The retrial is about to be scheduled! Our guy! We’ve long followed the worst Medicare-Medicaid criminal/most insanely pious Orthodox Jew (In prison, he prayed nine hours a day, “spending so much time praying on his knees that his legs were swollen and purple.”) in the country’s history, through conviction, Trump pardon, and now retrial. And, as world-historical hypocrisy mavens, we are loving every minute. The only spectacle as amusing is the Caged Wisdom sequence in the comedy Arrested Development, which is in fact largely indistinguishable from the ongoing Philip Esformes sequence.

In 2016, prosecutors charged Esformes in what they called the largest-ever scheme targeting Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for the elderly and the poor. Esformes was accused of bribing medical professionals to admit patients to his network of assisted-living facilities and nursing homes for services that were never provided or were unnecessary.

During the two-month trial, prosecutors asserted that Esformes personally received more than $37 million in the scheme. They told the jury he used his proceeds to finance a lavish lifestyle and pay $300,000 in bribes to the head coach of the University of Pennsylvania basketball team to recruit his son…

In April 2019, a jury convicted Esformes on 20 criminal counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, paying and receiving kickbacks, bribery, money laundering and obstruction of justice…

Esformes worries constantly about a new trial and the threat of incarceration…

Poor baby! I tell you it’s doing nothing for the guy’s mental health that he might, even after Trump pardoned him, serve his prison term for stealing billions of dollars from the American health system and degrading the lives of millions of poor old people. What’s the world coming to when one of the most disgusting crooks America ever produced actually has to serve jail time? Put Esformes in my search engine for even more lurid criminal details!

… is one of many lucky people to have been sprung from jail by The Genius of the Carpathians. A lifelong thug, Esformes committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history.

And here’s the best news: He’s only 52! Decades of thuggery and thievery lie ahead of him, thank God.

Thank God, for the crime-ridden Esformes family (Esformes’ crooked father established the Esformes health care fraud business) also presents itself as way way way godly.

Not that certain branches of Orthodox Judaism (the religion in this case) need any more bad publicity, what with their anti-vax, anti-mask, pro-large-gathering, pro-welfare-fraud thing; but the newly-sprung Esformes will significantly add to the enlightened, law-abiding profile of this group.

My posts about Esformes can be found here.

Er, not quite. Readers will recall UD‘s extensive, and really kind of fun, coverage of the inimitable Philip Esformes (scroll down) and his BFF, U Penn HEAD basketball coach (datz right – not coaching staff, not booster, HEAD COACH) Jerome Allen, a man who used a position of high responsibility, visibility, and salary to pretend that Esformes’ pisher was actually a Penn basketball recruit in order to get the unskilled unbright cheater into Wharton. This was a version of the Varsity Blues deal, with a $250,000 bribe going directly into the hands of the man U Penn judged ethically appropriate to run its entire basketball operation.

Lots of sports writers are okay with Allen getting thrown out of the college game (Who cares. He now has a job in professional basketball, where taking only a quarter million bribe is a mark of serious inadequacy.), but they’re all huffy cuz Penn got some penalties too. After all, they just housed a moral degenerate… and the whole bribery thing didn’t fuck up their winning average or anything, so why, God, why?

Three generations of them grace this land of ours – the grandfather, who established a dirty chain of nursing homes in Chicago; the son, who committed the biggest Medicare fraud in American history; and the grandson, whose admission to U Penn came about because of Esformes money paid to its basketball coach (now convicted of bribery). Read all about it.

Having spent every waking moment of his entire life breaking almost every known law, the son’s contrition in front of the judge today lacked a certain…

The son got twenty years, and might have gotten fewer if he’d been willing to say to the judge, in that contrition thing, exactly what he’d done …

At a critical juncture before he imposed Esformes’ punishment, the judge seemed willing to lower his final sentence by four years if the defendant agreed to elaborate on his “acceptance of responsibility” in his original statement to Scola. The judge said he would only acknowledge Esformes’ acceptance if he specifically admitted he paid bribes and committed other crimes. But … Esformes’ legal team chose not to go that route because it would have precluded their appeal of his trial convictions.

That’s it, babe. An Esformes to the bitter end. Might fuck up his appeal.

Most of the meetings took place in Esformes’ swimming pool (you need to register for access to the linked site) – he was worried Delgado might be wearing a wire – but this bit of personal counseling went on in one of the defendant’s many Medicare/Medicaid money extraction locations…

Man, I told you this trial would be fun! I told you! The biggest health care fraud in the history of this country is the culmination of generations of effort by the pious, illustrious Esformes family,  whose patriarch’s name adorns a chair at the University of Miami medical school, and whose scion played basketball so well for the University of Pennsylvania that his coach is going to prison.

… how many more besmirched names can this guy fit on his business card?

The author of America’s biggest health care fraud ever goes to trial February 11! (Various boring underlings have already pled guilty. I’m sure Philip Esformes’ lawyers will describe the evil way these evil people led their client astray.) UD promises you that the guy who bribed U Penn’s basketball coach to get his kid on the team will be spectacular on the stand. This is one to watch. We’ll enjoy – hell, love – covering it here on University Diaries.

Esformes pleads guilty, and we will be deprived of a trial.

On the upside: His life has been ruined.

Put Esformes in my search engine to revisit all his despicability.

… the compleat criminal, Philip Esformes, whose pardon by fellow fraudster D. Trump lacked full coverage (given that Esformes had around five thousand charges against him). SOOO the feds just picked and chose among the leftover charges and went after Esformes again WHICH has pissed this ultra-pious ultraorthodox person off no end and he’s been appealing up the wazoo.

But every court – now including the Supremes – has ignored him or laughed him out of the building … Cuz you know when you’re committing the largest health care fraud in American history and you get caught doing it, judges prob aren’t going to bend over backward for you.

University Diaries mainstay, Philip Esformes, who was convicted of running the “largest single criminal health-care fraud [scheme]” in the history of the Dept of Justice (he got twenty years), and who soon after was miraculously pardoned by Donald Trump, is on UD‘s mind this morning. Everyone’s talking about the increasingly plausible claim that DT and R. Giuliani sold pardons for two million dollars apiece.

Did they? Did Esformes, a way-pious orthodox Jew (I’ve already told you how much I love shout-out-loud hypocrisy!), shell out the bucks? Can’t wait to find out.

Meanwhile, right after Esformes got sprung, the pissed off feds filed another big criminal case against him (when you’re a world-historical crook, the pickins ain’t slim) so that was maybe two million down the crapper but thanks to tens of thousands of dead and dying old people (nursing homes were Phil’s MO) Esformes has TONS of money so don’t worry.

Whether it’s Philip Esformes or this dude, UD always eagerly welcomes back our country’s most inventive and prolific medical system… er… manipulators. Esformes, author of the biggest rip-off of the federal medical payment system in history, was pardoned by Trump, but he did SO MUCH shit wrong he has easily been brought to trial again on related charges. That’s one to watch.

Then we have the return of Pittsburgh’s most … uh… prolific surgeon, a guy who made buckets of money by performing like three surgeries SIMULTANEOUSLY babe and I ain’t kidding. He’d leave the geezers (he specialized in complex invasive surgery on the very very elderly — just what they need!) lying there on the table with a bunch of interns sort of standing around the anesthetized body waiting for hours for the guy to come back. Two patients lost limbs because of this sadistic protocol, but can you imagine how much money the guy made? While fragile ninety year olds lay there falling apart physically, robbed of any vestige of dignity while waiting for unnecessary and destructive surgery?

So UPMC and its star surgeon settled a WHOPPER of a federal lawsuit, after which I assume the dude went back to ravaging – in other lucrative ways – our oldest and most vulnerable in their final days.

But he and the school have refused to allow the government to keep an eye on them! The feds want to audit the dude’s billing; they want him to cooperate with a “corrective action plan.”

As part of the settlement, the government asked the defendants to sign paperwork — known as a corporate integrity agreement — that would place them under additional oversight. They refused.

Hell, I’d refuse too if I were making money amputed hand over fist!

So the feds are just designating him “high risk-heightened scrutiny,” and if I’m reading this right his patients are allowed to know this.

Just another day in the life of our well-meaning, absolutely pathetic, medical reimbursement system.

Are you afraid, as Varsity Blues concludes with its mastermind’s prison sentence (he got a few years), that we’ve seen the end of colorful, fun, characters like these?

DO. NOT. FEAR. When God closes a door, He opens a window.

First of all, Philip Esformes is headed for a retrial, and nothing Varsity Blues has to offer comes anywhere near Philip Esformes.

Plus if you’re not watching the State of South Carolina’s multipart adaptation of the greatest William Faulkner novel of all time – As Murdaughs Lay Dying – you are missing the glorious reincarnation of Flem Snopes and his clan. The trial is ongoing, available live on YouTube.

The hottest $1.3 billion thief EVER is BAAAAAAACK. The man who masterminded the “largest single criminal health-care fraud” in DOJ history got his ass out of jail thanks to his BFF Donald Trump’s pardon, but HUUUGE UD crush Philip Esformes [earlier posts here] is now back in court and I can’t wait to see him again!

Not just cuz he’s cute as hell w/ his Florida tan and late model sports cars, but because he’s done it all. The Medicare fraud was – for those of us who know and … well…. stalk this sex god – nothing. Nothing! Big Phil’s a crook in every conceivable way. You go ahead and name the crime, he’s… well, he hasn’t done the time, because of Trump, but he’s def. done the crime! I’m too old and tired to name them all (and them’s only the ones we know about), but on top of ALL THAT, Esformes is a staggeringly pious Orthodox Jew who always makes a point of giving some of his stolen loot – acquired through the pain and suffering of generations of old people – to Orthodox causes. If you’ve followed the endemic criminality of large swathes of Orthodoxy on this blog, you know that Phil is just a drop in the bucket. But what a drop! Adorable. And coming soon to a court near you.

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.