.
11/2/13,
"FBI tracking down Medicare fraud fugitives from South Florida," Miami Herald, Jay Weaver
"In Miami’s very deep sea of Medicare fraud, Carmen Gonzalez was a minnow. So when federal agents recently nabbed her after five years on the lam,
it didn’t exactly make a splash. But her arrest was the latest in an
under-the-radar round-up of fugitive scammers who have branded Miami
with the dubious title of the nation’s capital of healthcare corruption.
Gonzalez had played a supporting role in one of the region’s
biggest, baddest Medicare rip-offs. She first worked as a cleaning lady,
and then as a nurse who paid kickbacks to patients, for the notorious
Benitez brothers — three sharks who ran 11 Miami-Dade clinics that
swindled a staggering $84 million from the taxpayer-funded program,
authorities say.
In the spring of 2008, Gonzalez and her father, Enrique, who also
worked for the Benitez brothers, fled Miami after they were separately
charged. The brothers — Carlos, Luis and Jose — also left Miami soon
after they were indicted that May.
Where did they all go? Cuba —
No. 1 among Latin American destinations of choice for South Florida’s
Medicare fraud fugitives. Together, they stole hundreds of millions of
dollars by filing billions in false claims for everything from medical
equipment to HIV-therapy infusion drugs.
Gonzalez and some 30
other defendants have been captured over the last half-dozen years, with
the pace of arrests beginning to pick up this year.
There are still
another 150 fugitives from outstanding Medicare fraud cases in South
Florida, most of them Cuban-born immigrants who fled to Cuba, Mexico,
the Dominican Republic and other Spanish-speaking countries to evade
federal trials.
View more of the fugitives in our database.
With
the exception of Cuba,
several foreign countries with U.S. extradition
treaties have assisted federal authorities with making arrests and
returning fugitives to the United States.
Though progress has
been plodding, agents have collared 10 fugitives this year alone,
compared to a previous pace of one every couple of months, said Randall
Culp, the FBI special agent who supervises healthcare fraud
investigations in South Florida.
“We’ve been whittling down the
number on a case-by-case basis,” Culp said. “Agents are persistent in
trying to locate the fugitives and eventually law enforcement catches up
with them.”
“Sometimes we just get lucky.”
In September,
for example, FBI agents caught up with Gonzalez, a cousin of the Benitez
brothers,
after she had sneaked back into this country through the
Mexican border. She made the mistake of reapplying for a Florida
driver’s license while living in the Fort Myers area with relatives.
In
mid-October, she found herself dressed in an orange inmate jumpsuit,
standing in the courtroom of
U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno — the
very judge she had blindsided
five years earlier when she jumped bail,
fleeing the country after the judge had granted her a $50,000 bail when
she asked to visit Disney World for her son’s birthday. The Orlando trip
turned out to be a ruse.
“Where did you go? Why didn’t you show
up in court?” Moreno asked Gonzalez, before she pleaded guilty to a
bond-jumping charge last month. “I went to Cuba,” answered Gonzalez, who
now goes on trial for Medicare fraud in December.
Gonzalez’s defense attorney, Joel DeFabio, said she “panicked” in May 2008 when she fled with her son and husband.
“She
found that life in Cuba was hard, especially for her son,” said
DeFabio. “She saw no future in Cuba and wanted to give her son a better
life,
so she returned to the United States.”
At the time of her
initial arrest, Justice Department prosecutors had warned that Gonzalez —
charged in an $11 million Medicare fraud scheme at
one of the Benitez
brothers’ clinics, St. Jude Rehab Center, and suspected of assisting
eight of their other HIV-therapy clinics in the Miami area —was a flight
risk. They also noted that
her father, also charged as a bookkeeper and
patient recruiter at two Benitez brothers’ clinics, had just fled the
country.
Moreno, the court’s chief judge, had himself just issued
a memo in 2008 warning his colleagues not to set low bonds for Medicare
fraud defendants, citing a rising increase in fugitives.
So the
judge was not amused when Gonzalez forfeited a $7,500 bond down payment,
and didn’t show up for her next hearing that June. The judge lamented
that Cuban immigrants were coming to the United States, gaining lawful
residency and stealing from the Medicare system — and then returning to
their native country with ill-gotten gains.
“It seems to me that
our thinking has to change — that
someone from Cuba can flee back to
Cuba just like someone from Mexico,” Moreno told Gonzalez’s attorney,
DeFabio, at the time. “I don’t know what your client’s situation is, but
money goes a lot farther in Cuba.”
Despite those cautionary
words, the pattern of South Florida’s Medicare offenders fleeing to
Cuba, Mexico and other Latin American countries continued to climb until
judges in the last few years began rejecting bond requests before
trial....
An example: In 2009, Alcides Garcia, wanted for his role in a $10.7
million medical equipment ring, went to a shipping company in the Canary
Islands to have his personal belongings sent from Miami to the Spanish
island off the northwestern coast of Africa.
Garcia kept saying he was Mexican, but his heavy Cuban accent was a dead giveaway.
So,
the shipping company owner Googled Garcia’s name and up popped a Miami
Herald/El Nuevo story published in January 2009 that described
Garcia as
a Cuban-born fugitive wanted on Medicare fraud charges in South
Florida. The story, which carried a mug shot of Garcia, confirmed his
identity.
The owner called the FBI in Miami with an anonymous tip,
and the Spanish National Police did a background check and arrested him
on a provisional federal warrant at a hotel in Madrid. Garcia, 49, who
had used his real name but a false Mexican passport, was eventually
sentenced to eight years in prison.
The bureau also has had success dealing with other foreign countries. Last
February, for example, Colombian authorities extradited a woman who had
walked out of her 2006 healthcare fraud trial in Miami just before the
jury convicted her of operating a $5 million HIV-therapy racket.
In
2012, the FBI caught up with Magda Luz Lavin
after Colombian
authorities received a complaint about her from the victims of a
business scam in her native country, who had heard she was wanted back
in Miami on healthcare fraud. She was arrested that June in Medellin and
later extradited from Bogota to Miami. Lavin, 55, was sentenced to 15
years in federal prison....
During the past decade, HIV-therapy exploded into the most
spectacular swindle in Medicare history, with Health and Human Services,
known for its lax oversight, paying out billions of dollars on phony
claims for obsolete drug treatments that were mostly not provided to
patients. The scam spun so out of control that Medicare-licensed clinics
in South Florida billed more for this bogus therapy — more than the rest of the country combined.
For
the Benitez brothers, the HIV-therapy scheme was a windfall: Medicare
paid their clinics about $84 million between 2001 and 2004, according to
their indictment.
The Benitezes, who came to this country in
1995 and became U.S. citizens five years later, have now found a safe
haven in Cuba, according to sources familiar with their status.
The FBI
cannot pursue them or any other fugitives in Cuba because the United
States does not have normal relations with the communist island nation."...via Michael Savage
.
