Dr. Frank Stirlacci struggling to rebuild life, restore reputation after being cleared of criminal charges

SPRINGFIELD — After being charged with more than 100 counts of issuing false prescriptions and making phony insurance claims in the midst of the nation’s opioid crisis, Dr. Frank Stirlacci lost it all.

Prior to his indictment in 2017, he had two thriving medical practices, a stately, 5,000-square-foot home at the crest of Longhill Street in Springfield and another home in Kentucky. Beyond that, he had fulfilled a lifelong dream of being a family practitioner like his late uncle and mentor, Dr. Joseph Stirlacci.

Today, at 59, he lives in an Extended Stay America hotel outside of Chicago and is unemployed.

“I own a 15-year-old truck with 100,000 miles on it, and that’s it,” Stirlacci, who grew up in Springfield, said during recent interviews after he and an assistant were cleared of all charges following a jury-waived trial in Hampden Superior Court.

Stirlacci says he was forced to abandon thousands of patients, liquidate his retirement fund, borrow money, max out credit cards and default on leases for his offices.

“If it weren’t for my family and significant others, I would be literally homeless. It’s devastated everything,” he said.

His attorney, A.J. O’Donald, went with Stirlacci to Max’s Tavern to celebrate his court victory on July 15.

“You would have thought this guy was the mayor. ‘Hey, doc, how you doing? It’s been too long! When will you start taking patients again?’” O’Donald recounted of how Stirlacci was greeted at the restaurant.

Being cleared of the criminal charges alone, though, won’t restore his life and professional standing. Stirlacci lost his state license to practice medicine, as well as his certification required under federal law to prescribe drugs.

Stirlacci briefly was a security guard at the Eastern States Exposition “for the gas money,” and later worked for a time at a medical practice in Indiana, where he also was licensed to practice. But no one wants to employ a doctor who can’t write prescriptions, though. So the battle continues.

Trouble began when Stirlacci was amid a messy divorce in 2015. A judge in Kentucky, where his estranged wife lived, jailed the doctor for failing to pay legal fees, and there he sat for three weeks.

Stirlacci was held in a large community cell with alleged murderers, rapists, gun-runners and drug dealers, according to O’Donald. There were approximately 30 other inmates in the space where they shared three doorless bathrooms and one telephone.

He was jailed two weeks before the Kentucky Derby, when the area simultaneously lights up and shuts down, Stirlacci said. That slowed his ability to correct the course of his legal conundrum through the courts.

Meanwhile, at his longtime practice in Agawam where he was the only doctor, his patients needed care. And they needed prescriptions — some, specifically, for pain medicine and methadone.

Using the jailhouse telephone, he instructed his medical assistant and office manager, Jessica Miller, to fulfill the prescriptions using pre-signed authorizations he kept under lock and key.

She also followed his directive to bill insurance companies for office visits because the laws around prescribing narcotics had recently changed. As the opioid crisis ramped up, patients were required to pay monthly office visits to see physicians in person to re-up on those prescriptions, as opposed to having prescriptions that would automatically renew for months at a time.

Gov. Charlie Baker officially declared the crisis in 2015, citing an estimated 1,000 unintentional opioid-related deaths the year before. He appointed an 18-member Opioid Working Group of medical experts that February. Massachusetts opioid deaths reached a high of 2,102 in 2016 and have been hovering around that number each year since then.

“It was an example of a personal situation bleeding into a professional disaster,” Stirlacci said, adding that he was concerned for his patients’ well-being. “You do not abruptly stop opioid medication unless you know a patient is diverting,” or selling it.

Stirlacci contends none of his patients were “addicts.” They were primarily blue-collar workers who had been injured on jobs requiring physical labor, and some had painful chronic diseases, such as prostate cancer that crept into bones.

For Miller’s part, she felt her employer’s directives seemed benign enough. They had the same arrangement previously whenever he traveled out of town or went on vacation.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, state police and county prosecutors did not agree. Miller, a single mother of two from Palmer, was indicted along with Stirlacci. She faced multiple counts of filing false insurance claims over the office visit issue but was acquitted in last month’s trial.

“I was blindsided with the whole indictment situation,” Miller said recently during an interview with her and her attorney, Roy Anderson. “I don’t have a record and I had never been in trouble. I lost my job. I didn’t sleep forever. It was just awful.”

Miller googled the word “indictment” because she didn’t know what it meant. As the case dragged on, she passed on chaperoning one of her child’s field trips. She was afraid she’d turn up with a criminal record in a routine screening, though she hadn’t been convicted.

She had worked with “Dr. Frank” for four years. It was her first job as a medical assistant since earning her professional certificate after having children.

“I loved it. I would still be with Dr. Frank if he had an office. The patients were wonderful. It was a small-town practice,” Miller said.

She attributes the criminal case, in part, to animus between her and a newly hired nurse practitioner. Stirlacci had been so successful in Agawam that he opened a second practice in Springfield. He hired Jennifer Rivers to help him build and manage the caseload there.

Rivers was the one who called the DEA, trial testimony showed. She gave multiple statements to federal and state authorities and testified at the trial.

Hampden Superior Court Judge Edward McDonough Jr., in brief statements after rendering his verdict in Stirlacci’s and Miller’s cases, labeled Rivers “not credible.” “She may have had her reasons,” he said.

Rivers could not be reached for comment.

The judge also took a swipe at investigators, questioning whether they considered whether any violations of law were the results of unintentional mistakes.

McDonough found Stirlacci had been detained under “bizarre circumstances” hundreds of miles away and had acted appropriately to save his practice and support his patients.

“I do not find incriminating his statements that he wanted to keep his employees paid, that he wanted to keep the cash flow of the office going (and) that he wanted to keep the office open,” the judge said. “I credit his statements that he did not wish to abandon his patients. These are appropriate goals for any business whether it be a medical practice, a convenience store or a Fortune 500 company.”

O’Donald recently filed a motion for sanctions against prosecutors for what he contends was withholding exculpatory evidence.

A spokesman for the Hampden District Attorney’s Office denied any wrongdoing, and said an apology to the defendants will not be forthcoming.

“The Commonwealth stands by the underlying facts of the case: the defendant was improperly prescribing medication from a jail cell in Kentucky. The preponderance of material at the center of (O’Donald’s motion for sanctions) was previously disclosed, and was a reproduction of evidence, none of which was favorable to the defense,” said James Leydon, communications director for the office.

A spokesman for the DEA declined to comment.

O’Donald said he is working with an attorney in Washington, D.C., to regain Stirlacci’s federal license to administer drugs.

Asked what’s in store for his future, Stirlacci chirpily refers to “a new day,” but says he harbors deep resentment toward investigators and prosecutors in the case.

He concedes the prescription pain medication landscape has changed significantly since he began practicing 27 years ago. The conventional wisdom at that time was “stay ahead of the pain.” The message was consistent at every professional conference he attended in the 1990s and early 2000s.

He bristles over the notion that his predicament was collateral damage in an increasingly restrictive medical universe.

“The opioid crisis — regardless of where the pendulum is — is no excuse. The crime was governmental overreach followed by a malicious prosecution that lasted six years. And that is what impacted my life and professional career.”

Related content:

©2021 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit masslive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.