Veteran organized crime
reporter and author George Anastasia (seen in the bottom photo) offers a piece at Bigtrial.net on Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino (seen in the above photo) and the Fed’s
big East Coast mob case
Brad Sirkin has folded his
cards.
The prolific, enterprising
mob associate and sometime driver for Philadelphia Mafia boss Joseph (Skinny
Joey) Merlino has agreed to cop a guilty plea in that sweeping but flawed
racketeering conspiracy indictment in Manhattan Federal Court, and also to conspiracy
to commit health care fraud in a more pointed and apparently airtight case
against him and seven co-defendants in federal court in Tampa.
Merlino, on the other hand,
is hanging tough and is prepared to go to trial in Manhattan where several
other defendants also have opted to take deals. The insurance scam, the central
charge in the Tampa case, is just a small piece of the broader New York
indictment.
Sirkin, in a plea agreement
filed in Florida, admitted his role in what authorities have alleged was a $157
million insurance fraud scheme that included kickbacks to doctors and
pharmacist who knowingly wrote and filled bogus prescriptions for what
authorities said were "compound medications, chiefly pain creams and scar
creams, irrespective of medical necessity."
Sources said insurance
companies were billed from $500 to $1,000 for a tube of the bogus cream with
many prescriptions written with up to 10 refills. The mob was late arriving to
the scam involving compound creams which have been described by insurance
company investigators as the "snake oil of the 21st century" and
which have, according to early investigations, generated tens of millions of
dollars in fraudulent insurance reimbursements.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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