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Tuesday, July 21, 2015

LIQUID GOLD...OR A FAKE JOB? Miss Fortune Examines Robert Buckhannon's New Urine Toxicology Testing Laboratory "Job", And Finds All That Glitters May Just Be "Fool's Gold"

BREAKING NEWS: "Fake" job fools feds; Robert Buckhannon now free to travel U.S./Hawaii!

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, doctors are testing seniors for drugs such as heroin, cocaine and “angel dust” at soaring rates, and Medicare is paying the bill. 

Medicare paid $445 million for mass spectrometry urine drug toxicology testing in 2012, which is a 1,423% increase from five years before.

And it initially looked like Robert Buckhannon might be attempting to get into the game...but is he really?

Battle Creek's "crooked chiropractor", the federally-indicted Buckhannon, claimed in a recent court filing that as Executive Vice President of New Business Development for Nevada-based Clinical Testing Corp LLC, he's required to "travel to manage" the company's education and sales training for a "national network of Account Executives".

On July 13, a Nevada U. S. District Court judge signed an order modifying Buckhannon's pretrial release, and allowing him to travel to "jurisdictions outside of Clark County, Nevada", including the continental U. S. and Hawaii.

Clinical Testing Corp LLC claims to pride itself on acquiring "the latest technology and collaborating with the sharpest minds in the field of clinical toxicology", saying in marketing materials that "urine drug testing and confirmation testing is extremely important in the field of clinical toxicology for any doctor prescribing medication to a patient".

So is Buckhannon really in search of Medicare-fueled "liquid gold", or is his job just a cynical false front, carefully crafted to provide him with a cover story that allows him to travel the lower 48 states and Hawaii in search of more victims?

Miss Fortune calls "bullshit" on this one.

At first glance, Buckhannon's so-called "job" may appear legitimate, but it's not the first time he's used an arranged business development spot as protective cover for his real pursuits — and he's done it at least two other times in just the last five years.

In preparation for this report, among the research Miss Fortune reviewed were Nevada corporate filings, Clinical Testing Corp's sales and client start-up documents — capped with an off-the-record discussion with a pathologist.
 
Let's look at the June 23, 2015 letter from Clinical Testing Corp, LLC CEO John Rittenour that started this whole ball rolling.

DR. BUCKHANNON IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE "IMPLANTATION OF LABORATORY SERVICES IN CLINICS AND MEDICAL FACILITIES NATIONALLY." WTF?!

Rittenour, whose actual letter is shown at left, makes a mighty effort to sound like the CEO of a clinical testing lab — but falls woefully short. 

But what would you expect from someone whose background includes a six-month stint as the Marketing Director for an "urban record label based in Minneapolis with many positive and innovative projects working."

The letter fails in its first paragraph, with Rittenour apparently confusing "implantation" with "implementation" and using "around the company" instead of "around the country":

Dr. Buckhannon is my company’s Executive Vice President of New Business Development. As such, he is responsible for Education and Sales training of our national network of Account Executives. He is also responsible for the implantation of laboratory services in clinics and medical facilities nationally. Dr. Buckhannon also negotiates, facilitates and implements the utilization of multiple reference labs around the company so that we can provide the best patient care and customer service to our referring physicians and their patients.
 

The company was founded in Nevada on October 28, 2014, but when its website launched shortly after, Clinical Testing Corp, LLC was already boasting that it had "provided outsourced services to thousands of customers from most healthcare disciplines, including nearly all of the largest pharmaceutical, biopharmaceutical, and chemical companies in the world."

Hmmm? Really? Quite a claim to make just days after you launched a company, I thought, until I found the source: a company named BioReliance, formed in 1947

As you can see in the screen capture shown at left, all Clinical Testing Corp, LLC did was replace BioReliance with its name.

Instant credibility?

Not so fast. Let's go back to Rittenour's letter, replete with spelling errors, gibberish and crazy claims.

In this paragraph, Rittenour purports that Buckhannon's job requires travel throughout the lower 48 states and Hawaii (the spelling errors and grammatical offenses appeared in the original):

We have marketing coverage in all of the continental US and Hawaii. The management, training and ultimate sales volume falls under Robert’s prevue and his ability to travel to manage this process is essential for him to be able to adequately perform these tasks. I have attached a portion of the scheduled travel over the next three months. There will undoubtedly be additional travel to as the business continues to evolve.

- June 22nd-30th: Florida: Implementation of Pharmacogenetic testing and Medication therapy management protocols for several home health agencies.
- July 1-8th: Training for McLaren health systems. Sales presentation for 2 other hospital chains in Michigan.
- Week of July 12th: Las Vegas & Hartford Connecticut. Evaluate lab opportunity.
- July 15-17: Pharmacogenitc testing New Orleans, LA
- July 19th Colorado two days to implement training programs for sales force
- July 28-29 Sales training Orange County, CA
- July 30-31 Visit Lab Porterville CA

Systems evaluation of Lab Procedures
- August 3-8: Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego – Finish negotiating lab contracts and in service large Primary Care groups
- August 10-11: Detroit Regional Sales Training
- August 13-14 Boise Idaho – Follow up on implementation with Several Home Health agencies and Assisted living facilities
- Aug 18-19 Redmond WA implementation of Pharmacy review protocols for Assisted living facilities
 


If you merely skim the appointments, they may appear legitimate. But Miss Fortune noticed one glaring mistake: the claim that Buckhannon would be spending time at "McLaren health systems" conducting "training". 

Training? Who exactly would Buckhannon be training?

McLaren has its own 40,000 square foot laboratory in Flint, Michigan, and conducts its medical testing in-house. 

It's unlikely that Buckhannon, under federal indictment for his alleged role in a $34 million dollar hedge fund fraud, would make it through the doors at McLaren, let alone be "training" anyone.

In addition, if Clinical Testing Corp, LLC truly had a business relationship with McLaren, the Nevada limited liability corporation would need a Michigan "certificate of authority" to conduct any business within the state. 

Foreign limited liability corporations that are "transacting business" in Michigan must first obtain a Certificate of Authority from the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, and official records reveal no Certificate of Authority for Nevada-based Clinical Testing Corp, LLC.

Still want to claim a business relationship with McLaren, Rob?

CLINICAL TESTING CORP, LLC: A SIX-FIGURE MASS SPECTROMETER?

If you're going to go all the way, then you might as well claim that you have a world-class mass spectrometer just waiting in your (non-existent) laboratory for "urine drug testing".

While "mass spec" machines are indeed used by clinical laboratories for urine testing, Clinical Testing Corp, LLC made another giant mistake, describing a sophisticated machine whose cost can exceed $300,000 and requires six people to lift.

Our urine drug testing is performed on a ABSciEX platform, 5500 triple quad LC/MS/MS instrumentation. We can readily accomplish a capacity of 400 positive confirmation and negative confirmation tests daily with ample room to grow.

If you parse the words above, and I did, you'll discover that the machine described is the ABSciex API 5500 Benchtop Qtrap Mass Spectrometer System —  a system used only for research, not for basic diagnostic procedures like a urine drug tox screen. 

Judging from the available evidence, Clinical Testing Corp, LLC is nothing more than a  medical distributorship, specifically a sales/marketing company representing laboratories like Texas-based Ally Clinical Diagnostics and Synergy Laboratories, a Las Vegas outfit that shares an office address with Clinical Testing Corp, LLC. 

While both Ally and Synergy are reference labs that process work for multiple firms, it's difficult to determine proprietary information like the locations of each company's primary clinical labs and network partners for its urine toxicology and pharmacogenetics testing.

Back in January, 2015, Buckhannon began issuing a series of increasingly bizarre press releases promoting his new role with a company initially described as "Clinical Testing Corporation" and later as "Clinical Testing Corp, LLC".

In those releases, Buckhannon claimed he planned "on opening genetics laboratories in three new locations" and "creating better patient outcomes and groundbreaking healthcare discoveries."

One release even stated that Buckhannon would "be responsible for developing new laboratories in Las Vegas, Nevada, Phoenix Arizona, West Palm Beach, Florida, and Denver, Colorado." 

Funny, all cities that Buckhannon tapped during his hedge fund "fundraising days".

Well, it looks like my suspicions were warranted. 

Buckhannon's not only managed to insist in a press release that he would travel to "Phoenix, Arizona to view construction of the latest CTC lab", he's also fooled the government into modifying the terms of his pretrial release — until today.

But, like I said, he's used other fake jobs as cover, most notoriously with a former business associate/scammer named Zia Shlaimoun.

FLY ME TO SHLAIMOUN...TO INFINAFUND, AND BEYOND! 

The "Shalimouniacs" who read this blog already know about Zia, but here's a short refresher course.

On April 1, 2009, Robert Buckhannon, then CEO of Vestium Management Group and managing member of Arcanum Equity Fund (AEF), wired $20,000 out of an AEF account to Infinifund Ltd.

However, less than six weeks before, (on February 24, 2009), Buckhannon had sent an email to the other managing members, Terry Rawstern, Dale St. Jean and Gregory Tindall, telling them that pending investor redemption requests “can be strung out for a bit” while they pursued other investment opportunities.

According to court documents, Buckhannon wired an additional $200,000 to Infinifund on June 30, 2009. On August 18, 2009, Buckhannon sent a letter to the Funds' investors explaining the Funds lacked the necessary capital to pay investor redemptions.

When questioned in November 2009 by the Funds’ controller regarding the existence of an agreement authorizing or explaining the purpose for the disbursements, Buckhannon explained that Infinifund’s sole principal, Zia P. Shlaimoun, was the “cousin of his fiancé Marlena Michaels.”

But as Miss Fortune revealed in a March 10, 2014 post titled "Serial Monogamy in the Cereal City", Buckhannon wasn’t being entirely truthful— Buckhannon and Michaels had actually married in Las Vegas on May 15, 2009.

Buckhannon initially told the controller to classify the $220,000 payments to Infinifund as “expenses related the AEF’s August 2009 investment in Shea Mining & Milling.” However, in March 2010, the controller stated that Buckhannon told him to reclassify the expenses as “legal expenses for AEF”. When the controller questioned that classification, Buckhannon instructed him to reclassify the Infinifund payments as “investment management expenses”. 


Between March 2008-June 2011, Buckhannon billed himself as the Director of New Business Development for Itanics, Inc., a Los Angeles-based company owned by Shlaimoun.

Buckhannon claimed his duties included "expanding business lines".

Sound familiar, eh?

There's more.

Chris Paganes, a Michigan-based Arcanum/Vestium hedge fund associate of Buckhannon's, provided him with a cover story in 2011 as the Marketing Director of Joeshipping.com, the precursor of a discount shipping/charity fundraising scam later known as "Ship4Charities.com" that described itself as a "discount provider of shipping that gives to charity on every package shipped." 

My investigation revealed that only one of the charities featured as "partners" on the website ever received any of the money potentially donated in their names. You can read my entire five-part Ship4Charities series here, here, here, here and here.

ROBERT BUCKHANNON: COMING SOON TO A TOWN NEAR YOU?

Although it looks like Buckhannon may have fooled the feds, and gotten away with his latest con job, it's only temporary.

Trust me.










4 comments:

  1. I'm certain he is up to his old tricks again like he did when he opened the illegal bar in Battle Creek. According to MLCC code any person that claims to own or have interest (more than 10%) in a licensed establishment must go through the same background check as the licensee in this case Kelly Demoss. Dr. Dufus claimed to be the owner but his name never appeared on the license, I would bet the paperwork they supplied to the State of Michigan was fraudulent and the real ownership was hidden so as far as the MLCC was concerned he was not the owner only kelly demoss this was a clear violation of MLCC code.He obtained over 500k in hard loans from local and out of state investors to keep the doomed bar open and he stiffed all of them.

    I'm sure he is up to his old tricks again obtaining new investors for this venture in las vegas only a complete idiot would give this dirtbag money but as the saying goes a sucker is born every day!

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  2. Demoss is on the hook for the $456,000 hard money mortgage loan. Buckhannon's name is nowhere to be found on the document, and Demoss signed as the money's sole recipient.

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  3. Drug testing requires a DEA license to acquire the standards, surely this would be public info......

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  4. http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/news/local/2015/07/22/erv-brinker-alleged-have-sent-510000-psychic/30522789/

    Check this out! His palm reader apparently didn't have much foresight. I told you there was full time work for you here in Battle Creek. So much of what happens here glistens. many thanks for all you do.

    ReplyDelete