(File Photo of a Gavel)
Noah Haswell, Beaver County Radio News
(Pittsburgh, PA) United States Attorney Troy Rivetti announced today that two former CEOs of Primary Health Network (PHN), a non-profit medical organization headquartered in Sharon, Pennsylvania, have been sentenced in federal court to terms of imprisonment on their convictions for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. The sentences were imposed on fifty-eight-year-old Drew Pierce of West Middlesex, Pennsylvania, and seventy-two-year-old Jack Laeng of Lake Milton, Ohio. Pierce was sentenced yesterday to 40 months of imprisonment and Laeng was sentenced on April 16th, 2026, to 24 months of imprisonment. According to information presented to the Court, Pierce engaged in multiple schemes to defraud PHN over the course of almost a decade, with Laeng joining him in two of those schemes. Pierce, Laeng, and others first agreed to enter into contracts with a developer on behalf of PHN in return for kickback payments of 50% of the funds the developer received from PHN. PHN’s board of directors was not aware of the kickback payments, which ultimately caused a loss to the company of more than $1.5 million. Laeng was the CEO of PHN for the beginning of the scheme, from 2011 to about 2014, at which time Pierce took over as CEO. Pierce, Laeng, and others also engaged in a scheme in which they inserted a company called TopCoat between PHN and the company’s legitimate vendors. PHN paid TopCoat through the scheme, which provided no services other to then pay the true vendors a lesser price. PHN’s board of directors was unaware that TopCoat performed no actual work and was made up entirely of PHN insiders. The TopCoat scheme caused a loss to PHN of more than $400,000. In addition to these schemes, Pierce separately engaged in another kickback scheme, as well as in a scheme to pay his own personal expenses out of PHN accounts and conceal those payments as business expenses. Another co-defendant in some of the schemes, Mark Marriott, is scheduled to be sentenced on May 8th, 2026.