Miami Herald - March 16, 2009
Jay Weaver

Rolando Sanchez Valle, 35, of Hialeah Gardens, was arrested at Miami International Airport Thursday on charges of defrauding the nation's healthcare program. He will be arraigned Friday.

According to an indictment, Sanchez Valle submitted about $5.5 million in false Medicare claims for medical equipment that wasn't provided to patients between March 2007 and February 2008. Medicare paid his Miami business, Professional Choice, Inc., more than $522,000, the indictment says.

After Sanchez Valle was indicted under seal last September, FBI agents couldn't track him down and he was declared a fugitive in November.

He is among about 60 Cuban immigrants who have sought to evade Medicare fraud prosecutions by fleeing to their native country since 2004. Prosecutors say they bilked the health insurance program for the elderly out of hundreds of millions of dollars through complex Medicare fraud scams that have been operating with lax oversight in South Florida.

In late January, another Miami-Dade man was arrested at MIA after he had fled to Cuba in fall 2006.

Darvis Lazaro Leal, 30, operated a pharmacy from June to September 2006 that submitted about $425,000 in false claims to Medicare for medical supplies that were not prescribed by doctors and not provided to patients, according to an indictment filed in 2008.

The government health insurance program paid his business, RR Pharmacy, about $261,000.

Prosecutors said Leal left Miami for Cuba via Costa Rica in September 2006 during the fraud investigation. He worked as a clothing salesman traveling regularly between Cuba and Costa Rica, they said.

In December, Jorge Ramirez, former owner of a Miami clinic that treated blood disorders, was arrested at MIA and charged with defrauding Medicare of $42 million. Ramirez and two codefendants -- Eugenio and Maricel Hernandez, accused of $73 million in additional Medicare fraud -- had been indicted a year earlier. The FBI said they all fled to Cuba.

The Herandezes are still at large.

Collectively, Ramirez and the Hernandezes filed $115 million in phony Medicare claims for treating patients with blood disorders such as lymphoma. But the services, charged in 2005, were never rendered, according to an indictment. Their three Miami-Dade clinics received at least $11.6 million in Medicare payments, which were laundered through sham companies, the indictment alleges.

The most notorious among the roughly 60 Medicare fraud fugitives are Carlos, Luis and Jose Benitez, who submitted $119 million in false claims for HIV infusion therapy to the nation's health insurance program.

The brothers, whose Medicare millions were largely invested in the Dominican Republic, have been jailed in Cuba on immigration violations since September, according to federal authorities. But because the United States has no formal relations with Cuba, there's no indication they might be turned over for prosecution in Miami.
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