Nurse Practitioner Julie Devuono Indicted On Money Laundering Charges

Julie Devuono, pictured above, whose case has made news on this website since April 2022 when almost 100 teachers were removed suddenly from their salaries in the single most outrageous violation of due process ever seen in the history of New York City labor/education law, has been indicted for money laundering.

The teachers in the case I worked on (Index no. 518863/2022, Judge Abadi) mentioned in the Newsday article below, and the people who I spoke to who were not in that case yet who also were summarily removed from their salaries and put on leave without pay, are all innocent of the charges that were filed against Julie Devuono. They got vaccinated.

The NYC DOE, with their renowned disregard for the laws of due process, “believed” that anyone who walked in the door of Wild Child Pediatric Care to get vaccinated never wanted to be vaccinated, and bought a fake card instead. See Conroy Affirmation and his salary (above, from Seethroughny.net), paid by the NYC DOE. He is not an “independent” investigator. The malicious prosecution seen here, in my opinion, shows the utmost stupidity and shows how little respect the City has for municipal employees. Why would anyone with families, expenses, and great jobs working with children put all this into jeopardy? This makes no sense. Additionally, in our Constitution it says that all people are innocent until proven guilty. That’s what this country stands for, according to almost everyone except the NYC Department of Education. In the minds of the DOE, anyone you “believe” is guilty of something, is guilty, and has to prove his/her/their innocence. Nonsense.

Next time you scream and yell at someone because they were accused of something in the media, just stop. Next time someone tells you to ostracize a person you work with because they might have done something they should not have done, don’t follow this “advice”. People wrongfully accused suffer for the rest of their lives and remember every comment that hurt their soul.

Additionally, over the past year I have been in communication with all the petitioners and can say that this group of people are the loving and excellent teachers any parent would want in their child’s life. Many parents and students were distressed when their teacher disappeared in one day.

So while the NYC DOE “believed” they were guilty of something, in the end no one else did, – neither the Suffolk County DA nor the Court – and now everyone is back in their jobs.

The lesson here is not to jump to condemn anyone until you know the facts or the circumstances.

We can do that. We must do that.

Betsy Combier  betsy@advocatz.com

Papers: Julie DeVuono, charged in alleged fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination card scheme, indicted on money laundering charges

By Grant Parpan, grant.parpan@newsday.com@GrantParpanUpdated March 24, 2023 5:32 pm

A Suffolk County grand jury indicted a nurse practitioner accused of running a $1.5 million fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination card scheme on money laundering charges, court records show.

Julie DeVuono, 50, of Amityville, will be arraigned April 12 on the upgraded charges, which include felony counts for forgery of a government document and offering a false instrument as well as misdemeanor conspiracy for the alleged scheme she ran out of her Amityville health clinic. She was indicted Tuesday along with her corporation, Kids-On-Call Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, PC.

In a civil forfeiture action filed in state Supreme Court last year, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney alleged DeVuono used proceeds of the scheme to satisfy the mortgage on her Amityville house in the days following her arrest.

Tierney alleged in the filing that DeVuono, owner and CEO of a clinic operating under the name Wild Child Pediatric Health Care, authorized a $236,980 wire transfer just three days after her January 2022 arrest to pay the balance on a mortgage for the house owned by her husband, an NYPD pilot, according to the civil forfeiture complaint filed last May.

Defense attorney Steven Gaitman of Gaitman & Russo in Garden City acknowledged the indictment to Newsday, but declined to comment before the arraignment.

Prosecutors have alleged that after entering into an agreement with the Centers for Disease Control to administer free COVID-19 vaccinations to the public, DeVuono directed practical nurse Marissa Urraro of Northport to fake giving shots to patients who would then receive a vaccine card in exchange for cash. The shots were then falsely reported to the state, prosecutors said.

Adult patients paid between $220 and $350 per fake shot recorded with the state, according to the civil forfeiture complaint. Fake pediatric shots ranged between $85 and $220, the complaint said.

To conceal the alleged scheme, DeVuono, Urraro and receptionist Brooke Hogan, all of whom have been criminally charged, “wasted” the doses the clinic reported administering to patients by dumping an equal amount of the vaccine into a trash can, the complaint said. Urraro and Hogan have not been charged in the new indictment, court records show.

The employees often received cash payments from patients, which were kept in a safe at the office from which DeVuono would frequently remove cash, according to the complaint.

During the raid of the DeVuono home in January 2022, investigators recovered more than $869,000 in cash and a ledger indicating the scheme generated $1.5 million, according to the civil forfeiture complaint and prosecutor statements at her previous arraignment. DeVuono also shared some of the cash proceeds with her employees, prosecutors said.

The alleged scheme has been linked to a lawsuit in state Supreme Court in Brooklyn filed by an attorney for a group of 30 New York City public school teachers who were suspended without pay after an investigator reported they received their vaccine cards from the Amityville clinic, according to records in that case. Supreme Court Justice Gina Abadi ruled in December that those teachers, 27 of whom previously had been granted tenure, should be returned to the classroom and awarded back pay. Those teachers have not been criminally prosecuted.

Derin DeVuono, the nurse’s husband, was named as a noncriminal defendant in the civil forfeiture action. In that complaint, Tierney said his office intends to recover from Derin DeVuono the amount paid to satisfy his mortgage and any increased equity established in the time that has since passed.

Grant Parpan covers Suffolk County courts and federal courts for Newsday. A Long Island native, he joined Newsday in 2022.