Pagans male who claimed pregnancy pain to get pills sentenced to 20 years

On his first visit to the Levittown doctor's office, Patrick Treacy – a beefy, bearded biker with a full complement of face and skull tattoos – complained that he was having menstrual pains after numerous pregnancies.

The doctor prescribed him 240 tablets of oxycodone and 60 Xanax pills despite those ludicrous symptoms, and sent him on his way.

Thus began a lucrative business for the 49-year-old enforcer for the Pagans Outlaw Motorcycle Gang  -- one that on Friday landed him 20 years in prison.

Treacy, who pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges last year, was the eighth defendant to face sentencing for a pill mill operation led by William J. O'Brien III, who was sent to prison for three decades in October after turning his Bucks County pain-management practice into an illegal drug-distribution network worth $5 million.

Federal authorities have described the case as one of the worst local examples of a drug-dealing doctor's recklessly contributing to the region's epidemic of opioid addiction. And Treacy, a Pagan nicknamed "Redneck" with a penchant for violence, was an integral piece of O'Brien's operation, they said.

"His participation in the O'Brien pill mill conspiracy [is] simply the culmination of a lifetime of reprehensible criminal activity," Assistant U.S. Attorney M. Beth Leahy wrote in a sentencing memo in the case.

Relying on bikers with nicknames like "Tomato Pie" and "Body Parts" to bring him fake patients, O'Brien wrote dozens of prescriptions for oxycodone, methadone, Xanax, Percocet, and similar drugs between 2012 and 2015 that Pagans and their associates later resold on the streets for as much as $30 a pill.

And when female patients the Pagans had recruited, including strippers from Philadelphia-area clubs, were short on cash, O'Brien made it clear he was willing to trade prescriptions for sex.

Treacy -- a Pagan so proud that he tattooed "1% on his face, in a nod to the gang's motto that 99 percent of bikers are law-abiding while he and his crew were the other guys" -- was introduced to O'Brien through Sam Nocille, the gang leader credited with setting the O'Brien pill mill in operation before his death in prison in 2014.

Nocille received kickbacks from most of the players in the scheme, and Treacy was one of the biggest.

According to court filings, he moved more than 66,000 pills in the three-year period covered by the indictment – a tenth of the total credited to the O'Brien drug ring overall. Just one of the clients to whom Treacy resold pills netted him about $3,000 every two weeks, prosecutors said.

And when O'Brien needed the muscle befitting the leader of a drug organization, he turned to Treacy and his Pagans brothers.

Witnesses at O'Brien's trial last year testified that the doctor once tried to hire Treacy to kill his ex-wife – a crime prosecutors say was only averted by Treacy's arrest in Georgia, but which Treacy denied Friday.

In 2013, O'Brien sent Treacy and a Pagans associate, Joseph Mehl, to collect an $11,000 debt from a scofflaw patient in South Philadelphia. The men showed up armed with a pipe and brass knuckles, but fled from the man's house when a neighbor called police.

A day later, that debtor, Anthony Rongione, 44, and another man – Michael Sperring, 52, -- were found fatally shot in the head at a house on the 600 block of Fitzgerald Street. Their slayings remain unsolved.

Treacy's lawyer, Anthony Voci Jr., bristled at the notion Friday that his client had committed any violent acts while working with O'Brien.

"He bought pills. He sold pills," Voci said. "He didn't shoot anybody, stab anybody, or beat anybody."