BY FRED GRIMM
M ost places, when the president of a wildly prosperous medical clinic comes under investigation for defrauding Medicare, we first hear about him in the dry text of a federal indictment.
Justo Padron didn't reside in one of those places.
Padron was a quintessential South Florida character. His downfall might have been plagiarized from the books of Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry, who've often complained that real life here keeps stealing their plotlines.
His clinic in Hialeah had racked up 12,290 Medicare claims -- worth $7.4 million -- for HIV treatment. Except this particular HIV treatment (intravenous infusion) was all but obsolete. It was obsolete everywhere, it seems, but South Florida.
Justo Padron's résumé probably didn't allay suspicions that his operation reeked of fraud. At 36, he was already classified as a habitual criminal whose rap sheet included more than a dozen arrests for robbery, assault, trespassing and cocaine possession.
In 2002, the future president of Tamiami Medical Center finished up a six-year prison stint for burglary.
When investigators talked to Padron, he seemed to be having trouble accounting for $355,000 in the clinic's bank account.
THE GATOR WINS
The FBI was closing in. Not fast enough. This is South Florida, where reality likes to dress up as outlandish fiction.
On Nov. 8, security guards surprised the medical executive outside the Miccosukee casino attempting to steal a car. Padron fled into the darkness (no doubt reasoning that attempted grand larceny can't be good for business). He hurried out of the casino parking lot and leaped into a nearby lake.
Most places, jumping into a lake would seem a fine strategy for eluding authorities. South Florida is not one of those places.
He was mauled to death by a nine-foot alligator. So much for Padron.
The ex-con's $7.4 million clinic scam was among the astounding examples of local Medicare fraud schemes exposed by The Miami Herald's Jay Weaver.
Jay found that that bogus HIV treatment clinics in Miami-Dade County were paying kickbacks to low-life scoundrels and crackheads to pose as patients. In 2005 alone, our fake clinics hit up Medicare for $2.2 billion.
AND MORE SCAMS
HIV infusion fraud was just one of the rip-offs. Half of Miami-Dade's supposed medical equipment supply houses appear to be no more than mail drops for yet another variation of the Medicare hustle.
Not only is South Florida roiling with a wildly disproportionate number of Medicare scamsters, Weaver found that when federal investigators get close, local actors often skip the country.
Some 56 suspects in South Florida fraud schemes are on the lam. Weaver reported that $142 million in filched Medicare money disappeared along with them.
The FBI thinks many of the suspects, in a reversal of the usual migration pattern, are immigrants who fled back home to Cuba.
The numbers Weaver added up in local Medicare schemes were so large, so many billions, that they challenged the imagination.
But one of those numbers took a permanent grip on my imagination: Nine. As in the nine-foot alligator that, when it came to catching a South Florida Medicare cheat, was way ahead of the FBI
