Nicholas Bruno thought he had been hired to mow grass. Two years later, the Chicago native says, he was the on-paper owner of multiple companies tied to a multi-million-dollar clinic network — with accounts he never asked for, an office lease in his name and hundreds of thousands of dollars moving through businesses he did not control.
Bruno, a Chicago native living in Bradenton, Florida, spent 2022 to 2024 working for Michael Kent Plambeck, the former Texas chiropractor credited with pioneering an aggressive form of telemarketing-based ambulance chasing whose network has now reached Mobile. Last summer, reporting exposed how South Alabama Medical & Rehab on Old Shell Road was a front for Plambeck’s nationwide conglomerate, Chiropractic Strategies Group — a scheme dating back more than 20 years and previously found liable in a $4 million judgment for operating as a racketeering enterprise.
“I just thought he was a retired chiropractor at first,” Bruno said. “I was kind of curious how he had so much money, but figured it was inherited money. I slowly realized what the man was doing.”
From groundskeeper to namesake
Bruno was hired as a driver and groundskeeper. The work expanded: he helped maintain four or five homes and a tennis complex, worked on seven boats and several jet skis, and oversaw properties in Bradenton, Florida — including a former preschool site that was converted into offices and on-site housing for employees. A contractor has described that property as a “compound” where workers could live at a discount; Manatee County court records show several eviction cases in which employees pleaded that they worked for Plambeck and had agreements to stay. One carpenter said he was hired to redevelop living space there and later worked “phone sales” for what he called an ambulance-chaser referral company.
The preschool site, Bruno said, became the hub of Plambeck’s telemarketing operation — a call center targeting car accident victims across the country, run by his son and staffed by employees Bruno came to know well.
“They get a list of people that have been in car accidents,” Bruno said. Callers, he said, had to be at their desks by 9 a.m., because Plambeck wanted his people to reach crash victims before competitors could.
In late 2023, Bruno said, Plambeck offered him a raise — to $25 an hour — if he would open business accounts tied to the clinic network in his own name. He said he was told the arrangement involved S corporations and would not affect his taxes, and that he understood he was being connected to just two entities: Skyrise Management, a Wyoming corporation, and Chiropractic Strategies Group, registered in Kenner, Louisiana, at the same address that linked SAM&R in Mobile to Plambeck.
“He said, ‘This isn’t going to affect your taxes. You won’t have to worry about any of it,'” Bruno said.
Four businesses, not two
Everything changed in early 2024, Bruno said, when his work hours dried up while Plambeck traveled overseas. He went to a Bank of America branch and asked to see the transaction histories.
“She gave me four papers, four businesses,” he said. “I went, ‘Whoa, the business was only supposed to be two. Now I have four.'”
Bruno said he also discovered a Spectrum internet account and an office lease in his name that he had not authorized, in a Bradenton complex on Cortez Road where he understood parts of the telemarketing and recruiting operations were handled. He said the accounts were used to pay people inside Plambeck’s operation, and that the transaction volume alarmed him — as much as $100,000 to $400,000 moving through Skyrise in a four-month span, by his estimate.
The news organization that first reported his account has not independently reviewed the banking records. But Bruno’s account identifies the same opaque entities already linked to Plambeck through reporting, court filings and corporate records — the same companies now under investigation by the Mobile County District Attorney’s White Collar Crime unit. One of them, Media Placement Services, was described in an earlier Allstate RICO case as the operation that identified crash victims through police accident reports and funneled them into affiliated clinics, and by a Wisconsin appellate court as a “high-volume requester” of vehicle accident data.
Bruno said he closed one account containing about $6,000 — “that’s when they found out they knew I knew,” he said — and that Plambeck then told him he could keep roughly $20,000 left in the others if he closed no more of them. He eventually got out, closing accounts and transferring the businesses he believed were tied to Skyrise and the clinic network, some of which he said went to a woman connected to Williem Daniel Vacek, a Washington, D.C., attorney whose law firm later began representing Alabama clinic patients.
The attorney inside the operation
Vacek’s business records place him in Bradenton during the same period: a 2025 Florida annual report lists him as CEO and managing member of Vacek Holdings LLC there. Bruno said Vacek worked for Plambeck before becoming a lawyer — “more like the computer tech guy and the bookkeeping” — and Vacek has been identified as the authorized representative of 448 Holdings, the LLC that owns the preschool property. In 2024, before his D.C. license, Vacek helped launch “Sterling Shield Legal” in Arizona, telling a state judicial board overseeing non-attorney-owned law firms that his experience included serving as director of operations at Skyrise Management.
Sterling Shield was one of the firms used by Vacek’s Alabama-based partners, including attorney John Carradine Baker, under fee agreements presented to clinic patients at intake. A blank, unsigned Sterling Shield contract obtained during reporting bore a fax header — partially redacted with a marker — showing it came from a fax number belonging to the Shunnarah Law Firm. Mitri Shatara, an executive with Shunnarah, said he did not know why the blank agreement would have been sent from one of its offices and said staff would investigate. The Alabama State Bar has said such clinic-law firm connections would likely constitute conflicts of interest under legal ethics rules.
‘Claim jacking’ and the investigation
The scheme prosecutors describe — and which Bruno’s account matches from the inside — funnels crash victims into doc-in-a-box injury clinics staffed largely by certified nurse practitioners, pairs them with collaborating lawyers, inflates the bills with steep rates and high-volume treatment plans, then litigates against the at-fault driver’s insurer. Mobile County prosecutors have coined a term for it: claim jacking.
The Mobile County District Attorney’s Office has sued SAM&R in civil court under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act and is seeking to compel the clinic to comply with discovery demands, including information about payments the clinic allegedly made to Skyrise Management and Media Placement Services. Prosecutors have suggested the speed at which victims are called implicates a possible government insider with privileged access to accident reports. All individuals in the case have invoked Fifth Amendment protections, which the DA’s office says defendants are using to shield themselves from discovery while continuing operations — including efforts in Huntsville.
Plambeck has been served by publication and added to the civil prosecution, which remains pending alongside a simultaneous criminal investigation. Neither Plambeck nor Vacek returned messages seeking comment. Attorney Cole Gresham of Starnes Law, who represents Plambeck and SAM&R owner Chad Loveless in the civil case, did not return a call.
Bruno, for his part, said the contrast he saw was hard to miss: a mogul with a gated bayfront home, boats and a tennis complex — much of it bought, he believes, with the margins of a machine staffed by recovering addicts and people in trouble, hired off Craigslist ads to call strangers who had just been in a crash.
“I’ve never worked for someone that had so much money as he had,” Bruno said.