Cuban immigrant Joel Regino Díaz Martín allegedly escaped from Cuba with a multimillion-dollar loot, according to U.S. federal authorities, after defrauding Medicaid in Miami by pretending to be the owner of a mental health clinic that collected around $4,000,000 from the state medical insurance program for low-income individuals.
A report from the Miami Herald revealed this Thursday that Díaz "became a millionaire" after stating in corporate records that he was the owner of the New Behavior Health Direction clinic in Hialeah Gardens, Florida, but the true owner was the Cuban American José Dávila Núñez.
Most of the illegal profits from the clinic, obtained through fraudulent bills to Medicaid, were funneled to its true owner, Dávila, who paid Díaz to be the "designated owner" of his company, according to court documents.
Díaz, who arrived in Florida in 2018, fled to Cuba in the fall of 2020, the Miami newspaper specified. However, before that, he transferred millions of dollars from the mental health clinic to his boss through six bank accounts, while keeping a portion of the money for himself, according to court records.
The Miami Herald recalled that, like Díaz, "hundreds of Cuban immigrants have arrived in South Florida to participate in multimillion-dollar medical billing schemes, only to flee back to the island nation or to another Latin American country when federal agents are following them," a trend the newspaper documented in the story titled "The Medicare Criminals" in 2018.
On October 11, Dávila, 51 years old and a resident of Miami, was sentenced to over five years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release, after pleading guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud. He was also ordered to pay $3,869,703 in restitution for losses to the Medicaid program.
Two other associates of Dávila—Jesús Rojas, 44, and Luis Rivero, 50—also pled guilty to conspiracy to pay bribes to patients between November 2018 and December 2022 in exchange for them receiving purported mental health sessions at three other clinics in Miami: Davila Medical Center, Incorporated, Advanced Community Wellness Center, and Larkin Behavior Health, Incorporated, which together garnered approximately $12 million from Medicaid. Rojas and Rivero were sentenced to between two and three years in prison.
From April 2019 to September 2020, New Behavior Health Direction submitted false claims to Medicaid amounting to $3,869,703, alleging that they had provided psychosocial rehabilitation (PSR) services, a type of therapy aimed at assisting individuals with disorders such as depression and anxiety.
In September 2020, the "designated owner," Díaz, made several cash withdrawals from the proceeds of the fraud, handed part of the money to Dávila, and then fled to Cuba, the Miami Herald reported, citing a statement of facts submitted along with Dávila's plea agreement with prosecutors.
However, the statement does not specify how much taxpayer-funded Medicaid money Díaz took to Cuba.
The U.S. government successfully confiscated approximately $1.7 million in cash related to the bank accounts of New Behavior Health Direction.
According to the newspaper report, the federal prosecutor's office in Miami declined to comment on whether Díaz has been charged in the Medicaid fraud case. It also noted that there is no criminal case registered under his name in the federal judiciary system of South Florida.
The statement submitted alongside Dávila's plea agreement notes that, in June 2018, he "ordered" Díaz to register his name as the sole owner of New Behavior and to enroll the clinic in Medicaid.
During the investigation, federal agents discovered that Dávila had impersonated a doctor from Miami-Dade to use his identity as a supervising physician for New Behavior, in order to facilitate the clinic's billing scheme to Medicaid. In 2020, investigators confirmed during an interview with the doctor that he did not supervise New Behavior and was also unfamiliar with Dávila.
Dávila also stole the identity of a therapist, who was supposedly responsible for nearly half of the $3.8 million that New Behavior billed to Medicaid. The investigation revealed that the professional had never provided mental health treatment to anyone at the clinic.
To facilitate the transfer of fraudulently obtained money to the health insurance program, Dávila instructed Díaz to open six corporate bank accounts at TD Bank, Regions Bank, and Truist Bank, where Dávila deposited $1.7 million in illicit earnings, which were later seized by federal authorities.
According to statements, in September 2020, federal agents went to Díaz's last known address at 1116 Palm Ave., Hialeah, but the owner informed them that he had already moved out.
From that moment on, authorities made futile attempts to locate him. A government witness told federal agents that he "returned to Cuba," according to the Miami Herald report.
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