Dentist Accused of Medicaid Fraud, Erecting Backyard Water Park, Is Losing a Media Fight

[TexasTowelie]

Dr. Richard Malouf's Preston Hollow estate/amusement park/lawsuit factory.

In many ways, Dr. Richard Malouf is the very picture of success (See: "On Being Successful"; RichardMalouf.com). Born to Lebanese immigrants, he built a multi-million dollar chain of dental clinics from the ground up. He bought a French chateau on Strait Lane in Preston Hollow and set to work building a water park in the back. Through hard work, dedication, and top-notch SEO skills, he has even managed to knock unflattering news articles from the top of his Google search results.

Alas, with ostentatious success comes great scrutiny. Malouf -- and we have to be careful how we phrase this because as we'll detail in a moment, the man files defamation lawsuits the way other dentists hand out free samples of dental floss -- was accused a few years back of defrauding Texas of millions in Medicaid dollars. His company, All Smiles Dental and Orthodontics, collected tens of millions of dollars in Medicaid for putting braces on poor children, more than a thousand of them under 12 years old. In 2010, for instance, it billed the state for $10.2 million for orthodontics work performed at its 51 dental clinics, or three times the amount paid out for braces by the Medicaid program in Georgia. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott sued Malouf and All Smiles in the summer of 2012 over allegations of Medicaid fraud.

Not long after the lawsuit was filed, real estate blogger Candy Evans noted on her blog that Malouf was building the backyard water park, complete with a bowling alley, rock-climbing wall, lazy river and 35-foot water slides. Malouf's brazenness -- here you have a dentist accused of simultaneously exploiting poor kids and Texas taxpayers using his millions to build his own private wonderland -- proved irresistible to many media outlets including The Dallas Morning News, WFAA, CultureMap, an AOL real estate blog called Curbed.com, and the Dallas Observer.

Malouf responded by suing 1) Evans, whom he accused of trespassing and being a terrible journalist; 2) almost every media outlet that mentioned the backyard water park, with the exception of the Observer, for defamation; and 3) movie star Owen Wilson's mother, who lives next door, for abetting the paparazzi. (In a separate lawsuit that was recently dropped, Malouf claimed that Wizard Works Product Development Co., the supplier of a half-million dollars worth of "aquatic recreational equipment" for his home, had defrauded him.)

Read more: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2015/04/richard_malouf_dentist_medicaid.php

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