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.
With its latest accomplishment – caught by the feds stealing gobs of money in a wide range of inventive and patient-anguishing/bankrupting ways – UM Med maintains its national position as America’s most corrupt medical school ever. With a rogues’ gallery of leaders and doctors, the school has, over decades, enriched itself in ways so deeply and consistently depraved that at some point you have to grant it grudging credit for having utterly transformed a place of healing into an abattoir. The state of Florida is to be sure already the USA’s epicenter of elderly people and medical fraud; it took decades of clever planning and moral squalor for UM to make itself the epicenter of the epicenter.
“Tens of billions of dollars are lost annually to fraud, waste and abuse, and Miami is the Medicare fraud capital of the United States,” [the whistleblower’s attorney] said. “Today’s announced settlement and the schemes described in the DOJ press release are ironic considering they were committed by an iconic South Florida institution under the leadership of the former Secretary of Health and Human Services [the appalling Donna Shalala], the very agency that promulgated the Medicare rules that were violated.”
Sarah and Charles Warren said Puliafito wrote them prescriptions for asthma inhalers to soothe lungs raw from smoking marijuana and methamphetamine.
That’s Dr./Dean Carmen A. Puliafito, until recently the much-lauded head of the Keck School of Medicine, and a man whose compassion for his favorite fellow druggies extended to writing them prescriptions for some of the less attractive symptoms of chemical excess.
Carmen Puliafito’s career tells you all you need to know about why there’s a Black Lives Matter movement. Single-handedly Puliafito proves true everything anyone ever said about the breathtaking immunity white criminals may enjoy over long lucrative prestigious careers. I mean, Puliafito continuesto represent the University of Southern California to the public.
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And why not? I mean, sure, he had to, er, resign his deanship with full honors when one of his mad meth-filled nights turned sour and got anonymously reported to USC’s president (the police knew about it too, but didn’t even write a report); but he remains on the faculty. And the same president who knew all about Puliafito’s criminal mischief a few weeks later enthusiastically hosted his elegant goodbye party:
“Today, we have one of the, not just the area’s, but the nation’s preeminent medical schools and medical enterprises — and, in many ways, thanks to the leadership of Carmen,” [the president] told the crowd.
Carmen himself, in his farewell remarks, really nailed it: “[T]he primary job of dean of a medical school is to bring leaders that will really set the tone of the organization.” And tone-setting starts at the top!
Who cares if Carmen’s penchant for hanging out with crooks for long nights of drug overdoses – sometimes in his offices on campus – was the reason for the goodbye party? Rich white people using illegal drugs in front of hotel cameras isn’t, it turns out, illegal in Pasadena.
White Lives Matter, in other words; and in fact Puliafito came to USC trailing all kinds of other shit no one bothered acting on:
His time at Miami was not trouble-free. Marc Brockman, an optometrist at the [university], filed a lawsuit against Puliafito in 2006 for assault and battery and accused the university of negligence in hiring him.
Brockman alleged in sworn testimony that Puliafito, in a profane “tantrum” over an inoperable piece of medical equipment, grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat and choked him.
Puliafito denied wrongdoing.
During the case, it emerged that the university had investigated separate complaints of sexual harassment against Puliafito, according to sworn testimony and court filings in the lawsuit. The records do not reveal the outcome of the investigation, and a university spokeswoman said in response to questions about the probe: “We don’t have anything to provide.”
Puliafito and the university reached a confidential settlement with Brockman in June 2007.
Two months later, USC hired Puliafito.
And what a hire!
In a court battle that is still playing out, the University of California filed [a $1.85 million] suit in July 2015 against USC over its poaching of a leading Alzheimer’s disease researcher.
Puliafito was the self-described “quarterback” of efforts to land UC San Diego professor Paul Aisen, a star in the state university system.
… The suit accused USC of civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty and other misconduct.
And he’s still a highly respected, high-profile faculty member at the University of Southern California!
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The latest thing is that someone got hold of a series of emails Puliafito wrote to the Los Angeles Times reporters who broke the story about him…
Look. If you can’t make that campus attractive to people (UD has seen its palm-lined splendor), you’re not much of a president. Shalala did accomplish this.
Her problem is that she did it indiscriminately. She just looked at anything that might tart up the place and went there: football, Nemeroff:
The former secretary of health and human services raised some eyebrows when Miami hired Charles Nemeroff, a star researcher who left a previous job at Emory during a conflict-of-interest scandal, to lead the medical school’s psychiatry program.
But the reason UM is getting creamed again and others gloat is that its football program is in scandal again, as it has been over and over. A fine academic center has developed as its national face not medical giants or scientific powerhouses but a football bad boy on steroids.
The athletic program over the years has been sanctioned three times. That’s ample reason for bad repute…
It was to Shalala’s UM that Charles Nemeroff repaired after his problems at Emory. As the Chronicle puts it:
… Thomas R. Insel, who was helping to lead the [government’s conflict of interest] review, was also helping a tainted researcher, Charles B. Nemeroff, land a new job at the University of Miami.
Dr. Nemeroff, while chairman of the psychiatry department at Emory University, was one of several high-profile doctors found to have given speeches or written articles in medical journals extolling drugs or products made by companies that had paid them money or stock benefits that they did not report to their universities. Emory agreed to make Dr. Nemeroff ineligible for NIH grant money for two years. But after moving to Miami with the assistance of Dr. Insel, the director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Nemeroff was receiving NIH money before the two-year ban expired.
Addressing the NIH’s advisory board after Dr. Insel’s assistance to Dr. Nemeroff was revealed, Dr. Collins said he would delay the process of putting the rules in place to consider additional changes. In particular, he said the rules may need to be changed to ensure that any penalties or sanctions against a researcher remain in effect if the researcher moves to another institution.
Smart move on Nemeroff’s part, by the way, to jump to the University of Miami. They’ll never give him any trouble. You can’t go any lower than UM.
… Miami gets a bad rap as a university with no money. If that’s what you truly believe, take some time to go walk around the downtown medical campus. Start exploring and you’ll never feel like UM has a lack of funds ever again. The money is absolutely there; the only question is the willingness to spend it on athletics.
… PLEASE STOP thinking or insinuating that [President] Donna Shalala and [athletic director] Kirby [Hocutt] don’t want to win, or that they’d prefer to have a bunch of Rhodes Scholars who lose four or five games per year. That sentiment is beyond ridiculous. Both the president and athletic director want to win badly, but obviously want to do so the right way – with players going to class and not revisiting UM’s “Thug U” days.
When I think back to great UM teams, I don’t remember a bunch of guys getting arrested or failing out of school. Sure, there were some rough around the edges guys, but in all reality, no more than any other school.
A medical faculty is a dicey thing. Among this cohort of professors at your university, you’ve always got lurking a few ghosted writers, courtesy authors, research fakers, plagiarists, etc.
But your biggest problem these days, what with the money to be made from selling drugs for pharmaceutical companies, comes from corporate shills using their university affiliation to look respectable.
… [T]he Food and Drug Administration has cracked down on one of the most widely quoted cosmetic doctors, sending shudders through the ranks of opinion leaders in fashion publishing and vanity medicine.
The F.D.A. recently sent a warning letter to Dr. Leslie Baumann, a well-known dermatologist and clinical researcher in Miami Beach, citing the doctor for expressing premature enthusiasm in the media about Dysport, an injectable antiwrinkle drug the agency had not yet approved.
Dr. Baumann’s comments in the media in 2007 violated restrictions on drug promotion, according to the letter; the agency asked Dr. Baumann to explain how she intended to prevent similar violations in the future.
Under the Obama administration, the F.D.A. has stepped up scrutiny of drug advertising, dispatching many warning letters about misleading commercials and online marketing efforts. But this is believed to be the first time the agency has warned an individual investigator — a medical researcher who oversees a clinical trial — for apparently promoting an unapproved drug.
… Federal rules bar drug makers and investigators on their clinical trials from promoting a drug before the agency has approved the product. Dr. Baumann violated the restrictions, the F.D.A. letter said, because she was an investigator on a clinical trial for Dysport and promoted it well before the drug’s approval in April.
“Early data shows it may last longer and kick in faster than Botox,” Dr. Baumann told the fashion magazine Allure in 2007. She made similar comments that same year to Elle magazine and during an appearance on the “Today” show on NBC in January 2009.
… Dr. Baumann, a former professor of dermatology at the University of Miami medical school …
Former? Why is she still listed as a faculty member? And don’t you think she should update her Amazon.com bibliography?
But who cares. There are currently two great stories about medical fraud and universities!
Actually, only one – located, of course, at reliably ultra-scummy University of Miami medical school – is truly university-centered. The other – Baruch Hashem! – involves a real step forward in the federal government undoing DT’s disgusting pardon of Philip Esformes, author of the biggest health care fraud in this country’s history. The University of Pennsylvania is part of the Esformes story, but not a major part… Just one of his more trivial crimes.
Philip Esformes, a man incapable, as a matter, it seems, of principle, of obeying virtually any law, has been found guilty of this country’s largest health care fraud ever.
Much of the Esformes tale, which features his self-presentation as a seriously religious person, is scripted by Woody Allen. (‘The witnesses described how Esformes would direct them to pay doctors in cash, using code words like “fettuccine.”‘)
With his corporate and personal assets frozen, Esformes’ father, Morris, paid for the son’s costly defense, which has included lawyers from Black’s high-profile law firm and other attorneys. The father, with his son’s assistance, had amassed a fortune in the healthcare field in Chicago before they set their sights on Miami, where they got into trouble with the law for the first time in 2006. Back then, the Esformes family and the owners of Larkin Hospital paid $15.4 million to the U.S. government in a Justice Department settlement to resolve a civil violation of recycling patients between the hospital and the family’s nursing-home facilities and ALFs — a precursor to the current criminal case.
And Morris… well, about Morris you don’t wanna know… Very highly esteemed at Rogue Central, University of Miami medical school.
Certain universities – Louisville, USC, Yeshiva, the University of Miami – have the smell of more or less criminal enterprises. They’re always generating high-level, multifaceted, scandal; some of their trustees are crooked or even criminal financiers. Yeshiva had Bernard Madoff as treasurer; Ezra Merkin also sat on their board. Also, I believe, Ira Rennert. The school continues to have as a trustee Zygmunt Wilf. These are not pretty people.
Now, Harvard and MIT were indeed buddies with Jeffrey Epstein; Harvard even celebrates as an emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz, at least an Epstein intimate, and at most (according to one of Epstein’s slaves) a secret sharer in the sex. Its erstwhile president, who helped run a hedge fund while president, hung out with Epstein too. (He also hung out with Andrei Shleifer…) But these schools are not the rackety dives those other schools are. They’re not just in it for the money. Nor are they just in it for the sports: The heavy campus hand of plutocrat college sports fans (the recently departed T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State; Phil Knight at Oregon) generates scandals, too – but these are the tired, expected scandals of the jock school.
No, MIT and Harvard are great schools, serious schools, productive schools – they are among the world’s greatest intellectual institutions. They fuck with plutocrats because of their professors’ smokin’ ambition to understand, to invent, to cure. They want money, money, and more money to fund their projects. To be sure, some of this generative creative activity makes some of their professors personally wealthy — the ex-head of MIT’s Media Lab took money from Epstein for his own investments, which adds to the embarrassment of it all… More commonly, professors monetize their medical and technical breakthroughs, producing all kinds of conflict of interest trouble at cutting edge places like Stanford…
We little people, looking in at all of this from the outside, are assured that COIs can be “managed” – the word is always managed – and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads. Yessir!
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Now look. Most people are pretty greedy; many putrid plutocrats realize that a university affiliation can clean them up real good. It’s a marriage made in heaven. But here’s what UD finds remarkable: MIT’s endowment is close to 17 billion; Harvard’s is close to forty billion. In ten years or so, Harvard’s wealth will be, say, a hundred billion. Harvard is a superplutocrat.
These schools are currently in trouble for promiscuous plutocrat fraternization; but given how INSANELY – not to say unconscionably – rich they are, why is this sort of thing happening at all? Just make an appointment with the “super-secret and dictatorial Harvard Corporation” and explain to them that you’d rather dip into the school’s billions and billions and billions than have to take research money from a guy in jail for sexually enslaving fifteen year olds. The worst they can say is no!
Skeptical of the clean-up crew function of women when plutocrat sausage parties get out of hand? Read and learn. As FIFA went, so went Harvard – when things get truly desperate and you can’t hide what you’ve been doing any longer, Find A Woman, Pronto. You can always go right back to men when it all blows over.
[Before and after his conviction in 2008, Epstein was a regular on the masturbatory tech gadfly circuit — an attendee and sponsor of “billionaire dinners” and related sausage-factory soirees at which ultrawealthy men (among them the founders of Amazon and Google), elite scientists and various other male luminaries discussed the future they were collectively trying to build (or, depending on your perspective, squander.)]
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, Itold 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.
But let’s start with an April ceremony at another school: the University of Miami. There much fuss was made about the stellar, the great and the good Morris Esformes, who endowed a chair in medicine at UM.
At one point in the write-up, mention is made of another Morris Esformes chair in medicine, this one at the University of Chicago. But when Esformes’ son and nursing home business partner, Philip, was arrested for having run the largest health-related fraud in US history (he’s still in jail two years later, awaiting trial), the U of C seems to have decided it didn’t want a chair with the name Esformes on it anymore. Maybe the irony of sucking up all that money for medicine when said money came from generations of abused and neglected old people was a little too much for them.
The most recent holder of the University of Chicago medical school’s Esformes chair was suddenly and without comment renamed Louis Block.
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Incidental among the many crimes sonny is alleged to have committed was the bribery of a high-profile basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania. The bribery was on behalf of sonny’s own little whippersnapper, Morris the Second, who, according to a report, got into Penn on said coach’s recommendation – the kid was a great basketball player, see, and it had nothing to do with the $74,000 in payments Philip made to the coach on the kid’s behalf.
Did the kid ever play on Penn’s team? Nooooo you silly reader…..
Admissions fraud, Medicare fraud, Medicaid fraud, NCAA fraud… This one’s got it all.
All well-provisioned universities need access to an Emergency Title Reserve, a list of names they can immediately slap on a professor with a named chair when the original name on the professor’s chair suddenly becomes… well…
Take Mary Waters, the socially conscious Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard until it turned out Zukerman had stolen around fifty million dollars from the United States government. When it looked likely Zukerman would go to prison (that is in fact his current primary residence), Harvard was able to scrounge around in its ETR and come up with the name of some schmuck willing to sit there until he or she was needed (Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do or die).
Zukerman stole from the poor to give to the rich, as did the fascinating Esformes family, long one of the filthiest nursing home operators in Chicago, but now, in the person of Philip Esformes, “charged … in what has been touted as the nation’s biggest Medicare fraud case.” These named chair donors don’t think small – if you’re going to steal from America’s struggling taxpayer, steal tens – hundreds? – of millions! Then spread it around among the deserving rich so you can get your name emblazoned in some hoitsy-toitsy joint like Harvard, the University of Chicago…
Nothing says whitewashing like a university chair. If Bernie hadn’t suffered a reversal, hands down there’d have been a Madoff chair at Yeshiva University.
So Nir Uriel, once touted as the Esformes Chair in Medicine at Chicago, has been re-named the Block Professor.
UD of course has nothing against universities scrambling to dump crooks and replace them with saints. She has only two comments to make about this.
1. Better make sure the second-in-command is pure as the driven snow. It would be positively Rube Goldberg to have to keep giving their professors new names.
2. Instead of just quietly doing it, UD thinks universities should announce the change. Disclosure matters, and there’s a way of writing this sort of news release that makes it honest and unembarrassing.
For many years the University of Chicago has been pleased to be the recipient of financial generosity from the Esformes family, which endowed a professorship in our medical school. We have, however, now removed the Esformes name from that chair, because members of the family have been accused of Medicare fraud.
