Jurors, however, found Luehrsen not guilty of eight money laundering charges that dealt with concealing transactions, and they also acquitted him of two evidence tampering charges over deleted emails. 

In addition to remaining deadlocked on the fraud charge, jurors could not reach a verdict on 11 other money laundering charges having to do with transactions involving money allegedly derived from unlawful activity. U.S. District Judge Lawrence J. Vilardo declared a mistrial on those counts as well.

Federal prosecutors alleged Luehrsen, a 38-year-old former Clarence resident, generated more than $10 million in wrongful insurance reimbursements by orchestrating a pyramid operation to get prescriptions for non-narcotic, custom-made creams for scars, wounds and pain that included highly priced ingredients without doctors even seeing the patients. 

The U.S. Attorney's Office now must decide its next steps and whether to retry Luehrsen on the deadlocked counts. 

The money laundering and evidence tampering counts that Luehrsen no longer faces carried a prison term of up to 20 years and possible fines of between $250,000 and $500,000.

The conspiracy to commit health care fraud count carries up to a $250,000 fine and 10 years in prison.

When the trial began a month ago, defense attorney A. Lee Bentley III told jurors that the prosecution "invested millions of dollars in this case, and they mean to win."

For more than five years, "the government has continued to interview witnesses, over and over and over," he told jurors during the trial. "These government agents, they're trying to do their best. But what's happened here is the government came up with its theory, and now it's tried to mold the evidence to fit the theory."

At least for some in the jury, which deliberated for seven days, the evidence did not fit on the health care fraud charge.

The government said Luehrsen obtained a large number of high-reimbursement prescriptions for himself, including four custom medications from one doctor on one day in August 2014 and three more prescriptions from another doctor on the same day. In all, the insurance reimbursements for just Luehrsen's personal prescriptions totaled $326,639, according to the government.  

An Amherst woman recounted to jurors that so many refills of the medical creams came to her home that she started throwing them in the trash. She didn't know it at the time, but her husband's insurance company was billed thousands of dollars for a single tube.

With the exorbitant reimbursement rates for all of the refills, her husband's insurance plan paid more than $2.8 million. Several others with similar prescriptions also racked up huge bills for their insurers, with a tube of medical cream billed at an average cost of $14,000, but some billed upward to $27,000.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Charles M. Kruly and John D. Fabian charged Luehrsen and other participants in his operation arranged for custom-made medications "to contain ingredients that carried high reimbursement rates from health insurers."  They targeted patients whose health insurance covered compounded medications, companies like National Grid and Verizon. They sought out patients and convinced them that they would benefit from the medication and then worked with the patients to obtain the prescriptions.

Luehrsen and his associates got prescriptions from doctors who had never examined the patients and who had no relationship with them. One doctor signed 147 prescriptions for 19 patients, and the prescriptions were filled 519 times, resulting in more than $8.75 million in insurance reimbursements. The doctor examined only two of those patients, prosecutors said.

The defense strategy relied on two main themes.

First, the health insurance companies decided what they were willing to pay for different compound medications, Bentley said. They were perfectly free at any time to stop covering the compound medications or paying the high reimbursements.

Second, it was the other pharmacy reps that Luehrsen enlisted to work under him – and who later became government witnesses – who did the wrongdoing, according to Bentley and Luehrsen's other lawyer, Jason Mehta.

"Mr. Luehrsen did not forge any doctor's prescriptions. He didn't deceive any doctors," Bentley told jurors.

Luehrsen testified that when he learned the government was investigating him and his company, MedHype, he offered to repay the reimbursements for any of the inappropriate prescriptions that the others gained through misconduct.

"I had a great business, and I didn't need that kind of conduct to be successful," he told jurors. 

Two other men have already pleaded guilty to charges: one who helped get prescriptions without the patient having had a medical visit and the other who substituted different patient names on signed 12-month prescriptions for the creams without a physician's knowledge. Both testified as cooperating government witnesses in Luehrsen's trial.

One has already been released from prison after being sentenced to three years, and the other awaits sentencing. But the prosecution has depicted Luehrsen as the one who devised "the scheme to make those quick millions, and he conspired with others to commit health care fraud," Kruly told jurors.

The government seized approximately $2.5 million in assets from Luehrsen, including three condos and $861,000 in investment funds. The government alleged that from 2014 to early 2017 he received $3.3 million in proceeds from health care fraud.