US attorney’s office in N. Ohio collects 3 times its budget in 2011

Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Ohio is more than paying for itself.

U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach said Tuesday that his office made $48.6 million in civil and criminal collections in the budget year that ended Sept. 30.

The money collected is nearly triple the office’s annual budget of $17.1 million. The office is also aided by work done by other federal agencies, such as the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“We’re mining the underground economy and giving money we recover back to the taxpayer,” Dettelbach said.

The bulk of the money, $22 million, came from civil actions to collect from people who overbilled the government or cheated on federal programs, such as Medicare or Medicaid, Dettelbach said.

Criminal collections yielded $20 million.

The single largest source was more than $7 million in bank accounts, property and other assets that were collected from former Dr. Jorge Martinez, a Bath Township physician sentenced in 2006 to life in prison because the massive doses of painkillers he prescribed led to the deaths of two patients.

Martinez, an anesthesiologist, prescribed OxyContin, Zoloft and Valium only after patients he saw at his clinics in Mansfield, Lima, Parma and Boardman agreed to receive injections to treat pain.

He then billed Medicare, Medicaid, the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation and private insurers for the injections. He was convicted of health care fraud.

In another instance, attorneys recovered more than $4.1 million in a Medicare overbilling case against Forum Health, which owns Western Reserve Care System and Trumbull Memorial Hospital. Forum Health identified and disclosed that its hospitals were overpaid in more than 900 cases because of a billing error.

The office also recovered $2.4 million from the Rural Metro Corp. after the company, which provides emergency and non-emergency transportation, improperly billed Medicare for unnecessary ambulance services from eight offices in Ohio.

Agents also collected $5.5 million in forfeiture cases, Dettelbach said.

The most prominent forfeiture case the office handled was the September auction of the 43-carat “Golden Eye” diamond seized in a drug investigation.

The diamond was once owned by Paul Monea of Alliance, who was convicted in 2007 of money laundering and conspiracy. Monea attempted to sell the diamond to an undercover agent posing as a broker for a drug cartel.

The diamond sold in the auction for $2.8 million.

Dettelbach said most of the money was given to law enforcement agencies in Canton, which aided in the case.

The $48.6 million is the largest sum collected by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern Ohio since 2007, when $63.5 million was brought in, said agency spokesman Mike Tobin. In the 2006, the office collected $80 million, the highest total collected in the past decade.