Sokari ‘Momma’ Bobmanuel, 63, and Alantha Stewart, 42, were sentenced for operating a $6 million scheme in Houston that saw them and co-conspirators illegally sell over a million opioid pills.
A multiyear $6 million drug operation that saw the illegal sale of over a million opioid pills officially came to an end Wednesday when its ringleaders were both sentenced to over a decade in federal prison.
Sokari “Momma” Bobmanuel, 63, and Alantha Stewart, 42, operated a pill mill scheme out of Houston from May 2018 to August 2019, a Justice Department news release said. Bobmanuel will spend the next 14 years in prison after a jury in a Houston federal court found her guilty June 9. Stewart pleaded out in January 2020 and received a lesser sentence of 10 years, according to court records.
Bobmanuel, the former owner and pharmacist-in-charge of Cornerstone Rx Pharmacy, participated in the scheme by helping facilitate the illegal sale of nearly 160,000 pills, court documents said. Prescriptions for the pills were issued by her co-conspirator, Jonathan Rosenfield, and others from Sunnyside Medical, including two Houston-area pill-mill clinics.
Buyers of the pills would often pay Bobmanuel $1,200 for a single oxycodone prescription, and they’d use other peoples’ names to purchase the drugs, court records said. Bobmanuel amassed over $1 million during the scheme.
Stewart, co-owner of the Sunnyside Medical pill-mill clinics, illegally prescribed opioids under Rosenfield’s name, according to court documents. She and her co-conspirators at Sunnyside Medical issued prescriptions for over 1.1 million pills, which in turn were bought by drug dealers posing as patients, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Rosenfield, who co-owns Sunnyside Medical, and Stewart’s husband, Elmer Taylor, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and are scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 15. Taylor, who worked at Sunnyside Medical with his wife, recruited buyers for the scheme, court records said.
Sunnyside Medical clinics made $5.4 million from selling the prescriptions for the drugs, according to court documents.
