Trial Of Nursing School “Diploma Mills”

Imagine the horror of learning that the Nursing School from which you graduated gave you a Diploma without proper training.  There you are doing quite well in your job and suddenly you find that your License is about to be revoked because you did not attend a properly licensed School!

That is exactly what happened in Florida’s Palm Beach School of Nursing, Quisqueya Health Academy, Sacred Heart Institute of Fort Lauderdale, and Siena College of Health in Lauderhill where “Operation Nightingale,” an effort by the Department of Justice to shut down these Schools, revealed that altogether the facilities issued over 7600 fake nursing diplomas.

In 2023, 27 people were charged and convicted for their participation in the scheme.  Last Friday, the final three remaining Defendants faced jury trials. 

Palm Beach State College-Lake Worth Registrar Gail Russ was convicted of 13 counts of wire fraud and exonerated of five others.  Recruiters, Cassandra Jean, Owner and Operator of Success Nursing Review in Brooklyn, New York and Vilaire Duroseau, Owner and Operator of the Center for Advanced Training and Studies in West Orange, New Jersey, were both found guilty of four counts of wire fraud.  They now face up to twenty years in prison.

 It is scary and unnerving to realize that there are people who fell for these false diplomas.  The Judge specifically told the Jurors, “The absolute corruption of the nursing field by these defendants and others who work with them … This was all a shortcut designed to make money.”

Unfortunately, these get-rich-quick schemes sound great in the beginning but are truly costly in the end.  The common denominator to all of it: greed.  

If it looks too good to be true, it probably isn’t!  There is truly a lesson here in caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.