Robert Courtney (fraudster)

Robert Ray Courtney (born September 15, 1952) is an American former pharmacist from Kansas City, Missouri.

Courtney graduated from the School of Pharmacy at University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1975.

In 1986, Courtney became the owner of Research Medical Tower Pharmacy in Kansas City, where he had worked for some time.

He primarily mixed intravenous drugs.

Before his arrest, Courtney served as a deacon at Northland Cathedral, an Assemblies of God megachurch in Kansas City.

In 1990, Courtney began purchasing pharmaceuticals on the gray market and using them to fill prescriptions at his pharmacy.

In time he began diluting prescriptions to increase profits.

Both practices were illegal.

In 1992, he and his first wife divorced; Courtney retained custody of their two daughters.

His second marriage lasted four or five days and was later annulled.

In 1994 his third wife, Laura Courtney, gave birth to twins.

In 1998, Eli Lilly sales representative Darryl Ashley noticed Courtney was selling three times the amount that he'd bought of the cancer drug Gemzar.

Eli Lilly initiated an internal investigation but found no evidence of illegality and closed the investigation without further action.

When he reviewed the utilization records, he discovered the same problem that he'd seen in 1998; Courtney appeared to be selling Gemzar for $20 per vial less than what the drug was worth at the market, appearing to take a substantial loss.

Combined with the lack of side effects, it led Ashley to suspect that Courtney might be diluting the drugs.

Ashley said years later that if he was right, Courtney was committing "a hideous crime".

Hunter also noticed that many of her patients were only suffering mild side effects, and their condition didn't seem to be improving.

Hunter had medication that had been supplied by Courtney tested.

The results showed that the sample contained less than one-third of the drug prescribed.

Upon receiving the test results back, Hunter immediately cut ties with Courtney and notified the FBI.

Investigators with the FBI and FDA initially didn't believe that a pharmacist would do something so egregious; pharmacists have long been among the most trusted professionals in the country and the world.

They initially hoped there was an innocent explanation.

However, when Hunter showed them the test results, they realized that she was telling the truth.

Hunter submitted seven additional samples for testing by the FDA's forensic chemistry lab.

Tests on those samples revealed that they only contained a fraction of the prescribed dosage–as little as 15 percent, and at most 39 percent.

They immediately knew that they had to move quickly.

While health care fraud cases normally take years to build, the investigators knew they didn't have that long.

They spared no expense to stop Courtney, considering it a matter of public safety.

Investigators believed that Courtney took a base dose of chemotherapy drugs and split it between three prescriptions, then sold them to oncologists for the same price as a full dose.

He took advantage of the fact that oncologists are usually concerned mainly with chemotherapy's effects on the body, not the amount of the dose.

While he was supposed to prepare infusions with $3,000 worth of chemotherapy drugs, the solutions he prepared were equivalent to only $700, turning a significant profit.

Even with damning evidence that Courtney was diluting drugs, federal prosecutors asked the FBI and FDA to establish a chain of custody in order to get probable cause for an arrest.

Prosecutors believed that since there were other pharmacists in the building, they needed to tie any diluted drugs directly to Courtney and show he was the only one who was diluting drugs.

In August 2001, the same month he was arrested, Courtney held total assets worth $18.7 million.

In early 2001, several nurses in the office of Dr. Verda Hunter (now Hicks), an oncologist in Courtney's building, noticed that several of Hunter's patients weren't experiencing the debilitating side effects that are normally the case with chemotherapy regimens.

They voiced their concerns to Ashley, who wondered if Hunter's patients were actually getting the full prescribed dose.

In 2002, after initially being caught diluting several doses of chemotherapy drugs, he pleaded guilty to intentionally diluting 98,000 prescriptions involving multiple types of drugs, which were given to 4,200 patients, and was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.

Courtney was born in Hays, Kansas.

His father was a traveling minister based in Scott City, and described Courtney as an "ideal son".

He played the trombone at Wichita South High School.