Last year, the Justice Department charged five men with running a pandemic-era racket that falsely billed Medicare and another federal program $65 million for genetic and COVID-19 testing that prosecutors said were not medically necessary.
Prosecutors also accused them of paying kickbacks to doctors and recruiters who steered hundreds of thousands of patients’ tests to a lab in Texas, Innovative Genomics, which collected $44 million from the taxpayer-funded Medicare system and a COVID-19 insurance program.
Before trial in Miami federal court, three of the men pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit healthcare fraud and cooperated as government witnesses against the remaining two defendants. But after a month-long trial, a 12-person jury on Thursday acquitted Diego Sanudo Sanchez Chocron, 48, and Gregory Charles “Milo” Caskey, 58, of the conspiracy charge and six related offenses…