Unwatched, a sober home-based business boomed. Daniel Cleggett Jr. visited his expanding empire of sober properties in a shiny black Mercedes and spoke of salvation. God had lifted him from the pit of addiction, and now, he believed, it was his life’s function to elevate others. For the determined, he prescribed a spiritual cure: Fill the hole in your coronary heart with faith, not medicine. Cleggett, a South Shore robust man in his early 30s who emerged from a wild youth coated neck to ankles in tattoos, had watched enough pals die. He was determined to avoid wasting lives. It was lucrative work. At the fourth sober residence he founded, Lakeshore Retreat in Wakefield, a bed started at $3,000 a month; some clients drained their 401(ok)s or turned to grandparents for help. They paid as a result of Cleggett promised hope: clear, lovely houses; structured sober dwelling; a group of misplaced souls finding one another.
Not the overdose demise in his first home. Not the allegations that he was a part of a murky network recruiting younger addicted folks to ship to Florida for therapy - two of whom died. Not the investigators from the Legal professional General’s Office who began asking questions. Cleggett’s operation grew: He opened a women’s sober home. Then a house in Boston. After which, on June 17, two landscapers engaged on the Lakeshore property spotted a pair of sneakers behind a shed, set back 20 ft or so from the swimming pool. When they went to select them up, they found the bones. Nobody knows what number of sober homes there are in Massachusetts, or where they are all located. Homes like Cleggett’s, which cater to the newly sober and supply drug testing, curfews, and peer help teams, are shielded from regulation by federal and state truthful housing legal guidelines. They are not considered therapy facilities: They're residences for disabled folks, and the state well being division can’t, without adjustments to federal and state legal guidelines, require them to satisfy any standards.
However nobody is watching. Anybody can open a sober residence - just dangle an indication in your door and start amassing rent. On this regulatory void, Cleggett and numerous others have arrange shop. Protected from prying eyes, Cleggett has opened one dwelling in which, Boston officials say, shoppers are crammed into overcrowded, unsafe rooms, and one other where purchasers say they have been informed by staff without medical licenses to cease taking psychiatric medications and, as a substitute, to pray. Two folks under his company’s watch have died. "It’s a legal loophole that costs lives," mentioned Quincy Metropolis Councilor Brian Palmucci, who wrote an ordinance attempting to require sober homes in Quincy to register with town after receiving complaints about houses in his district. Cleggett didn't respond to repeated requests for comment. A Globe reporter sent him an inventory of questions and dropped off the listing at two of his sober homes. Po st has been creat ed by GSA Con te nt Generator Demoversion !
At a home in Quincy, beauty assistant director Nick Espinosa said Cleggett had obtained the questions and was consulting a lawyer. "We do our greatest," said Espinosa, who declined to answer particular questions. When dealing with so many individuals, he said, you’ll have 100 good experiences and five bad ones. "We are really about serving to individuals. For greater than a decade, prosecutors have been fighting abuse of Medicaid, the government’s medical insurance program for the poor, by sober properties and drug-testing labs making a fortune off urine checks. In 2012, several years earlier than Cleggett opened his first dwelling, the state was grappling with a rising chorus of complaints about dangerous sober homes beset by relapses of residents. Public health officials concluded in a report that they were legally powerless to impose regulation. In 2016, with overdose deaths statewide at a historic high, the state authorized guidelines that funded an independent company, the Massachusetts Alliance for Sober Housing, or MASH, to certify sober properties.