Dr Marvin Moy was facing federal prosecution and a bitter divorce, and his life had been in limbo for months. Some immediately wondered if what looked like a boat crash was actually something else.
The doctor eased his boat, the Sure Shot, out of its slip on Long Island, New York, late that October morning, guided it past Fire Island and into the Atlantic Ocean, toward where the big tuna were biting and away from a world of mounting troubles.
No lawyers, no federal agents, no courtrooms.
Dr Marvin Moy, a Manhattan physician, was a regular fixture at the Center Yacht Club in the hamlet of Moriches. Some club members arriving from the city were viewed as outsiders, but Moy moved with ease in this world, a fisherman’s fisherman who happened to have a busy day job.
Then, in January, Moy was indicted in federal court in Manhattan, charged with insurance fraud through his medical practice. The government accused Moy and others of running a scam that involved bribing emergency responders and hospital employees to direct car crash victims to his pain management offices. A conviction could have led to years in prison.
And he was in the midst of a long and bitter divorce from his wife of 14 almost entirely rocky years. In court filings, he described disputes over custody of their daughter, age 12, and over finances. The divorce case had dragged on for five years so far, and Moy had cycled through several lawyers, still owing one firm more than US$69,000, according to a lawsuit against him.
But on October 12, a calm and clear Wednesday, Moy was planning to leave all that behind. He was bound for a popular area in the ocean called the Hudson Canyon, a journey of some six hours. He had brought along a new acquaintance, Max Wong, a 36-year-old nurse in the Queens borough of New York City.
Night fell over the Sure Shot, and Wednesday night rolled into Thursday morning. Their fishing complete, Moy and his friend were on their way back to the marina, about an hour from the yacht club.
Then, just after midnight, a distress beacon on Moy’s yacht sounded its alarm from 40km off the coast of Fire Island. The Coast Guard quickly dispatched pilots who spotted an oil slick, a floating white cooler and a lone man — Wong, the nurse.
But Moy, who had transcended humble roots to become a physician treating thousands of patients and then become the subject of a sprawling criminal investigation, had disappeared.
Two months later, prosecutors and people who knew him are still trying to understand what happened out there on the open ocean. Friends from the marina had theories; Wong, the last man known to have seen him, provided an inconclusive account. The judge overseeing his case issued a warrant for Moy’s arrest, citing the possibility that he had not been on the boat at all. Federal investigators said their inquiry was ongoing.
“Look, who knows what happened?” said Roland G. Riopelle, a lawyer representing Bradley Pierre, who is accused alongside Moy in the insurance fraud case. “As I sit here now, I have no reason to know one way or the other whether he died in a boating accident or cleverly created a situation that looked like a boating accident and fled.”
The only thing anyone knew for certain was that Moy was gone.
A success story
In some sense, Moy’s career in medicine was launched in the kitchen of a busy Chinatown restaurant called Mee Sum Cafe. His father, Donald Moy, a Chinese immigrant whose family had settled on nearby Mott Street, had owned it since taking it over from his own parents.
Marvin, still a boy, became a lackluster student after his parents divorced, he explained years later in a 2021 story about the cafe, written by a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and published on Medium.
“I just wasn’t interested in things,” he said. But a single day’s work as a dishwasher in Mee Sum was clarifying: The family business was not for him. He buckled down and became a disciplined student who went on to attend New York University and medical school in Buffalo, New York.
He graduated in 2004 and returned to New York City, where he opened pain management clinics called Medical Now PC in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.
In 2007, he met a woman named Hanyue Zhu — she went by Hannah — and they were married less than a year later, in August 2008. They settled in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side; soon, Zhu was pregnant.
Moy’s rising fortunes were radically interrupted just four months after his marriage, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Surgery in 2009 took a grave toll, with doctors removing a large portion of the organ, turning Moy into a diabetic. He spent two months in a hospital before leaving for home.
But in his absence, much had changed. His version of events is drawn from an affidavit he filed in his divorce case that was obtained by The New York Times. Zhu, reached at her Manhattan apartment, declined to comment for this article.
Moy claimed that his pregnant wife had moved her mother into their cramped apartment, forcing him to recover from surgery in Chinatown with his grandparents. He felt isolated, even after their daughter was born in 2009. He wrote that when Zhu took the baby to China for a visit, he feared the cancer could return and kill him and the girl “would never know me, her father.”
He was trying to expand his medical practice but was low on cash, with lag times of months or even years between filing an insurance claim and finally receiving payment. His wife persuaded him, he claimed later, to enter into an agreement with a financial backer called Medical Reimbursement Consultants. The partnership with the company and its owner, Pierre, was the beginning of years of trouble.
A rescue, and a mystery
When the Coast Guard rescuers arrived, they quickly pulled Wong from the sea and into a helicopter. He was badly cut about the face but had escaped serious injury. Most importantly, he was conscious and appeared lucid.
He told searchers that the boat had been struck by a much larger vessel and said he had last seen Moy alive. “One individual remains missing and is reportedly wearing a life jacket,” the Coast Guard posted on Twitter.
News of the incident spread quickly on social media.
“The boat owner is a good friend of mine and one of the nicest guys around,” one person posted on the boating forum TheHullTruth.com. Another wrote, “Marvin is a dock mate in my marina, and one of the most competent people and captains.”
The so-called golden day for rescuing someone at sea is just that — 24 hours. Beyond that, water temperature, weather, stamina and other factors make survival far less likely.
The search for Moy continued all day October 13 and into October 14. The Coast Guard searched more than 4,000 square miles of the ocean surface by Friday afternoon.
At 1:03pm Friday, the Coast Guard posted again on Twitter:
“#Update: The search for the missing person has been suspended.”
A few days later, Moy’s disappearance was met with scepticism at a court hearing in Manhattan.
“The government requests the court issue a bench warrant,” a prosecutor in the case, Mathew Andrews, said. “If Dr. Moy was, in fact, not on the boat.”
The judge, Paul G. Gardephe, agreed: “It may well be that Dr Moy is deceased, but as I understand it, his body has not been recovered, so that leaves open the possibility that he is voluntarily absenting himself from today’s proceeding.”
Two months later, the lack of evidence has only fueled suspicions.
“The government’s investigation into Dr Moy’s disappearance is ongoing,” Nicholas V. Biase, a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, said last week. “We encourage anyone who may have information as to his whereabouts to please contact this office.”
But far from Manhattan courtrooms, to the men who know little about the doctor’s legal problems but a lot about his boating skills and habits at sea, his fate is quite clear.
They’ve spent many hours with Moy in his boat in all conditions — good and bad, even dangerous. And they’re sure they know what happened that night.
Legal trouble
The deal between Moy and his new business partner worked like this: Medical Reimbursement Consultants would pay Moy’s practice 35 per cent of new claims up front — fast cash immediately instead of a long wait. Then, when the insurance company made its payment down the road, Medical Reimbursement Consultants would keep it all.
At first glance, the arrangement, known as “factoring,” might seem unbalanced. But Moy rationalized that he needed cash, and that most insurance companies, when they paid a claim, usually only paid 70 per cent or 80 per cent anyway.
Throughout this arrangement, prosecutors would later charge, Moy was also engaged in a sprawling plot to draw tens of thousands of car crash victims into his and other doctors’ practices. The ringleader of this more than US$70 million enterprise, according to a 2022 federal indictment, was Pierre, the man who was keeping Moy afloat with his instant 35 per cent payouts on outstanding insurance claims.
In the description of the enterprise in the indictment, people called “runners” bribed hospital workers, 911 dispatchers and police officers to slip them names of people hurt in car crashes. The runners then contacted the victims and directed them to Moy or another clinic in the group. The indictment does not identify any of the police officers or dispatchers who are said to have provided information.
Once the patients arrived at his clinics, Moy “conducted unnecessary and excessive medical treatments” to drive up the insurance claims, the indictment states. The conduct began early in Moy’s career, prosecutors charged.
Court records suggest that with the arrival of the criminal charges this year, Moy turned on Pierre. In three meetings with investigators, Moy “made damaging admissions to the prosecution team” and told them that in fact, Pierre ran his medical practice, according to a motion filed by Pierre’s lawyers seeking a separate trial.
His wife had filed for divorce years earlier, and Moy had moved to a separate apartment in the same building, three stories above, where he lived alone.
By the spring of this year, Moy was unmoored from his life and routines, unable to practice medicine pending a trial in his case.
A sanctuary at sea
More and more, Moy sought solace in the one place that seemed unchanged: his boat. His father was a fisherman, and had taught his son to love going out to sea.
“That was his refuge from all this pressure,” said Moy’s aunt, Fong Moy, 67.
His friends at the marina said he generally left his legal problems in the city. “You keep your personal stuff to yourself — that’s what he does,” said George Harned, 41, a fisherman and charter boat captain. “He’s a doctor, but he’s a fisherman. That’s his passion.”
Still, the case was taking its toll. “He definitely was stressed out,” said one of his oldest friends, John Chase, who also docked his boat at the Moriches marina.
Soon, the season for tuna would end; more urgently, meetings with his criminal lawyers promised to keep him in the city for extended periods.
Marvin Moy wanted to get in one more run.
In October, he reached out to at least four friends with an invitation to join him on the five- or six-hour trip to the Hudson Canyon. For that type of outing, a crew of four is ideal, with two people awake at all times. This was especially important for Moy.
His diabetes would, on some trips, sap his energy on the boat, and in these instances, on the long, uneventful stretches in transit at sea, he would go below deck to his cot and nap, leaving the navigating to one or more companions.
But for this trip, all four friends told him they had other commitments that day and declined.
So on October 12, a little before 12pm, Moy ventured out with a single crew mate — Wong, a newcomer to the marina.
On social media, Wong had posted photographs going back years of himself sport fishing, suggesting experience on the water.
Longtime friends of Moy said they met Wong only briefly or not at all. Only one friend said he had been fishing with him, with a crew in late September, and had come away questioning Wong’s experience, based on his conduct on board and handling of equipment.
An empty slip
To the men from the marina, Wong had a lot of questions to answer. He was out of reach, recovering from his injuries at a hospital, but Harned sent him a text message.
“Yo u need to come clean,” he wrote.
Wong told his version of events.
“I got seasick at the end of the trip and I stopped fishing. Trip ended early,” he wrote, according to screen shots of their exchange. He said he fell asleep on a bench and heard no warning: “The impact woke me up and debris were flying everywhere. He told me he was hurt. I tried to call mayday but all electronic were down.”
The boat sank with Wong clinging to the case that holds the boat’s inflatable life raft, and Moy to a life ring, Wong wrote: “The last word I heard from him was ‘Max, are you ok?’”
Wong’s texts did not say who was supposed to be awake and at the helm.
This account, to Moy’s friends, sounded dubious at best. Why didn’t Moy grab life jackets? Why didn’t he try to deploy the life raft? Why, if he was last seen floating in a life ring, had he not been found? Instead, the doctor’s friends had been considering their own theory — one painfully grim, but an answer to the lingering questions.
“Any offshore trip is a calculated gamble,” said Chase. “You have to be very careful, and bad things can still happen.”
That morning, what bad thing happened?
They wonder whether Moy, after a long day and night at sea, had returned to his cot below deck and fallen asleep — “Marvin’s signature move,” one friend said. The cot is at the very front of the boat, its head tucked in the V shape of the bow. If this had happened, Wong would have been expected to keep watch at the controls. But he said in the texts that he was asleep.
The boat’s automatic pilot function was likely to have been engaged, with its radar showing what was nearby. Had it indicated a nearby ship and gone unheeded?
Wong, answering a reporter’s call in November, said, “I’m not going to comment.” He did not respond to later text messages.
If the Sure Shot struck a commercial ship at its cruising speed, the impact would have been instantly devastating. The bow would probably have been severely damaged, instantly flooding the cabin where the doctor was known to sleep.
It is unclear whether a further search for Moy’s body will be conducted. The Coast Guard has told Moy’s lawyers that he is not considered deceased until its investigation determines as much.
That investigation remains open. A Coast Guard spokesperson said that the information provided by the surviving passenger — Wong — about a collision could not be verified. No ship reported striking another vessel in that area that morning. Investigators identified three vessels that potentially could have been near enough to have unknowingly struck the much smaller Sure Shot but had not singled out any one.
And so two worlds are kept waiting. In separate courthouses in Manhattan, lengthy criminal and civil cases sit stalled for lack of a defendant. After he disappeared, Moy’s car sat in the marina’s parking lot for days, until a relative arrived and drove it away.
The slip where he kept his boat remained empty.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Wilson
Photographs by: Rick Wenner
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
