"Filling My Bathtub With Ones": Texas Lab Owner Convicted in $328 Million Genetic Testing Scheme Fed by Telemarketing

A Dallas jury convicted him.

The verdict

On February 20, 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) Criminal Division announced that a federal jury in Dallas had convicted Keith J. Gray, 39, of McKinney, Texas, a laboratory owner and former NFL player. The convictions were for conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive health care kickbacks, five counts of violating the Anti-Kickback Statute and three counts of money laundering. Sentencing was set for a later date. Each count carries up to 10 years.

How the telemarketing fit in

Per court documents and trial evidence, as laid out by DOJ:

• Gray owned and operated two clinical labs, Axis Professional Labs LLC and Kingdom Health Laboratory LLC.
• He offered and paid kickbacks to marketers for Medicare beneficiaries' DNA samples, personal information (including Medicare numbers) and signed test orders for medically unnecessary cardiovascular genetic tests.
• The marketers hired other companies to solicit Medicare beneficiaries through telemarketing and to do "doctor chase," which meant finding beneficiaries' primary care doctors and pressuring them to approve tests.
• Patients had supposedly been "qualified" for testing during phone calls with non-medical staff at one of those companies, not by their own doctors.
• To hide the kickbacks, Gray used sham contracts and invoices billing "marketing" hours that were reverse-engineered to match per-sample kickback amounts. He also called the payments "software" and loans that never existed.

The texts

Trial evidence included text messages in which Gray and a co-conspirator got giddy about the Medicare money. The co-conspirator wrote, "$ent, you should have it any minute if you don't already. Get it?" Gray replied, "Sorry I was filling my bathtub with ones. Yes lol."

The money

Axis and Kingdom billed Medicare about $328 million for false, fraudulent and kickback-tainted genetic testing claims. Medicare paid about $54 million. Gray laundered some of it by buying luxury vehicles, including a Dodge Ram truck worth more than $142,000 and a Mercedes Benz SUV worth more than $145,000.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), the Texas Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) and the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General (VA OIG) investigated.

Why it matters

The lab sat several steps away from the actual calls, and the jury convicted anyway. Phone "qualification" by non-medical staff, doctor chase and per-sample payments disguised as hourly marketing all came out at trial. Putting layers between yourself and the telemarketing doesn't make the arrangement go away.

That's it.