Crime & Safety

Chantilly Pain Clinic Owner Sentenced on Drug Trafficking, Fraud Charges

Paul Boccone receives 15-year prison sentence.

A federal judge handed down a 15-year prison sentence Friday to a Chantilly pain clinic owner who was charged with drug trafficking, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Virginia.

Paul Boccone, 56, was convicted on Aug. 3 of conspiring to distribute and distributing oxycodone, healthcare fraud and payroll tax evasion. Boccone was the owner of Chantilly Specialists, a pain management clinic in Chantilly.

Without any medical training, licensing or certification, Boccone hired medical personnel who had no background in pain management. The lead nurse practitioner at the businesses, Charles Brown Jr., was also sentenced Friday to five years in prison.

Find out what's happening in Chantillywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Boccone, who often referred to himself as "Dr. Boccone" according to a Washington Examiner article after his arrest, kept up the ruse by writing out prescriptions to patients and had the medical personnel he had hired endorse the prescriptions. Evidence presented at Boccone's trial showed that four patients died of overdoses from prescriptions obtained from Chantilly Specialists.

At Boccone's direction, Brown altered the file of a patient after they found out that person had died.

Find out what's happening in Chantillywith free, real-time updates from Patch.

In all, Brown provided more than 800,000 oxycodone pills to 600 patients, including 14,400 pills to one addict.

A notice on the company Web site says the office is no longer seeing patients. The Web site lists Boccone's resume, which says he was a lawyer. The Examiner article notes that: "There are no records of Boccone being a member of the Maryland State Bar. It appears that he applied for membership, but was rejected in 2003."

Boccone got into more legal trouble between the time he was convicted in August and his sentencing Friday. He was held without bond last month after being arrested for abuse of an elderly female in Washington County, MD. Bail was set at $25,000 on Oct. 26 in Washington County Circuit Court after Boccone was indicted on a charge of obtaining property and neglecting a vulnerable adult, according to a local newspaper, The Herald Mail.

The Chantilly Specialists clinic was also in the news three years ago, when physician's assistant who worked there, Jorge Sanchez, was arrested for inappropriately touching several female patients. Sanchez was from Hagerstown, MD.

Boccone is a resident of Boonsboro, MD, and has a wife and child, according to The Herald Mail. 

After sentencing Friday by United States District Judge Claude M. Hilton, Boccone's sentence was announced by Neil H. MacBride, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia; Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, Attorney General of Virginia; James W. McJunkin, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office;  Richard A. Raven, Special Agent in Charge of the Washington Field Office of IRS-Criminal Investigation; and Nick DiGuilio, Special Agent in Charge for the Inspector General’s Office of the United States Department of Health and Human Services in Philadelphia.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

To request removal of your name from an arrest report, submit these required items to arrestreports@patch.com.

More from Chantilly