Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Staff report
CLEVELAND
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio recovered more than $48 million in improperly gotten gains in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, including more than $4 million in major cases in the Mahoning Valley.
That office said it collected $48,654,132, almost three times its $17.1 million budget for that fiscal year, including fines, forfeitures, restitution, investigation and prosecution costs, affirmative-civil-enforcement actions and foreclosures.
The recovery included more than $4.1 million from overbilling of Medicare by Forum Health, former owner of Northside Medical Center in Youngstown and Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Warren, the U.S. attorney said.
More than $7 million in bank accounts and other assets have been collected to satisfy a restitution order against Dr. Jorge Martinez, an anesthesiologist who operated pain management clinics in four Ohio locations, including Boardman.
Dr. Martinez is serving a life prison term after having been convicted of health-care fraud that resulted in the deaths of two patients.
Dr. Martinez overprescribed OxyContin and Vicodin to patients, including drug addicts and their friends and families, the U.S. attorney said.
The federal government also recovered $2.4 million from Rural Metro Corp. after that company improperly billed Medicare for medically unnecessary ambulance services from eight Ohio offices, the U.S. attorney said.
The government also got more than $2.8 million from the auction of a 43-carat diamond seized in a drug investigation.
That diamond was once owned by Paul Monea of Alliance, who was convicted in 2007 of money laundering and conspiracy.
Monea tried to sell the diamond to an undercover agent posing as a broker for a drug cartel, the U.S. attorney said.