exaggerating their symptoms to boost insurance payouts, prosecutors have said, focusing on low income clients because he thought them more likely to be receptive.

His plea says he told patients that higher medical bills would boost insurance settlements. Mitchell Davis disputes prosecutors' claim that he told the firm's chiropractors to include exaggerated "pain levels in their treatment notes and to order as many services as the patients would accept, whether the patients needed or wanted the services."

He also sent patients to pain management doctors before determining whether they needed those services and had chiropractors perform therapeutic massage knowing they weren't licensed to do so, his plea says.

Davis' office was known as Davis Chiropractic, at 4144 Lindell Boulevard, and later City Health & Chiropractic.

Mitchell Davis pleaded guilty in December to charges of conspiracy and making a false statement concerning a health care matter. Galina Davis pleaded guilty the same day to a misdemeanor charge of conspiring to access a computer without authorization and has yet to be sentenced.

Mitchell Davis and his attorneys sought probation, not prison time, Wednesday, citing a series of factors. Davis pleaded guilty early, cooperated with investigators and the largest affected insurance company, paid the restitution and had undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, attorney Richard Finneran said.

They also complained that two lawyers who they claimed were more culpable and who had profited more that Mitchell Davis had not been charged.

Davis apologized in court, saying he was just trying to help car accident patients get fined insurance settlements and didn't think it was a crime.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dorothy McMurtry responded that Mitchell Davis lied to investigators and put his wife "out front," as the person who had to "cold call" officers to find someone to help them and solicit patients. He also caused police officers to neglect their jobs so they could pull reports for him, she said.

Two of the former police officers implicated in the scheme have also pleaded guilty.

Terri Owens pleaded guilty in December to felony bribery and admitted taking thousands of dollars in bribes from 2011 to 2016. Cauncenet H. Brown pleaded guilty in July to a conspiracy charge, admitting helping another officer provide information before doing so on her own. Brown earned just $5 to $15 for each report, netting an estimated total of $14,400.

Former officers Marlon Caldwell and Mark Taylor have pleaded not guilty and are scheduled to go to trial Dec. 3.

Owens left the department in September 2017. Caldwell was an officer from 1990 until he retired Jan. 3, 2011. Brown was a St. Louis officer from 2003-2011 and 2013-2015. Taylor began his police career in 1990 and retired in January.

Mitchell and Galina Davis struggled to obtain accident report information for years, suing for access for no charge and being lauded as "Sunshine Heroes" for that in 2012. Greg Saikin, an attorney for Mitchell Davis, said accident reports had been publicly available in the past, but full reports were no longer made public after a change in department policy. Addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates and insurance information for occupants of vehicles was blacked out.

The Davises sometimes asked lawyers to get the information for them. At other times, their employees pretended to work for accident victims' attorneys to get the nonpublic information. They also used police officers, who accessed reports from police stations and their police vehicles, then took cash payoffs.

It's not clear how the scheme was discovered, but during the investigation, FBI agents and the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General listened in as Galina Davis sought to find new officers to take her bribes.

In October 2016, when Owens balked at continuing the scheme, federal agents watched and listened as Galina Davis was rejected by three officers she approached for help.

___

Visit the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at www.stltoday.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.