By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
In a stunning twist in a long-running Medicare fraud case, both the Miami U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI stand accused of spying on a defendant’s lawyer by illegally and secretly obtaining copies of confidential defense documents.
Court papers filed last week by attorneys for Dr. Salo Schapiro contend the secret practice was not the action of “just one rogue agent or prosecutor.” Rather, it was apparently an “office-wide policy” of both the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI that’s gone on for “at least 10 years.”
The unwritten policy involves “surreptitiously copying defense counsel’s work product through the government-contracted copy service that the government requires defense counsel to use to obtain the discovery documents’’ needed to properly prepare for trial, according to court papers that seek either the dismissal of Schapiro’s indictment or the disqualification of the entire prosecution team.
Miami attorneys Howard Srebnick and Rossana Arteaga-Gomez represent Schapiro and filed the motion, which asserts that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has for several weeks been investigating itself in the matter.
Miami U.S. District Judge Marcia G. Cooke held an initial hearing Tuesday that was continued until June 8 at 1:30 p.m. The judge, in an order, has asked both parties to respond to this extraordinary question: “What remedies, if any, are available to the court were the court to find that the described conduct in defendant Schapiro’s motion is a systemic, consistent and/or pervasive practice of or on behalf of the United States Attorney’s Office?”
A spokeswoman for Miami U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer would not be interviewed. However, late Thursday night prosecutors filed court papers confirming that an internal probe is underway and asserting that defense arguments are “based on erroneous accusations and insinuations.”
“Despite the charged language this is not a case about intrusion into the attorney-client relationship, eavesdropping or sneaking into the defense camp,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney James V. Hayes and Justice Department fraud attorney Lisa H. Miller.
Defense attorney Srebnick did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Specifically, the court papers allege that Fort Lauderdale-based copying service Imaging Universe and president Ignacio E. Montero provided the government with CDs containing duplicates of documents Schapiro’s defense team culled from 220 boxes of evidentiary records in preparation for trial. Federal agents had seized those records from the mental-health clinic Biscayne Milieu, where Schapiro worked.
“Covertly cloning defense counsel’s work-product to obtain a tactical advantage is nothing short of ‘shocking to the universal sense of justice’ mandated by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment,” Srebnick and Arteaga-Gomez wrote. “To the extent that the prosecution team can infer from Dr. Schapiro’s selection of discovery documents his thought process, the government has violated his Fifth Amendment right not to be compelled to be a witness against himself. This intrusion into the attorney-client relationship has also violated Dr. Schapiro’s Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel.”
The government responds
The government’s Thursday night response acknowledged that Imaging Universe did supply the FBI with duplicate CDs of what the company had copied for Schapiro’s defense team, but said the discs “were never requested by any agent, prosecutor or anyone else on the government’s behalf.”
Prosecutors Hayes and Miller also stated that they were unaware of the duplicate CDs until an FBI agent disclosed their existence in late April. They said that when they found out they immediately told “Montero to stop and began an internal inquiry.”
“To date it has found that there was simply no pervasive practice of receiving or recording defense discovery, and that it was not a widespread or institutionalized practice,” says the government’s response.
Nova Southeastern University constitutional law professor Robert Jarvis was skeptical of the defense’s sensational claims, but said that if the allegations prove true it could upend hundreds of criminal cases, free untold defendants and potentially result in criminal charges against government officials responsible for violating defendants’ rights.
“This opens a huge can of worms,” Jarvis said. “It’s potentially catastrophic for the government and I would think that the [U.S.] Attorney General would be swooping in on this. There are 95 judicial districts. If it happened in this office, you have to wonder if it’s happening in any others.”
Schapiro, 70, Sonia Gallimore, 74, both Broward residents, and Marlene Cesar, 64, of Allentown, PA., were indicted on charges of health care fraud and conspiracy and making false statements in September 2014. According to the indictment, they and other alleged co-conspirators submitted more than $55 million in phony Medicare claims through the Miami clinic, Biscayne Milieu, collecting more than $11 million. Previously, about 25 other owners and employees of the clinic pleaded guilty or were convicted of healthcare fraud.
On Tuesday, attorneys for Gallimore and Cesar filed paperwork seeking dismissal of their charges, claiming their clients’ rights were similarly violated by the alleged scheme.
The defense motion says that between late 2014 and last month, Schapiro’s lawyers repeatedly visited an FBI warehouse in Miramar where discovery documents are kept for review. During Arteaga-Gomez’s first visit to the warehouse federal agents told her that if she wanted to copy any documents she would have to use Imaging Universe, the motion says.
Since the indictment, Imaging Universe has charged Schapiro $8,200 to produce nine sets of discovery documents to his defense team. The motion identifies those records to include a dozen CDs containing approximately 1,140 PDF files, many with multiple pages.
The motion contends that company president Montero “lied” to Arteaga-Gomez about the copying process, and instead of making sure the government did not see the defense’s hand-selected files, provided FBI case agent Deanne Lindsey with duplicate copies.
Montero did not respond to a detailed voicemail message seeking comment.
Prosecutor discloses FBI received defense CDs
Hayes, the federal prosecutor on Schapiro’s case, first informed Srebnick and his associate that agent Lindsey “had been surreptitiously receiving the CDs” on April 22, according to the defense motion.
“Hayes proposed to immediately destroy the CDs,” but the lawyers asked instead that he give them to the defense, “which he did,” the motion says.
Hayes declined to be interviewed about the matter.
Arteaga-Gomez phoned Montero on April 25 to ask who had told him to provide copies of the CDs to the government. Montero, the motion says, answered that an “agent” told his office manager to do it. “Mr. Montero then stated that he had been providing to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the past 10 years duplicate copies of the discovery documents selected by defense counsel in other cases.”
Montero also forwarded to Schapiro’s defense an April 21 email he sent to a healthcare-fraud paralegal in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, stating that he’d provided the Justice Department with duplicates of defense records “since 2006.” Montero added that both his old company, Xpediacopy, and Imaging Universe had done it.
If so, the alleged government misconduct spanned the administrations of three Miami U.S. Attorneys – Alex Acosta, who served from 2005-2009, Jeffrey Sloman acting U.S. Attorney from 2009-2010 and Wifredo Ferrer, who took over in May 2010.
Srebnick and Arteaga-Gomez wrote that they’ve recently had “multiple conversations” about the matter with Miami federal prosecutors and their supervisors.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office has admitted that Agent Deanne Lindsey had been receiving copies of the CDs and had been keeping the duplicate CDs in a folder as she received them,” the motion says. Lindsey also “confessed to opening four of those duplicate CDs” looking for files, copying and pasting files onto her own CDs and providing “those new CDs to the government’s expert witness for trial preparation,” the motion says.
The prosecutors’ response sought to cast Lindsey’s contact with the records in less threatening way.
Prosecutors notified the defense last week that Montero had “confessed to lying to Rossana Arteaga-Gomez about the discovery process” in order to hide what was happening, the defense lawyers wrote.
“That the government-contracted copy service misled Ms. Arteaga-Gomez in order to cover-up the office-wide policy makes this case especially egregious,” the motion says.
Details about the size, terms and duration of Imaging Universe’s contract were not immediately available. The prosecutors’ response, however, said the contract is between Imaging Universe and the Government Publishing office.
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