The Mesh Mill: How Scammers Took Advantage of Women's Pain

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Chameleon – "The Mesh Mill: How Scammers Took Advantage of Women's Pain"

Date: April 2, 2026
Host: Josh Dean
Guests: Sharon Gore, Elizabeth Shambley Burch, Ron Lasorsa
Theme: True crime investigation into a shocking medical and legal scam targeting women with pelvic mesh implants.

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into how criminals exploited leaked medical data to scam thousands of women into unnecessary and unsafe surgeries, all under the guise of helping victims of defective pelvic mesh implants. The host, Josh Dean, traces the story from the firsthand account of victim Sharon Gore through the work of investigative law professor Elizabeth Shambley Burch and whistleblower Ron Lasorsa. Together they expose the machinery of mass tort fraud—a high-stakes intersection of healthcare, legal loopholes, data privacy breaches, and predatory capitalism.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sharon Gore's Ordeal: The Victim’s Perspective

• [00:22–08:22]
  • Sharon receives a disturbing call with intimate details about her past surgery, told her pelvic mesh implant is a "ticking time bomb."
  • Urged to travel to Florida for urgent, ‘free’ removal surgery, she relents despite growing suspicions, bringing her nurse niece along.
  • The supposed "surgical center" is just an anonymous office suite; the procedure felt "archaic" and frightening.
  • Post-surgery, care is non-existent, symptoms worsen drastically, and the clinic vanishes.
  • Notable Quote:

    "I was afraid for a different reason. That maybe I'd made the wrong decision." – Sharon Gore, [05:48]

2. Exposing the Scam: How Did This Happen?

• [08:22–15:24]
  • Sharon is not alone; the New York Times uncovers a rash of similar cases.
  • Women lured into "free" mesh removal surgeries to strengthen lawsuits against device manufacturers.
  • Notable Quote:

    "Just like that, she’d stumbled into a growing industry that makes money by coaxing women into having surgery...so that they are more lucrative plaintiffs..." – Josh Dean paraphrasing NYT, [09:15]

  • Behind the operation: massive call centers using stolen data, high-pressure tactics, and false medical claims.
  • Mass tort lawsuits are engineered for profit, with women’s suffering commodified.

3. The Machinery of Fraud: Leaked Data & Legal Loopholes

• [13:01–17:32]
  • Indian call centers access vast healthcare records, cold-call women using private medical data for extra legitimacy.
  • The "ticking time bomb" script weaponizes fear and urgency.
  • Third-party medical liens—hidden in auto-scrolled electronic forms—tie women's settlements to creditors, at compounding interest.
  • Notable Quote:

    "The docusign packet...was auto-programmed to go directly to the signature page, so you didn't realize all the things you were signing." – Elizabeth Shambley Burch, [16:27]

4. The Architects: Who Was Behind the Mesh Mill?

• [17:32–22:30]
  • Vincent Chabra (call center operator with a criminal past), John Spicer (ex-con and 'medical consultant'), and Ron Lasorsa (Wall St. paralegal turned whistleblower) use a DC legal loophole to create "Alpha Law," a sham mass tort firm.
  • Chabra’s history: online pill mills, puppy mills, and habitual grifting.
  • Doctors and chiropractors join, offering unsafe 15-minute surgeries with almost no medical oversight.
  • Notable Quote:

    "Some of these doctors were getting medical records for patients and approving them for surgery in less than one minute." – Elizabeth Shambley Burch, [22:44]

5. National Scope—a Systemic Crisis

• [23:18–25:19]
  • The mesh scam is one example; similar practices spread to hip implants, sterilization devices, and more.
  • Whistleblower Lasorsa quantifies mass tort fraud:

    "We estimate that between 10 and 30% of every tort is fraudulent. It is a parasitic ecosystem..." – Ron Lasorsa, [24:08]

  • No effective regulation: both plaintiff and defense bars benefit from volume.

6. The Aftermath: Money, Justice, and Unpunished Scammers

• [25:32–29:10]
  • Over 100,000 women contacted, thousands receive damaging surgeries.
  • Average settlement: $40,000; Sharon receives $52,000 but faces a $60,000+ medical lien, leaving her in debt.
  • Notable Quote:

    "The settlement that I got ended up having to be turned right back over...So obviously 52 doesn't cover 60." – Sharon Gore, [26:49]

  • Chabra & partners cash out by selling the victim "cases" to a Houston law firm for $40 million—most key players escape criminal liability.
  • Only minor participants charged or disciplined; main perpetrators hide assets, avoid prosecution.

7. Human Consequences: Enduring Trauma for the Victims

• [35:24–37:49]
  • Sharon and others suffer permanent physical and psychological harm.
  • Notable Quotes:

    "We just became money makers for people...they butchered us and they sent us home without even the thought of what was going to happen next." – Sharon Gore, [37:03]

  • Other women, like Jerry Plummer, are left permanently incontinent or worse.

8. Whistleblowers and Warnings for the Future

• [31:13–34:54]
  • Ron Lasorsa, motivated by personal tragedy, chooses to come clean and expose the network, but acknowledges his own deep complicity.
  • Notable Quote:

    "The unfortunate reality is I was also a bad person...But I’m not shining my halo by any means. I'm speaking truth." – Ron Lasorsa, [34:54]

  • The mesh mill case exposes a much broader pattern of unchecked fraud in American mass tort law—with little punishment for high-level perpetrators and enormous cost for vulnerable victims.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• "I was afraid for a different reason. That maybe I'd made the wrong decision." – Sharon Gore [05:48]
• "Just like that, she’d stumbled into a growing industry that makes money by coaxing women into having surgery...so that they are more lucrative plaintiffs..." – Josh Dean (paraphrasing NYT), [09:15]
• "The docusign packet...was auto-programmed to go directly to the signature page, so you didn't realize all the things you were signing." – Elizabeth Shambley Burch [16:27]
• "Some of these doctors were getting medical records for patients and approving them for surgery in less than one minute." – Elizabeth Shambley Burch [22:44]
• "We estimate that between 10 and 30% of every tort is fraudulent. It is a parasitic ecosystem..." – Ron Lasorsa [24:08]
• "The settlement that I got ended up having to be turned right back over...So obviously 52 doesn't cover 60." – Sharon Gore [26:49]
• "We just became money makers for people...they butchered us and they sent us home without even the thought of what was going to happen next." – Sharon Gore [37:03]
• "The unfortunate reality is I was also a bad person...But I’m not shining my halo by any means. I'm speaking truth." – Ron Lasorsa [34:54]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:22–08:22: Sharon Gore’s personal story
• 08:22–10:50: NYT investigation, mass tort context
• 10:50–13:57: Whistleblower Ron Lasorsa enters the story
• 13:57–17:32: Data leaks, call center mechanics, and the anatomy of the scam
• 17:32–22:30: Introduction of key perpetrators—Chabra, Spicer, Lasorsa—and the legal loophole
• 25:32–27:05: The scale and consequences for victims, Sharon’s financial devastation
• 31:13–34:54: Lasorsa's whistleblowing, aftermath for perpetrators
• 35:24–37:49: Permanent harm to women; concluding reflections

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Conclusion

This episode lays bare a deeply unsettling convergence of medical vulnerability, data insecurity, legal exploitation, and corporate greed—with devastating consequences for women expecting help. It exposes systemic flaws in mass tort law, the ease of weaponizing personal data for profit, and a justice system failing to protect its most vulnerable. The few whistleblowers who emerge do so with regret and little impact, while the perpetrators largely walk free, and the victims continue to pay the price—physically, financially, and emotionally.

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Transcript

[Sharon Gore]

Campsite Media. Hello.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

What is, though?

[Sharon Gore]

What do you want me to say? Chameleon.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon, Chameleon. Weekly. In the waning days of 2013, Sharon Gore was in the throngs of Christmas preparation when her phone rang.

[Sharon Gore]

That call was frightening. Well, it's actually frightening on the front end. I shouldn't say that on the front end. It was just, oh, wow, something's wrong.

[Josh Dean]

Sharon lives in South Carolina, not far from Myrtle Beach.

[Sharon Gore]

Because this individual provided me with a great deal of detail about a surgery

[Josh Dean]

that I had had, this was somewhat unnerving to hear all the details this person on the phone was relaying to her. The matters they were discussing had happened

[Sharon Gore]

a long time ago, and I wasn't clear on all the details of my surgery, because it's a surgery. You go to surgery and you count on the doctor to do what they're supposed to do.

[Josh Dean]

Four or five years earlier, after having the last of her three cesarean sections and experiencing some side effects of those surgeries, Sharon had decided to have a partial hysterectomy.

[Sharon Gore]

I had been having some issues, and as a result of the issues that I had had, he made a decision, talked with my husband about it, and they put what was termed at that time a sling in.

[Josh Dean]

Sling is shorthand for pelvic mesh, also known as transvaginal mesh. This is synthetic netting that is surgically attached to provide muscle support in women who suffer from a variety of conditions, including pelvic organ prolapse and incontinence. Sharon was mostly okay after that for a while.

[Sharon Gore]

Then I began to have some issues with, you know, just some noticeable things sexually with my husband and so forth. And so I didn't pay very much attention to it.

[Josh Dean]

The woman who called her said that she'd gotten Sharon's name from a list of women who'd had this one type of surgical mesh implanted. It was manufactured by a company called Boston Scientific. She explained that the mesh had been recalled and that Sharon needed to have it removed immediately. The mesh was faulty. Worse than faulty, was dangerous.

[Sharon Gore]

I distinctly remember her telling me it was a ticking time bomb. It was just that kind of phone call there, oh, my gosh, I gotta think about this. We've got a family full of medical people. And so I did talk to people. I did talk to them about it, and warning seemed to be, oh, my goodness. Yeah, well, you know, I've heard something about that and that kind of thing.

[Josh Dean]

The woman said that the procedure to remove the mesh would be fully covered by Boston Scientific, and that Someone would be in touch soon to help her schedule it.

[Sharon Gore]

I got through the holidays, and I still received phone calls all through. And they were not all from the same people.

[Josh Dean]

There was, as she said, real urgency. Very specific steps for Sharon to follow.

[Sharon Gore]

We need to come to this location. We've got this doctor. He specializes in this. He's the only person in the country that can do this or in the States or whatever. And we need you to come and get this done

[Josh Dean]

in the new year. The conversations picked up, and Sharon agreed that this was something she should do.

[Sharon Gore]

You're asking me to come to get on a plane, come to Florida. We'll make all the arrangements. You'll stay in a hotel room. We'll have someone pick you up. We'll bring you over to the surgical center, and there you'll have your surgery. You just need to bring somebody with you.

[Josh Dean]

Sharon picked her niece, a nurse.

[Sharon Gore]

She said, aunt Sharon, I don't know. Something about this is not right. And. But I was already into it at that time. And sure, I could have pulled back, but when you think you've got something in you and you've been convinced that it's, you know, a detriment to your body, you're kind of between a rock and a hard place. And I really felt like that's where I was.

[Josh Dean]

The building where they were taken near Orlando, was not a hospital. It wasn't even a medical clinic. At least not by the outward signs.

[Sharon Gore]

Got in the elevator, went to a second floor. When that opened up, that area was set up like office space. No signage, nothing that indicated we were at a surgical center.

[Josh Dean]

Sharon was shown to a small medical bay partitioned off by curtains. She seemed to be the only patient in the entire facility.

[Sharon Gore]

You get undressed, you get the IVs and all that, and then the sedation and so forth. And then I remember being wheeled to the surgical area, which looked unlike. I'd had several surgeries and C sections, and one thing. And did not look like a surgical area at all. Was not fully under. When they took me back there. I remember it. Had I been able to, I think I probably would have gotten up and left at that very moment. And just because it was a little bit kind of butchery.

[Josh Dean]

Butchery,

[Sharon Gore]

almost like just archaic. Nothing modernized at all.

[Josh Dean]

This was Sharon's final image, final thought before she succumbed to the anesthesia.

[Sharon Gore]

I remember being just afraid. And obviously when people ask her, most of the time, you are anyway, so that's not an unusual thing. But I was afraid for a different reason. That maybe I'd made the wrong decision.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon, the weekly show about dangerous pretenders. And I'm Josh Dean. This week, the dark side of America's medical tort business. It's the story of how leaked medical data enabled a group of scammers and put innocent women at risk.

[Sharon Gore]

Chameleon.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon. This is Chameleon Weekly. Sharon Gore went under at that weirdly anonymous medical clinic, feeling in her last moments of consciousness like something was wrong. And pretty much as soon as she woke up, those fears felt even more validated.

[Sharon Gore]

So we got back to the facility and I was never seen by the doctor again. I leave Florida with a catheter which could have very easily been removed by someone in South Carolina. But they asked me to come back to Florida. They removed the catheter, gave me another prescription, I think for antibiotics, and came home. And then things were terrible. Terrible.

[Josh Dean]

Sharon had struggled at times with incontinence in the past, but this was far worse than anything she'd experienced before.

[Sharon Gore]

I mean, I was really struggling. What in the world has happened? So I called back and they say that's normal. I mean, every now and then you get a bad cold, you have some incontinence, you know, some things here and there, but not like it was when I came home from Florida.

[Josh Dean]

Ultimately, Sharon went to a urologist in South Carolina and began a series of procedures to get herself right again. More than once along the way, she tried to contact that original clinic for help.

[Sharon Gore]

I did contact them, and by that time, I guess the center had been dismantled. No one's answering the phone calls. You can't get the same person that you talked to before. This person doesn't know that person. And so, no, there was. It was. I knew.

[Josh Dean]

The full story of what happened here wouldn't become apparent for years when more stories of more women like Sharon began to trickle out and eventually hit the radar of some journalists. And in April 2018, the New York Times ran the first of a series of stories on what was revealed to be a. A jaw dropping medical and legal scam. The headline read, how profiteers Lure women into Often Unneeded Surgery. Which is when you have the complete picture. A classically understated New York Times headline. The Times story opens with a woman named Jerry Plummer, whose tale is very similar to Sharon's. She too was promised a free removal and the services of a law firm that would sue Boston Scientific on her behalf. Jerry also flew from her home in Arkansas to this mysterious clinic in Florida and was rushed through a procedure that caused problems for years after. Here's how the reporters explained what was happening. Just like that, she'd stumbled into a growing industry that makes money by coaxing women into having surgery, sometimes unnecessarily, so that they are more lucrative plaintiffs in lawsuits against medical device manufacturers. The Times reporters interviewed dozens of women lawyers, finance executives, and marketers and estimated that hundreds, perhaps thousands of women had been sucked into this assembly line like system fueled by banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds. The profits are immense. So are the costs to women. Some suffer physical problems from the surgery. Others say they've become depressed or unable to work. Still others have to get mesh reinserted. One of the people who read that story was Elizabeth Shambley Burch, a professor at the University of Georgia Law School who specializes in mass torts and complex litigation.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

I'm also an author, so I went back to school and I got an MFA in narrative nonfiction from our journalism school in order to be able to tell a story like this.

[Josh Dean]

Mass torts are civilian actions that involve multiple plaintiffs suing over a common product or incident. The cases are bundled and typically put in front of a single judge, but payouts are individual. Beth, as she likes to be called, couldn't get this pelvic mesh mystery out of her mind. She'd been looking around for a project that would tie together her interests in mass torts and narrative nonfiction when this one just sort of fell in her lap.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

I was about a month and a half in, and I got a call from a whistleblower. And the whistleblower told me a tale that seemed too fantastical to be real. And eventually I started connecting the dots and realized that it was linked to this New York Times story.

[Josh Dean]

The whistleblower's name was ron Lasorsa, a U.S. naval Academy grad and Marine infantry officer who got his MBA while on active duty and then worked on Wall street until he went through a terrible divorce that caused him to overhaul his life. La Sorsa became a paralegal in part to help himself through that divorce.

[Ron Lasorsa]

Coming from Wall Street, I was very profit oriented. And pound for pound, the legal services industry is the most profitable industry in the world, right? For the amount of work that lawyers do, it is amazingly, grotesquely profitable if you do it right.

[Josh Dean]

And mass torts, he saw them as particularly profitable.

[Ron Lasorsa]

Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of plaintiffs, and done at scale. And so from an economic pirate perspective, that was the most attractive area of practice for me to focus on.

[Josh Dean]

Beth ultimately published a book on her investigation called Pain Brokers released in December of last year. Its genesis is what she heard from her conversations with Ron Lasorsa.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

He had been burned by all of his former comrades and he was out for vengeance and out for some revenge. And so it was one of those stories where I initially didn't believe a lot of it because it seemed a little crazy and it seemed to be driven by his anger. But as I dug into it, it turned out that it was true. He worked inside of this giant call center at 1000 Corporate Drive in Orlando, and he had been one of the kingpins.

[Josh Dean]

1000 Corporate Drive was the home of the call center that had reached out to Sharon and it turns out so many other women offering this urgent life saving surgical service to remove the so called ticking time bombs inside of them.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

He was alleging that there was a massive conspiracy to cold call women who had pelvic mesh implanted. And the conspiracy started through a data breach in India.

[Josh Dean]

Many industries use India's famous call centers, staffed by cheap and fluent English speakers, to handle things like customer service. India is also often the home base for associated services like data handling and storage.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

So as private healthcare companies began outsourcing their records keeping to India, the Indian call centers realized that they were sitting on a gold mine. And that gold mine was that they had the product codes for a whole bunch of products that had begun failing, whether it was a hip implant or in this case, vaginal mesh. And that they began cold calling these women and they knew everything about them. They knew their names, their birthdays, the implant date, the doctor, the hospital seemed very legitimate.

[Josh Dean]

I cannot overemphasize how important this is. It's the whole ball game. When someone calls you about a medical emergency and has all of your information, information that is private and protected by law, you're immediately disarmed. How could you not believe this person to be a reliable source?

[Sharon Gore]

I'm not gullible. I really am not. It just happened to be special circumstance where you rely on what your intuition tells you regarding information that's being shared with you about your health. And you believe it. You know, you just believe it. That's no different than your doctor's office calling you with your test results.

[Josh Dean]

Now add urgency.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

On top of that, they started telling these women, you have a ticking time bomb in you. You have to have it removed immediately or you'll die. But not to worry, we're setting up appointments down in Florida. You just have to fly down, have it removed, and everything will be well.

[Josh Dean]

The premise behind this was valid. Vaginal mesh Was problematic. There was a recall, and many of the women who got these cold calls were having pelvic issues. But this was never a legitimate effort to help these women. Some clever opportunists, including Ron lasorsa, got hold of this critical, extremely personal data and used it as the basis of a scam.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

The mesh was removed at chiropractic clinics and outpatient centers near strip malls. Mesh removal surgery, when done right, can take between seven and eight hours. And these doctors, in some cases, were bragging that they were ripping this out in 15 minutes.

[Josh Dean]

Part of the genius of this scam is that the women themselves weren't being charged for this possibly unnecessary surgery, but their medical bills for the procedures weren't forgiven either.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

This was set up by using third party medical liens, and it was a lien against their future settlement Proceeds in the neighborhood of between $60,000 and $150,000, depending on the interest and how long the suit took to settle.

[Josh Dean]

Which means that women like Sharon left the clinic with problems and with liens that would ultimately be called. When lawyers they had never met settled cases against Boston Scientific on their behalf, did the women just not notice they were signing such a thing? The scammers had thought of this, too.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

The docusign packet that they thought was for routine HIPAA forms and consent forms, all the things you would typically need for surgery. It was auto programmed to go directly to the signature page, so you didn't realize all the things that you were signing.

[Josh Dean]

You might wonder, as I did, why these people would force women into surgery if the mesh was known to be bad. Couldn't the opportunistic lawyers affiliated with this scam simply sue the mesh makers, Boston Scientific, on behalf of the women anyway? Because that does happen. Unethical lawyers often file claims on behalf of people who aren't even aware it's happening, or on behalf of people who are dead or don't even exist. This type of fraud is very common. But with the mesh case, there was financial incentive for forcing women into the procedure.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

When the mesh wasn't removed, the judge often dismissed those cases because of lack of damages. So the incentive for the scammers was to convince women that they had to have the mesh removed in order to jack up the settlement value of their lawsuits.

[Josh Dean]

The origin of this particular iteration of the scam, as laid out to Beth by Ron lasorsa, was traceable back to a single man, An Indian American with a checkered past named Vincent Chabra, who was running the call center.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

He'd started off selling dental Insurance plans and solar panels and that kind of thing. And his father died. And when his father died, he wanted to be buried in India. And so a year or so later, Vince takes his ashes back to India. And there he talks to several of his cousins in India who are running a call center, and they talk about how they're selling leads to mass tort plaintiffs attorneys.

[Josh Dean]

Those leads leaked medical data, like the list of women who'd had vaginal mesh implants.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

And you can make way more in a mass tort plaintiff's attorney lead than you ever can selling dental insurance or solar panels. And so the light bulb flicks on and he goes back to America and he teams up with a couple of lawyers who I think initially don't realize where these leads are coming from.

[Josh Dean]

Ron Lasorsa claims that he truly didn't know where the leads were coming from at first, or maybe he just knew better than to ask. He also says that there was one more key player in the mix.

[Ron Lasorsa]

John Spicer was a convicted armed robber who did like seven and a half years in jail. He got out, became some sort of medical consultant, got introduced to mass tort and figured out the scam. He's the one that introduced the 5.4 law firm to me. He also introduced it to Vincent Chhabra.

[Josh Dean]

Without wandering too far into the weeds, the this law basically allows law firms registered in Washington, dc. Back then, it was only Washington, dcto be owned by people who weren't lawyers like John and Vincent and Ron.

[Ron Lasorsa]

I claim the dubious honor of being one of the founders of fraud in the mass tort industry. You know, I helped perfect it.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

This group forms their own quote, unquote law firm because they don't want to just sell leads. They actually want to get in on the contingency fees that a lawyer would be able to get.

[Josh Dean]

At every step, it seems to go from bad to worse. After the break, we get into the mechanics of how this whole scam actually played out. Welcome back to Chameleon. So this is a pretty incredible thing to summarize, but Vince Chabra, not a lawyer, and Ron Lasorsa, also not a lawyer, used a loophole created by lobbyists and discovered by a former armed robber and founded a law firm to handle mass tort cases. Fueled by fake leads stolen out of a call center in India.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

They created this kind of Frankenstein law firm called Alpha Law, and that was the umbrella that they started using to

[Josh Dean]

sign up clients, clients like Sharon and Jerry. Beth would learn while writing her book that Vincent Chabra didn't suddenly Break bad. When he got hold of this leaked data, he had a history.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

Vince Chabra was arrested for running an online pill mill.

[Josh Dean]

That's a facility set up to prescribe drugs to people who don't need them, typically narcotics.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

He had served 30 months in prison. He had been out briefly on probation, but was then rearrested because of his involvement in a puppy mill, as in

[Josh Dean]

mass breeding of dogs, often with little concern given to the health or well being of the animals.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

So this is not someone who is, you know, really on the up and up. And then shortly after he gets out of prison and he's selling the solar panel leads and the dental leads is when he is burying his father in India and discovers the next big thing.

[Josh Dean]

So Vincent and Ron Lasorsa and the other Alpha Law partners operating out of 1000 Corporate Drive, got to work.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

The idea is essentially to scare the women into having this surgery in order to jack up the settlement value for the third party litigation funders, the doctors, the middlemen, the lawyers, but ultimately not the women themselves. So they come up with the ticking time bomb script. Their job was to convince the women that the pains were a product of the mesh, that they had to have it removed. And then if they said, oh, we'd have to have it checked out by the doctor and they felt like their doctor was dismissive of whatever pain they had, then the callers used that to their advantage. Or the callers would say, we only have a certain number of doctors in the country who know about this. This is cutting edge stuff. There's only a few doctors who can remove it.

[Josh Dean]

Chabra's scheme used chiropractic clinics for the surgeries. That's where Sharon went. And the chiropractors worked out deals with a small group of surgeons who seem to have stepped on and bent their moral compasses. Somewhere along the path to this work,

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

some of these doctors were getting medical records for patients and approving them for surgery in less than one minute. They didn't do any kind of physical exam before actually doing the surgery.

[Josh Dean]

These were, to be clear, doctors with licenses and practices.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

All but one of them has hospital privileges. And that person still has hospital privileges, I would presume, in Jamaica, whereas he was originally licensed to practice.

[Josh Dean]

Beth's book uses the mesh story as the underlying narrative, but it exposes a much broader industry, I guess, of these mass tort cases, where shady law firms employing shady doctors push people into treatments they either don't need or should be getting from legitimate hospitals under the care of doctors who actually want to Help.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

A testimony by one of the scammers indicates that he had been solicited to do the same sort of thing for hip implants for Essure, which is a permanent sterilization device for women. He lists a whole bunch of other cases as well. So this was happening simultaneously across the country in multiple types of these mass tort cases.

[Josh Dean]

This specific type of fraud, which is very much still growing, has become Ron lasource's passion now that he's seen the light.

[Ron Lasorsa]

It's not just the choppers. It is pervasive. There are a number of bad actors doing the very same thing. Right now, I've written a white paper with a leading national legal ethicist by the name of Jack Marshall. Based upon Jack's first term, personal experience with multiple law firm clients, as well as my own experience, we estimate that between 10 and 30% of every tort is fraudulent. It is a parasitic ecosystem between plaintiff's counsel and defense counsel because both sides of the coin get compensated. Plaintiff's counsel gets paid by the plaintiff, so they're incentivized to submit the maximum number of claims in the lawsuit. Defense counsel gets paid by the hour, and they're incentivized to maximize billing hours for the defendant, for the manufacturer. And more importantly, there's no regulatory organization that's policing this. There's nobody protecting plaintiffs. There's nobody protecting taxpayers.

[Josh Dean]

Or, it should be noted, the women who fell into this one specific niche of this vastly wider mess. The scale at Vincent Chabra's operation at 1000 Corporate Drive alone was staggering.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

I know that There were over 100,000 women who received these calls from 1000 Corporate Drive. I don't know how many ultimately went through the mesh mill. I think they admitted to a little less than 2,000, but it could have been more than that.

[Josh Dean]

I doubt I need to do much more here to outrage you, but it does get worse. The point here, after all, was the lawsuits. Alpha Law's entire plot was to get women to undergo a procedure in order to maximize the settlement they could obtain, allegedly on their behalf. In the mass tort case that was underway, the average settlement, Beth says, was around $40,000. Sharon got a bit more.

[Sharon Gore]

I think it was $52,000 is what I remember, and I put it in the bank. But then one day, I open up the mailbox and I find this letter in there. And the letter indicates that I owe some huge amount in a loan of over $60,000.

[Josh Dean]

That would be the lien, the one that covered the surgery. She never wanted the one that drastically degraded her quality of life.

[Sharon Gore]

So the settlement that I got ended up having to be turned right back over. So when this bill came, it's over $60,000. So obviously 52 doesn't cover 60.

[Josh Dean]

She'd have to pay that balance out of pocket.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

In other instances, the women took out the medical lien and there was compounded interest. And so in some of the instances where there was compounded interest, the third party litigation funders actually went after the women for the remainder of the funding proceeds.

[Josh Dean]

Third party litigation funders being. Well, it's sort of self explanatory if you just hear the words. These are investors who provide money to pay lawyers to mount lawsuits in order to take a percentage of the settlements from those cases.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

The rationale behind third party litigation funding is a noble one. The original idea is, you know, we don't want for plaintiffs to have to settle on the cheap just because they need to pay rent or they need to pay for their groceries. So we will lend them money so that they can hold out for whatever that high dollar settlement is or that high dollar trial later on. But the practicality of it has emerged such that it looks more like payday loan lending or pawn shops.

[Josh Dean]

And that's not the end of the bad actors either. Alpha Law never planned to actually take these women's cases to court. They were compiling cases for sale to another firm.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

Very sadly, they sell these women's tort claims like they are packs of baseball cards.

[Josh Dean]

Two of the women Beth interviewed for her book ultimately found one decent lawyer, a small town guy in Arkansas named J.R. baxter, who began a campaign to unpack the scam and sue on their behalf.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

He files a lawsuit and names a whole bunch of who he thinks are the co conspirators. He leaves room to add more co conspirators and that ultimately gets some coverage in the New York Times. And the New York Times article is the tipping point. It also is the beginning of a criminal investigation opened by a US Attorney in New York. The call center is ultimately broken up. They sell all of their assets to Aiken mears for the $40 million.

[Josh Dean]

So Chhabra and his partners did in fact sell the bundled cases to a law firm in Houston for $40 million.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

They continue to try to solicit new clients with a new group of lawyers that ultimately doesn't pan out. And so the two firms that are owned by the Chabra family ultimately declare bankruptcy. And there are only a couple of people who are ultimately subject to criminal prosecution.

[Josh Dean]

Vincent Chabra isn't one of them. And how can that be?

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

According to the prosecutors, so much time had passed that the statute of limitations had run. And so they were not able to get the Chabras or the lawyers. The ultimate charges were RICO and violation of the Travel Act. So the Travel act allows for federal prosecutors to get involved when there has been some sort of violation of state law. And so in this instance, the violation of state law was the anti kickback statute in Florida. So they were able to get a doctor and a middleman on that particular statute, but not the Chabras. Part of it was the way that the Chabras had set up the entity. So Vince Chawbara, of course, didn't have his name on any of all of this because this goes back to his pill mill days. He had a $16 million forfeiture judgment hanging over him.

[Josh Dean]

Ron Lasorsa asserts that Chabra most likely funneled at least a chunk of the 40 million in proceeds out of the country.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

And so he moved all of his assets offshore to Hong Kong and into other foreign bank accounts so as to avoid having to pay this criminal forfeiture judgment. So when all of this was set up, it was set up through different companies with different parts of his family's name on the companies. And so when the middleman was making these payments to the company, it was to a different Chabra company, as opposed to law firm headquarters, which was what they were calling the call center, which was also confusing for the women because it sounds like it is a law firm.

[Josh Dean]

LaSourca signed an NDA, but subsequently decided to break it in order to talk to Beth and to become an Alpha Law whistleblower. But this didn't get him off the hook for his role. When Alpha's assets were placed into bankruptcy, he was forced to pay $150,000, just about all he had left from the whole scam. Clear a slate.

[Ron Lasorsa]

There's no honor among thieves, right? But I can't cry about it. When you get ripped off after the heist, what are you going to. Who are you going to go to to complain?

[Josh Dean]

Lorsa didn't suddenly wake up one day and realize he was a crook who'd been taking advantage of America's deeply flawed legal system to bilk innocent people. His crisis of conscience stemmed from a tragedy of his own.

[Ron Lasorsa]

In 2016, my life got turned upside down. I lost my son and my life fell apart. And it's been nine years now. And so this has been a process of reevaluating my life and trying to figure out how I can do the best I can with the time I have left.

[Josh Dean]

It's made him reevaluate everything and everyone.

[Ron Lasorsa]

You know, it shouldn't put doctors and lawyers on pedestals, right? They are human, just like the rest of us. Crow to greed. And the. The folks that were the doctors that were involved in this were fully aware of what they were doing, and they got paid handsomely to do it.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

And I don't want to ruin the ending, but, yeah, nobody gets punished. I mean, there are two criminal indictments, and both of those ultimately end in a whimper. One of the doctors was in prison briefly for witness tampering. He was released from that when Covid hit. And his quote from talking to me was, thank God for Covid. His lawyers convinced the judge that he had to be released so that he could pitch in with the COVID efforts, which, instead of doing that, he started with his plastic surgery, Even though he's not licensed as a plastic surgeon.

[Josh Dean]

That went just about as terribly as you can imagine and resulted in him losing his license to practice for something unrelated to his involvement in the mass tort surgery scam.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

His ultimate disbarment in the state of Florida stemmed from botching a Brazilian butt lift surgery and killing the woman.

[Josh Dean]

How about the chiropractors whose offices provided the surgical.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

They had been accused previously of running a spine crime ring where they teamed up personal entry lawyer to try to get people who had been in car accidents to also have what was allegedly unnecessary surgeries.

[Josh Dean]

They were not charged either.

[Ron Lasorsa]

I was just asking Beth, like last week when the book first came out. I guess the choppers are on the rung somewhere.

[Josh Dean]

And the Chabras. Neither Ron nor Beth knows where they are today.

[Ron Lasorsa]

They were indicted maybe a year ago, 18 months ago in Miami for taking investor money for litigation finance and just spending it, you know, for their personal use. Once a scumbag, always a scumbag.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

They're in the wind, and so far as I can tell. So they were in south Florida. Now I don't know where they are.

[Ron Lasorsa]

Maybe they hear this. Keep running, Vince. You'll be in jail soon enough.

[Josh Dean]

Ron Lasorsa did a good thing by opening up to Beth, and he's now working to expose and fix America's crisis with mass tort fraud. But he's well aware that none of that changes what he's done previously.

[Ron Lasorsa]

The unfortunate reality is I was also a bad person. You know what I mean? I wasn't an innocent victim in all of this. That's part of the problem that's why I know as much as I know I was in it for the money just as much as the next guy. But I'm not shining my halo by any means. I'm speaking truth. And if I have to endure the consequences of my previous actions, then I'm perfectly comfortable doing so in order to do the right thing.

[Josh Dean]

The only people, it seems, who suffered any real consequences for any of this are the women like Sharon and Jerry.

[Elizabeth Shambley Burch]

It was pretty horrendous for each of them. They were all left much worse off than they ever began. Jerry Plummer is permanently incontinent. She wears diapers every day. She has to have special pads that she puts on her bed every night. She's been told by multiple doctors that there's nothing they can do for her. And then Sharon has had to have a number of procedures to try to deal with her incontinence and including, essentially, it is where they shoot silicone gel into her urethra to try to prevent leaking.

[Josh Dean]

Those additional procedures may have fixed some of the problems, but they've caused others. They also caused trauma. They introduced risks that these women wouldn't otherwise have had to take.

[Sharon Gore]

I went through a lot. This was traumatizing. I'm still having these surgeries or procedures.

[Josh Dean]

There's also this. For the better part of a decade, Sharon was enduring all of this thinking she'd just had some bad luck or worse, that it was her fault in some way based on the decision she'd made.

[Sharon Gore]

I just thought my circumstance was a terrible circumstance. Something had gone wrong and I didn't understand the full picture of what had happened.

[Josh Dean]

She now understands what she was a lottery ticket of a sort for a very American kind of business run by a notorious scammer who had no interest in law.

[Sharon Gore]

We just became money makers for people. This was bad, but I mean, what are you going to do about it? You're just a little small person in just this big mess. Nobody really gets punished. They didn't get punished, not at the level they should have gotten punished after what they did. I mean, that was a butcher shop that I went to. They butchered women in those rooms. That is what they did to us. They butchered us and they sent us home without even the thought of what was going to happen next.

[Josh Dean]

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Teamed by Ewin lytramuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help, and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email [e-mail] or leave us a message at a special number we've set up 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.

[Sharon Gore]

I think Chuck would approve.