MIAMI - Federal agents arrested four Miami-Dade health-care operators Thursday in one of the nation's biggest Medicare fraud cases, charging them with scheming to fleece $200 million from the taxpayer-funded program by billing for bogus mental-health services.
Lawrence S. Duran, 48, of North Miami and his company, American Therapeutic Corp., were charged along with other employees in a conspiracy indictment. The Miami-based company's chief executive officer, Marianella Valera, 39, was also among the defendants named in the indictment.
Duran, Valera and two other employees - Judith Cruz Negron, 39, and Margarita Acevedo, 40 - were in federal custody Thursday morning.
The indictment was unsealed at the same time as a government whistle-blower lawsuit filed against American Therapeutic, the nation's largest chain of community mental-health centers licensed by Medicare, authorities said.
People are also reading…
The indictment charges American Therapeutic and its senior employees with conspiring to bilk Medicare for group therapy sessions that were either unnecessary or not provided to patients, many suffering from Alzheimer's disease. They were mostly supplied by assisted-living facilities that received kickbacks for the referrals.
Agents for the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services raided one of American Therapeutic's clinics just after the arrests. They were carrying up boxes of records and computers out of the clinic to load them into a van.
To signal the importance of the case, senior Justice Department officials flew to Miami to announce the biggest Medicare Fraud Strike Force case in history.
"We have rarely seen anything like the illegal conduct charged in this indictment, both in terms of the nature and size of the scheme," said Lanny A. Breuer, assistant attorney general of the criminal division.
The scope of the alleged Medicare fraud surpassed that of a vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates charged last week with operating phantom health-care clinics to try to cheat the federal program out of $163 million.
U.S. authorities touted that case as "the largest Medicare fraud scheme ever perpetrated by a single criminal enterprise," with 73 people charged in New York, Los Angeles and other cities.
