Police shut down illegal dental office in Granite City operated by immigrants

GRANITE CITY — In a small, two-story brick house on a one-way residential street a couple of blocks from the police station, a bootleg dental practice operated, marketed through an encrypted app to the Hispanic community, authorities said.

Clients seeking dental care were led up the back stairs of a house in the 2500 block of Iowa Street and into a darkened room where there were dental chairs, suction hoses, dental surgical tools, orthodontics equipment and an X-ray machine. Cash was the expected payment for services.

It isn’t clear how long this went on. Residents in the working-class neighborhood didn’t notice anything unusual, they said, except for a few more cars parked on the street.

“This is a pretty quiet street. We don’t have any problems here,” said a woman who lives nearby and didn’t want to be identified.

For at least a year and half, the house operated as an underground dental practice upstairs until it was shut down last fall, according to a police report.

After a four-month investigation by Granite City police, prosecutors charged Idania J. Moreno-Paal, 41, and Rodolfo Figuera, 59, with felony practicing medicine without a license.

Moreno-Paal, of Granite City, and Figuera, of Rolling Meadows, near Chicago, both practiced as dentists in Venezuela before emigrating to Mexico, then to the United States.

Moreno-Paal, her husband Salvador Francisco Tabacco-Campos and their four children lived in the house, while upstairs she performed everything from cleanings to extractions and even braces, police said, in exchange for cash.

Figuera, who patients knew as “The doctor” would come to the Metro East to treat patients and paid Moreno-Paal to use her home for his appointments, according to a police report. He did not live in Granite City, and his whereabouts are unknown.

According to police, Moreno-Paal and her husband fled Venezuela into Mexico. In 2022, both had been granted temporary protected status work visas to enter the U.S. Tabacco-Campos “possibly owned and operated a pharmacy in Venezuela, according to the police report.

The illegal dentist office has since been shut down, and the whereabouts of Moreno-Paal and her family are unknown. Neither Moreno-Paal nor Figuera had been booked into the Madison County Jail or made a court appearance.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request seeking information about the family and Figuera immigration status, including whether they’ve been deported.

A root canal gone bad

The operation came to police attention in mid-October after a 33-year-old woman reported that she experienced an infection that spread and caused fluid to leach from her ears after a root canal went awry.

The woman spoke to police through a translator and told them she was suffering from a toothache in her rear molar and didn’t have dental insurance. Several of the woman’s co-workers referred her to Moreno-Paal, who she learned was a dentist in her home country of Venezuela.

The woman told police she contacted Moreno-Paal through the encrypted phone app “What’s App” in Spanish.

When the woman arrived at around 7:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, Moreno-Paal let her up the stairs and put her in a chair. The woman told police that Moreno-Paal gave her a pill and she lost consciousness and awoke after receiving a root canal. She left after Moreno-Paal gave her a pack of pills and told her to take one every eight hours. The woman told police she paid $850 in cash and left.

Two days later, she returned to the Granite City house suffering from pain and swelling.

Moreno-Paal and a man, later identified as Figuera, proceeded to surgically extract the infected tooth.

The infection did not abate. The woman was treated in two local emergency rooms. Eventually, the infection relented, but then the hospital bills came.

The woman went to Hoyleton Youth and Family Services seeking financial assistance with the medical bills, according to police reports.

A Hoyleton worker contacted Granite City police. Two days later, Granite City police executed a search warrant on the house.

According to a police report documenting the search, they found a container with human teeth inside, dental equipment, narcotics, six cell phones, notes and ledgers, bank statements and $1,254 in cash.

A violation of the TRUST Act?

In their report, Granite City police noted that they conducted a records check through the Department of Homeland Security regarding Moreno-Paal, Tabacco-Campos and their four children.

The Illinois TRUST Act, signed into law in 2017, regulates local law enforcement interactions with federal immigration agents. It prohibits them from holding individuals solely on immigration detainers, stopping people based on perceived status, or sharing nonpublic information without a judicial warrant.

At the time, the TRUST Act was one of nation’s strongest state-level due-process protections for immigrants, designed to shield them from being deported while interacting with local police.

Granite City police did not respond to requests for comment about the case or whether they assisted Immigration and Custom Enforcements agents. The Illinois attorney general’s office also did not respond.

In a May 2022 interview with a Mexican newspaper, Excelsior, Moreno-Paal told a reporter she did not want to go to the United States initially because she could not practice dentistry without going back to school.

Something changed after that.  Moreno-Paal and her husband, Tabacco-Campos, both were issued temporary visitor drivers licenses in February 2023 — six months before they filled out paperwork applying for an occupancy permit for the house on the Iowa Street.

A man who spoke only in Spanish answered the door at the house earlier this month and said he now resided at the home and the dentist’s family no longer lived there. He didn’t know their current whereabouts and pointed to a mailbox stuffed with mail addressed to the couple.

After the search warrants were executed in October, Granite City detectives Noe Marquez and Brandon Shellenberg brought Moreno-Paal in for an interview. She denied the amount of income that she derived from the practice, according to a police report documenting the interview. When detectives confronted her with bank statements and wire transfers, she told them what she was doing with the money.

“She explained the money was for a home she purchased back in Venezuela,” according to the report.

Moreno-Paal told the detectives she purchased the medications found in the home from local Mexican grocery stores, the report stated.

The neighbor who lived down the street told a reporter that she didn’t know the couple’s whereabouts either but noted there have been other people living at the house since the search warrant was executed in October.

“It should be noted the above incident was not reported to the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation at the completion of this report in order for further criminal investigation to be completed,” the police report stated.

The department has no reports on file regarding Moreno-Paal and Figuera, according to the agency’s spokesperson.Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.