Menu Close

Egisto Salerno, a medical doctor practicing in San Diego, pleaded guilty to illegal opioid distribution, admitting that he signed bogus prescriptions for multiple deceased or incarcerated patients.

According to his plea agreement, Salerno illegally distributed 78,544 hydrocodone pills. Hydrocodone is an opioid pain medication commonly known as Norco or Vicodin. Salerno admitted that his prescriptions for the 10 mg tablets were outside the usual course of his medical practice and were without a legitimate medical purpose.

Salerno also admitted that an undercover federal agent who visited Salerno’s clinic on six occasions received six hydrocodone prescriptions containing Salerno’s signature.

In a separate instance, on a date when the undercover agent did not visit the clinic and the doctor did not see him, Salerno acknowleged that a prescription was written in the name used by the undercover agent and that Salerno completed and signed a progress note in the “patient” chart for the purported visit that did not occur.

Salerno used his medical practice on El Cajon Boulevard in San Diego to carry out this criminal activity between November 2014 and February 2018, the plea agreement said.

During this period, Salerno also acknowledged that he pre-signed prescriptions and often allowed his non-physician employees to complete those prescriptions; and that, with regard to one of the multiple dead “patients,” his signature appeared on at least five prescriptions made out in the “patient’s” name that were issued and filled more than a year after the “patient” died.

Salerno is the seventh defendant to enter a guilty plea in connection with the pending case that flowed from the investigation of this “pill mill.” Each of the defendants is awaiting sentencing.

The plea agreements of the six other defendants show that paid patient “recruiters” were bringing “patients,” many of whom were homeless, to Salerno’s office to secure hydrocodone prescriptions; that, after the prescriptions were written, the “patients” were brought to pharmacies to fill the prescriptions; “patients” turned over their hydrocodone tablets to the recruiters in exchange for payment and, in some instances, recruiters picked up the tablets from the pharmacies themselves; and, in turn, those hydrocodone pills were being sold by the lead recruiter in San Diego and that such pills were also smuggled into Mexico and sold to a pharmacy there.

Salerno will be sentenced on May 11, 2020.