On Monday, April 14, 2025, a federal jury convicted Eduardo “Eddie” Lopez of conspiring to fix the wages for home healthcare nurses in Las Vegas and for fraudulently failing to disclose the criminal antitrust investigation during the sale of his home healthcare staffing company. According to the complaint and trial evidence, Lopez, who oversaw recruitment, hiring, retention and assignments of nurses for three home health agencies, conspired with unnamed conspirators in a series of meetings and communications to artificially cap the wages of Las Vegas-area nurses between March 2016 and May 2019. He will be sentenced on July 14 for one count of participating in a wage-fixing conspiracy and five counts of wire fraud.
Lopez’s conviction marks the first antitrust jury conviction for the Department of Justice (DOJ) since it announced in 2016 that it would prosecute wage-fixing and no-poach agreements criminally rather than as civil matters. It follows a string of criminal trial losses for the DOJ in three other no-poach and wage-fixing cases: United States v. Manahe, United States v. Jindal, and United States v. DaVita. In all three cases, juries declined to find that the defendants entered into illegal agreements to allocate labor markets or fix wages. In 2022, the DOJ secured a guilty plea against nurse staffing agency VDA OC, LLC for wage-fixing, but that case did not proceed to trial.
The DOJ’s failure to secure antitrust convictions to date has sparked commentary about whether its effort to criminally prosecute no-poach and wage-fixing agreements had hit a dead end. For its part, the DOJ has never backed down from its position, reaffirming in January 2025 guidance that felony criminal charges are appropriate for agreements not to recruit, solicit, or hire workers, or to fix wages or terms of employment. Monday’s conviction may well serve as an incentive and roadmap for the DOJ to bring similar criminal investigations to trial.
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