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| July 23, 2007 |
By: Julie Kay |
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outh Florida’s former white powder bar has a lucrative new group of clients.
The criminal defense lawyers, who once mostly represented drug dealers, are increasingly busy defending people and companies accused of Medicare fraud. That work, lawyers say, is offsetting a steep decline in drug cases.
Miami defense lawyer Jose Quinon represents Mabel Diaz, who along with her husband, Abner Diaz, was recently indicted in the largest Medicare fraud case in South Florida history. Quinon said he handles about five health care fraud cases at any given time.
“Drug cases are a thing of the past,” he said. “The feds are mostly doing health care fraud and mortgage fraud now. In the last seven years, I have done at most three drug cases. The U.S. attorney’s office has turned up the heat.”
Many prominent South Florida defense attorneys are active in representing health care fraud defendants. They include Roy Black, Joel Hirschhorn, Roy Kahn, Glenn Kritzer, Richard Sharpstein, Barry Wax, Marc Seitles, Jane Moscowitz and Joaquin Perez.
Anthony Vitale, who represents Abner Diaz and his former company, has become one of the most active health care fraud defense lawyers in South Florida.
Moscowitz said that even though she’s not a health care lawyer, fraud cases have become the largest single category of cases she works on. The cases cover a wide range of alleged fraud — durable medical equipment, Medicare, Medicaid, pharmaceuticals, medical devices and counterfeit drugs.
Hirschhorn, once a leading member of Miami’s white powder bar, said he got tired of the feds heavily scrutinizing his legal fees from accused drug dealers and risking prosecution. So he stopped handling drug cases in 1998, and turned to health care fraud, which now represents 75 percent of his business.
“There are more federal agents doing health care fraud than are assigned to drugs, no question,” Hirschhorn says. “I usually charge hourly fees for health care defense, rather than flat fees. And there’s less a risk of someone looking over your shoulder.”
The defense lawyers, along with prosecutors and law enforcement agents, say most of the Medicare fraud in South Florida is attributable to Hispanics, particularly Cuban Americans.
Cuban immigrants are sometimes recruited shortly after arriving in Miami to act as fronts for more established operators, they say. Family members hand down knowledge of how to organize these frauds.
“Some of these people coming over from Cuba on rafts — they have clinics before they even land,” Quinon said. “I’ve seen it.”
A veteran health care agent who declined to be identified agreed. “They don’t even have driver’s licenses yet and they’re signed up as the nominal owner” of a medical equipment company, the agent said.
There are various theories as to why Medicare fraud has become so identified with the Hispanic communities in Miami-Dade.
Gabriel Imperato, a health care lawyer who is managing partner of Broad and Cassel in Fort Lauderdale, said “the culture of paying kickbacks is fairly well-established in Latin America. This is an accepted way of doing business and at least in some circles has carried over to the health care industry.”
But Malcolm Sparrow, a Harvard University professor of government management and former police investigator, said health care fraud is a specialty of other U.S. immigrant groups as well, such as Russians. He said organized crime groups turn to immigrants from the same ethnic groups because their loyalty is to their ethnic group, not their new country. In addition, in Russia and other poor countries, stealing is a way to survive, he said.
“Organized crime is behind a lot of these [Medicare fraud] crimes,” he said. “They even try to intimidate law enforcement.”
Some lawyers, prosecutors, and agents, however, theorize that the Cuban government is behind Medicare fraud. They argue that the money is routed to Cuba and that’s why prosecutors are never able to get their hands on most of the stolen funds. “I’ve been hearing that Fidel is sending people here to do the fraud for a long time,” Quinon said.
A former prosecutor who didn’t want to be identified debunked that theory. “I’ve heard for years, that there are folks … that funnel money back to the island,” he said. “But I have never heard anyone [offer] evidence of a formal tie to the Cuban government.”
Julie Kay can be reached at jkay@alm.com or at (954) 468-2622.
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