The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Doctor’s Orders | 4. Wheel of Fortune

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

With our main suspect on the lam, we fan out across the globe to dig into the past, present and potential future of the man prosecutors call, the “Mastermind of Fraud.” Doctor’s Orders is produced by Western Sound for Sony Music Entertainment’s The Binge.  Binge all episodes of Doctor’s Orders, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge.  Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access.  The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Searchlight Pictures presents The Roses, only in theaters August 29th. From the director of Meet the Parents and the writer of Poor Things, comes The Roses, starring Academy Award winner Olivia Coleman, Academy Award nominee, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Samburg, Kate McKinnon, and Allison Janney. A hilarious new comedy filled with drama, excitement, and a little bit of hatred, proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses Only in Theater's August 29th. Get tickets now.

Listen to all episodes of Doctor's orders ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Or visit getthebenge.com to get access to wherever you listen. The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. Where is Munir? Where is Munir? But the biggest question in the case, where is Dr. Uyeda? For over 15 years, authorities in California have wanted to talk to him,

whether as a person of interest in the murder of Juliana Redding, or as a named defendant in a mega health insurance scam. Okay, we didn't really know where Ua was. So we went about trying to find Uaida. It's a decades-old occupation. This is Mark Minnick. And as we tried to find Yuwaita through different sources, investigative sources, we popped up all kinds of stuff. In 1999, Mark was the CEO of Van Wert County Hospital in a really small town in Ohio.

Probably about hour and 15 minutes south of Toledo. And for a while, in the early 2000s, unit team were trying to track down Munir Ueda. You know, we popped down. up articles from magazines from Eastern Europe where he's judging beauty contests. You know, we see pictures of him and other beauty pageant people who eventually ended up in Van Wert, Ohio, amazingly enough. We found out the supposed Harvard rumor, found out more about the Stanford Fellowship, we found out more of other hospitals he had dealt with.

In there, I had the California Bureau of Investigation calling me. along with other people. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. It's just absolutely amazing. The guy has left this kind of trail over, you know, 25 years. The path Dr. Murnir Uweda took, from growing up in Lebanon to a small town in Ohio, to global capitals around the world,

is the same path. He took from small town surgeon to accused criminal mastermind. We figured, you know, it was mostly about the money. But then some of the things revealed a possibly greater diabolical person than we had imagined. I'm Benadere from Sony Music Entertainment and Western Sound. You're listening to Doctor's Orders. This is episode four. Wheel of Fortune.

Everyone, whether you're a superhero or a supervillain, or anything in between. Everyone has an origin story. Now, Munir's father, the family is originally from Tripoli. Now, this is kind of a known, more impoverished area in the country. Munir Yuwaita's origin story starts with a father who was, by most everyone's account, a superhero. Marwana Weida, who is a Munira Wadea's father, trained in internal medicine at the American University of Root. This is Mayanem Said.

She's part of an investigative reporting duo based in Beirut, Lebanon. And she told me that Marwan Yueda is kind of a big deal. After training in the United States, he returned to Lebanon in 1966 and was a pioneer in Lebanon's health care system. That was the year that Munira Weta was born. And that is when he introduced the specialty of infectious diseases, the practices of infection control and antibiotic utilization. So you have this man who is very, very talented and clearly kind of a pioneer in his field, right?

This very, very impressive man, it's kind of very interesting to see how far the apple fell from the tree. We don't know too much about teenage Munir, but we know that he and at least one of his sisters followed in their dad's footsteps, attending the American University of Beirut. Munir graduated from AUB's medical school in 1991. One of his sisters is still at AUB. She's a professor there. Her specialty is in anti-corruption and ethical business practices for accountants worldwide. From 1991 to 1999, Munir's resume shows several things,

a medical internship at NYU Medical Center in New York, Harvard and Albert Einstein Medical College for orthopedic training, a fellowship at Stanford for spinal surgery, and maybe it was in New York, that Munir met a woman named Eha Erbsaloo. She's the oldest romantic relationship that we could find for Munir. Aja was the runner-up for Miss Estonia in 1988, and she was also in New York in the 1990s.

After all that, a job in Van Wert, Ohio. We were looking for an orthopedic surgeon, probably 1998-99, and we had put out a recruitment contract, and he was one of our candidates who did a visit to Van Wirt. This is Mark Minnick again, former CEO of Van Wirt County Hospital in Van Wirt, Ohio. I just really like saying Van Wirt. Well, I would say we're a typical Midwestern community. Van Wirt County is probably a population base of about 31,000. Van Wert City itself is about 11,000. You know, the county fair is one of the big events of the year.

All the things you kind of see about the Midwest in the movies kind of epitomizes Van Wert. Mnir seems into it. He takes the job. Moves into a house right across the street from Mark. With a couple show dogs, his former beauty queen, now fiancé, along with an avid interest in horses, like really fancy horses. I mean, he had dogs, he had horses. had models. And people always ask me, hey, did you think of anything? No, I know doctors who date

models. I knew doctors who have show dogs, and I knew no doctors who have horses. Now, I'm not sure I know a doctor who has all three, but not unusual hobbies for doctors. The year AHA and Munir moved to Ohio, they also started a modeling agency called E&M Model Management. According to media reports, the agency was offering foreign models, potential. work in America. So I think we had like 18 kids in our neighborhood. I think 17 of them were boys and they were all under 14 years of age. So when they saw the models out jogging or whatever, I mean, they could draw attention. And then there was another one. And I think I've seen her on the internet as maybe another Missistonia or another Missistonia contestant. But they were there for a while

too. And their appearance eventually led to AHA's disappearance, so to speak. Soon, Aja, the now former fiancée, had left. And Miss Estonia, 1998, Cadre Valhutz, had arrived. She was also Miss Baltic Sea, 1999. So the way doctors and hospitals operate does not make sense to me. I had Mark explain it. Van Wert County Hospital needed more orthopedic surgeons. So they recruited Munir. And we're thinking, well, Harvard's the gold standard. We're thinking Stanford's the gold standard.

But hospitals rarely like hire doctors, like on a W-2. When Munir arrived in Van Wert, Mark's hospital helped him set up a little company. Then the doctors at the hospital started referring their patients who needed an orthopedist to his new practice. And since it can take a minute for a new practice to get established, the hospital guaranteed Munir's new company and income. With the expectation that once it was all up and running, Munir would pay that money back. It was like an advance.

And then we watch and see when that revenue is sufficient enough to support the practice. And so we basically asked for financials on a monthly basis. And we found basically that he was doing much better than our guarantee. Mark says he'd build almost two months. million dollars in under six months. And I would be the first one to say he built it up very quickly. But build does not mean collected. So this is where things get a little confusing, but it's important.

So I'm going to explain. As you know, if you've been to a doctor, when you get a bill, there's so many different things on it, and the rates can be, well, crazy. Sometimes they're all, did that really happen? And it costs how much? The thing is, doctors never expect to get all that money. They know they're usually just paid a fraction of it. Like, one insurance company might pay, say, 45% of what's billed.

Medicare might pay, like, 80%. So what doctors bill and what they get can be really, really different. And it causes this very real temptation to overbill. Because they're the ones who order all the tests, they're the ones that order all the admissions, they do all those things. If physicians weren't honest, they could write their own paycheck. So hospitals like Van Wert County Hospital have a layer of oversight called peer review to make sure doctors aren't ordering unnecessary things. In other words, is what he's doing appropriate? Insurance companies do their own reviews too.

And this is maybe where some of that whole, Insurance companies deciding what's appropriate care and what's not appropriate care. This is where some of that comes from. Just some. Doctors pushing the envelope and overbilling. So here's Munir Uweda, moving to Van Wert, Ohio, with his beauty queen, and suddenly billing a lot of money. And the hospital wanted to see what's going on here.

So at that point in time, we wanted to reconcile with him. And he basically stonewalled us on that. Basically, what he did is he filed suit against us. And not only the hospital, but me specifically. So, you know, we were trying to work with him, and all of a sudden we get slapped with a lawsuit. So as this stuff is going along, we're starting to figure out that we're dealing with a fairly sophisticated person.

Not sophisticated in a good way, but probably sophisticated in ways that we typically don't deal with. It took 18 months to litigate. I think he went through five different attorneys in the process. He kind of used attorneys as a fungible good. In the end, Mark and the Van Wert County Hospital prevailed. The judge ordered Munir to repay over $400,000. But remember what gets billed versus what gets collected?

So we had put the money in escrow. And the only people that could get access to the escrow were the attorney. We went to the escrow. The money was gone. Dr. Uweda had forged his attorney's name and taken the money and esconded with it. Judge Carr had some kind words for Dr. Uweda's attorney who Dr. Uweda hoodwinked along with everybody else. So we had the judgment, but we didn't have the money. Meanwhile, Munir had already, like, disappeared, like months ago. It kind of vanished in the dead of night. When faced with that peer review for his almost $2 million in charges, Muneer resigned his hospital privileges, which effectively squashed any inquiry.

Yeah, that squashes that. Because I don't, you know, my peer review is about me. I'm reviewing what's going on in my institution. And if he's out of there, then I don't have the right to review him anymore. Mark still doesn't know how much money Muneer made while working in Van Wirtz. I guess our impression of you, Wait, it was, okay, He was not a great partner. He was not a great person to be associated with.

But then some of the things post-wise, I mean, I think one of the things that the California Bureau of Investigation asked me that really kind of said, holy crap, you know, maybe I'm, maybe we avoided a really bad situation when they asked me if I ever feared for my life. You know, it's like, okay, why would I fear for my life? Should I have been worried? You know, my family lived there, all those types of things. But I don't know that he had to advance that far. I don't know that he was into it to the hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, and then the whole Juliana Redding thing. You know, maybe he just got deeper and deeper.

But we just thought he was, you know, a basic crook. Mark and his lawyers did eventually track Munir to California, and they did get their money. They may be the only ones to be. gotten any money back from Dr. Munir Uweda. Before the murder of Juliana Redding, before the alleged empire of corruption, Munir Ueda first made headlines in the gossip pages, in Estonia.

My name is Olga Romana. I'm an investigative reporter from Estonia. And the first article that I found mentioning Munir was published in October 1999. So this is right at the same time things are going sideways in Venworts. Definitely they were local celebrities. Where is Estonia? Just south of Finland.

Borded by Russia in the east, Latvia in the south, and across the Baltic Sea from Stockholm, Sweden. It's a small country. The entire country is 1.3, 1.4 million people. So it's super tiny. Tallinn, the capital, was an old medieval town. Today it's close to a half million people. It's a very lovely place where to be. And today it's known a lot for its really vibrant startup community.

So you got the boyfriend of two misses, Missistonia 1988 runner-up, now being seen around town with Miss Estonia in 1998. People are going to start talking. You know that with any love triangle involving two misses, it will create quite a bit of attention and people will be talking about it. So media did write about it quite a lot at that time. The headline from November 15, 1999 reads,

Very direct, Kajai Valhats with Eha Erbsalus partner. Then, not two months later, on January 4, 2000, did Khadjai Balhats secretly get married abroad? The article says, From one misses cuddle to another, In recent months, Cadre Val Haetz, who won the Miss Estonia title two years ago, has been in front of the lenses of photographers in the social media, and not alone. She is still in the photo series with a dark-blooded man.

The mysterious companion is former Miss Eja Erbsalou's Lebanese partner, Munir. And I'm just going to say this. Certain outlets in the Estonian press do not seem to give A.F. about certain journalistic standards. They call Mooneer at different times a, quote, womanizer, an exotic charmer, an evil genius, and pretty much just assume all the charges against him are true. Different country, different rules, I guess.

It took just two months. In the first reports, they were denying any romantic connections, and then later it was confirmed that, yeah, they actually did get married really fast. I traded an email with AHA, but she didn't want to comment for the story. We also emailed Cadre, but never heard back. After the drama of the Love Triangle settled down, Munir and Cadre got down to business.

I think it was in 2000, that they started buying up real estate in Estonia. Holger's research shows they bought an apartment in the luxurious and exclusive, Old Town Tallinn, a nearly 2,000 square foot apartment that would cost in the neighborhood of, say, three-quarters a million bucks today. Then they bought an historic country manner. Think like Bridgerton, big house with a collection of building sprawling grounds, like an historic estate. They bought it for 10 million Estonian crowns. That would be about 1.5 million in today's dollars. According to media reports, their goal was to turn it into a horse farm.

Yeah, it looks like it was never properly developed into a horse farm. What I can find from one media report from 2004 is that allegedly they brought, was it, 10 or 12 Brazilian Mastiff dogs as well, they intended to bring a chimpanzee. They need special permission to bring a chimpanzee from Lebanon to their farm. The Estonian press also reported that around that same time, Munir was leaving Estonia quite often, leaving Cadre at home. An article in the paper's Stars section is headlined. Munir and Kadri believed that the separation is temporary. Kadri is quoted, The family is in Estonia, and being with the family makes Munir happier than anything else.

So Kadri used that opportunity to express that she didn't really understand what that fuss was about, that they are clearly in love, we were looking into each other's eyes, even when Munir is in the United States doing his MBA, that we are calling each other two times a day, but they are clearly, clearly, clearly in love. Sounds very much like what you'd see in, like, Hollywood celebrities trying to quash rumors about whatever, you know? Yeah, I wouldn't know much about it.

Just going to say, Holger is a very accomplished investigative journalist, usually focused on Russia, financial crimes, stuff like that. I did get the feeling that this celebrity gossip stuff was kind of beneath them. During this period, Munir also pursued an MBA program at the very prestigious Morton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Then, he started establishing a new medical practice, this time in California. Holger dug into what was going on at the Country Manor in the early to mid-2000s. What he found was that it seemed like, at least at first, Munir and Cadre had big plans for rehabbing the estate, turning it into a state-of-the-art equestrian center.

Think million-dollar horses, a genetic breeding program, very high-tech, very expensive, and potentially very, very lucrative. But then, something changed. So I've just arrived at Ferden and der Aller. Ferdin and Alley is basically ferden on the river Aller.

And as soon as you arrive in Ferdin and Alem, and you look at the train station where I am now, it says Reiterstadt, which literally means rider's city or equestrian city. This is Rob Hyde. He's a freelance investigative reporter who's lived in Germany for over 20 years. Sometime around 2002, so a year or more after that last article about family making Munir happiest, Munir was spending time in the German countryside. in a small town called Ferdin. Breden is smack dab in the middle of Germany's ancestral center for horse breeding and equestrian sports.

It's incredibly scenic. You're riding through farms, and you're seeing the windmills, all the fields, and then the horses, and it kind of gets you in the mood of it. According to German media reports, Muneer's relationship with Ferdin was deeper than a simple love for horses. There is, you may have guessed it, a woman involved. Her name is Julia Koffler.

She was 19 at the time. He was 35. And she was a real horse lover, but she was actually a waitress. She was about to graduate from high school in 2002. And then suddenly this American businessman, you know, comes over and it puts a lot of effort, she said, into charming her. So she said, quoting, he kept coming to town. He took me out. He was very charming.

and I liked him a lot and she was completely unaware that he had already married. Rob's quoting from an interview with Julia published in 2016 in the German newspaper Kreitsaitong. The article says that Julia identified a property near Ferdin

similar to the Estonian estate. Julia says, quote, he wanted to buy something. I found it with my contacts in Ferreton. This is it. I knew immediately. I talked him into it. It was our project.

We both in terms. enjoyed it. They named the horse farm Gistut Eichenhain, or Oak Grove Stud Farm. Then, Julia moved to California to be with Munir. In June 2006, they had twins. But by late 2006, according to court records, they already were in a child custody battle that would last several years. We reached out to Julia for this podcast, but she didn't want to comment. I just want to stop and point out that everything we've been talking about so far in this episode, none of it is illegal. Munir was buying real estate. He was having romances and children. He was having contract disputes. He was living in Estonia, spending time in Germany, getting a fancy business degree, and starting from 2002, practicing medicine and starting to build a medical empire in Southern California.

All this is leading up to the summer when he met Juliana Redding. Nothing here is illegal, but it is expensive, which leads to two very interesting and very pertinent questions. How could Munir afford all this? Where was the money coming from? Td Bank knows that running a small business is a journey from. startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business you're in, visit td.com slash small business advice to find out

more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. The one thing I could say was absolute certainty. California is the training center for all health care, fraud, and abuse. I want to introduce you to a guy named Bill Reynolds. Bill's been investigating medical fraud for 33 years. He's been studying Munir Ueda for over a decade now. My primary responsibility is California War II. The fraud and abuse is just rampant.

I had no idea. He has stories for days about the depth, dangers, and outrageous characters in the Workers' Comp Fraud world. There was one doctor who he traveled from facility to facility, and he'd bring three physician's assistance with him. And each person, the doctor and the three PAs would see 80 to 100 people in a day. It was just a mill operation. It was a traveling dock in the box. They would hand the patients anywhere from 320 to 400 patients, five pharmaceuticals.

And so they were making hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. And this is just one individual in there. It might sound super dry. Yes, a lot of money. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, insurance. ripping off insurance companies. I mean, who likes those guys? But Bill's all, nah, man. This is actually life and death. Like I had one individual who came to me, I think I reviewed 500 surgeries. I think it was 12% of the people died within six months of having the surgery.

They would target Hispanics. Hey, let's recruit these patients from Mexico. So they'd offer them a pathway to citizenship. Come here. Follow work. comp claim, they would deplete them of half a million dollars of health care benefits, hand the person a check for $25,000, and send them back across the border with a disability from a spinal surgery. Work comp patients are like an ATM card. They are a money generated for them. They want to push them into all those business units and deplete them of all his benefits.

They don't care if he rehabs or not. Bill says in the 2000s, most of the action in California was in pharmaceuticals. During this period of time from 2002 to 2009, pharmaceuticals was the big dog. 50% of work comp, $13 billion. They'd see doctors, clinics, and other medical providers billing insane amounts. For example, take this drug, Renadidine. This is the drug that they bought for $18. or paid $18 for, but they billed $532 for it.

Every single patient got this drug plus four additional. And so you can see how much money is made off of that. But it was also everything else. What I call the Wheel of Fortune. The truly sophisticated operators would get business all around the wheel. Transportation services to take patients to and from appointments. translation services for non-English speakers, prescriptions and pharmaceuticals,

and also all the regular medical services, from doctor's appointments to imaging and diagnostics, all the way up to full-on surgeries. You just can't drop your guard around these guys, because you're dealing with so much money, so much money. I mean, a typical back surgery is 80 to 82,000. On the average, these guys were 400,000. 50 to 475,000, just the one corner of the wheel of fortune was almost a half million dollars.

Another example is that doctors would find loopholes in order to bill more. Say a doctor wants to give you an injection for pain. In his office, he could bill, say, $800 for that. But if you happen to have another office right across the hall that has an EKG machine, some oxygen in the corner in case something happens, suddenly it's an ambulatory surgical center, and you can bill $15,000 for the exact same procedure. But nothing never ever happens.

It's just a loose nugget in the law that allows them to capitalize on that. So we're talking about lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of money. like hundreds of millions of dollars. And patients, some of whom actually need real care, are unknowingly slipping into this medical netherworld where they become, well, like an ATM car. So this is the Southern California Workers' Comp World

that, after leaving Ohio, hanging out in Estonia for a little while, a little German vacation, an MBA from the Wharton School, Munir Uweda decides to set up shopping. In 2004, Munir sets up a company called Frontline Medical. His empire would eventually grow to include over 30 different companies, all of which authorities alleged were controlled by him in some way or another. Even though the actual names on the companies, the majority owners, the directors, the officers, etc., were not him.

These companies were all around that wheel of fortune. MRI and imaging companies, a surgery center. a pharmaceutical company, a transportation company, the list goes on. Bill says back then there were two players who were just milk in the hell out of the workers' comp system. And through his investigation, he can see when Munir started working with them. I know that one of the contracts he had was dated back in 2002. So that's probably the start of his transition into the California fraud scheme. What I can tell you is that in 2005, there were complaints about Munir, that he wasn't performing his own surgeries.

I mentioned this in an earlier episode. It eventually turned into an investigation by the California Medical Board that became a formal disciplinary action and would eventually lead to his medical license being revoked. Why would he do this? Well, it could be any number of reasons. Maybe he wanted more billings. There are examples in the early 2000s of doctors claiming to do. do multiple surgeries a day, some by their physician assistants, and then billing for over a million dollars for one day's work. It's just unconscionable when one of the individual doctors,

he started at five o'clock in the morning. And my partner went over and finally got him to come out around nine o'clock from the operating room in his scrubs. And while he's talking to him, the guy's drunk off his ass. He's doing these surgeries drunk. And the hospital was turning their head to this because he's bringing in too much money. Maybe Muneer was just too busy to do the surgeries himself. He was growing a medical empire after all,

and that takes time. It takes a lot of phone calls. You're managing a whole staff, multiple staffs. Regardless, Bill says, Each innovation and fraud quickly spread. Everyone was learning from each other, working together, referring to each other, getting kickbacks for those referrals. You figure out a unique, new way to build the system? Well, once one individual does that, oh man, the train has left the station.

It's being replicated by provider after provider. The greedy you are, the deeper you're going to go. He thinks Munir learned from these fraudster bigwigs. and soon he says rose to the top it was follow the money I equate it just like a drug dealer you got a drug dealer who's

dealing grams and then you go to the next guy who's dealing an eight ball to a pound and the guy who's stealing a kilo and then he's in a multi-kilo well that's how I equated your weight in he followed that money to get up to be the top of the pyramid

And for the most part, it was fine. Business was humming. Sure, some other insurance investigators were digging into frontline medical and Mooneer. But the authorities, they had murderers to catch. They used to deal with. Crimes where there was a clear victim, a clear perpetrator, and cases that opened and closed. Until. Jilliana Redding was found brutally murdered.

This was a slow, brutal murder. A Santa Monica detective investigating the murder of Juliana Redding started hearing things. Not about the murder, but something with even more victims. And money. Lots of money. Her investigation led her to a Santa Monica storage facility. She opened a door, she looked inside,

and found boxes, boxes and boxes and boxes. It became obvious that these documents related to dozens and dozens of shell companies or other companies that were related to, Eweida, that touched on what the homicide detective was hearing from witnesses, allegations that he was engaged in massive health care fraud. Next time, on doctor's orders. From that point on, I was going to the medical clinic at least twice a week. It just hurts so bad.

I can't even describe it. And I was like popping pills. Had a real estate empire. He had racing cars. He had dogs. He had horses. He was running all these things. How does one person do all that?

One of the first pieces of evidence that we found was a bill that was submitted to an insurance company for treatment by a doctor. Well, that doctor on that date was in jail. That's in episode five. Ashes to Ashes. Don't want to wait for the next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of doctor's orders ad-free right now by subscribing to the Binge podcast channel. Search for The Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple. Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month.

Check out the binge channel on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to learn more. Doctor's Orders is produced by Western Sound for Sony Music Entertainment's The Binge. The executive producer and host is me, Benadere. The executive producer for The Binge is Jonathan Hirsch. Doctor's Orders was written and produced by Neda Salem, who's edited by Ben Adair, Lila Hassan is our fact checker, legal review by Davis-Rite-Tremaine, LLP. Michael Rayfield is the mix engineer. Next up, episode five, Ashes to Ashes.