Prescription Drug-Ring Leader Sentenced to 11 Years

A West Orange man was sentenced to 11 years in a New Jersey State prison Thursday for leading a Newark-based drug ring, which illegally sold millions of dollars of prescription pain killers a year, the New Jersey Attorney General's Office announced. 

Mohamed Hassanain, 47, was sentenced March 28 by Superior Court Judge Joseph C. Cassini III after pleading guilty to the drug distribution charges in June 2012 that stretched from Newark to Boston. 

Hassanain admitted that from July 2005 to January 2007 he led a narcotics ring that sold approximately 40,000 OxyContin and Percocet pills per week, officials said. 

The investigation revealed a Livingston doctor, Mario Comensanas, 57, was paid to write prescriptions for patients who did not exist or were never seen by a doctor.

According to the attorney general's office, the drugs were mostly sold to a ring based in the Bronx. The prescription drugs sold in the Bronx were then sold to another drug ring in Boston.

Hassanain ran the operation from his home in West Orange and his business on Clinton Avenue in Newark, officials said. He and 18 other member of the drug ring were arrested and charged in August of 2007 who face a collective 200 years in prison. 

“The defendants in this case were reaping millions of dollars by distributing thousands of addictive narcotic pills every week to criminals who were dealing them on the streets of New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts,” Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa said in a release Thursday.

Comesanas was sentenced to 15 years in prison on May 26, 2010 after pleading guilty to first-degree racketeering and second-degree distribution of narcotics.