Nursing home operator from Chicago jailed as feds allege $1 billion scheme

For years, wealthy nursing home operator Philip Esformes seemed to live in perpetual motion, using private jets to travel between his Water Tower Place condominium and his mansions in Miami and Los Angeles.

Now federal authorities are applying extraordinary court pressure to keep Esformes locked in a Florida detention cell where he awaits trial for allegedly orchestrating an unprecedented $1 billion Medicaid and Medicare bribery and kickback scheme.

"This is the largest single criminal health care fraud case ever brought against individuals by the Department of Justice," Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell said at a July 22 news conference announcing the charges.

Arrested at one of his $2 million estates on the Miami Beach waterfront that morning and placed in immediate detention, Esformes has been denied bond despite a barrage of court pleas that include letters of support from nursing home patients and the recipients of his philanthropy.

His confinement in the Miami Federal Detention Center marks a new challenge for a business family that has withstood two decades of Justice Department probes and Tribune investigations into allegations of patient abuse, corruption and substandard conditions at their Illinois, Florida and Missouri nursing home facilities.

From their Lincolnwood offices, Esformes and his father and business partner, Morris Esformes, took in millions of dollars annually from federal programs for the sick and disabled.

Both have cultivated reputations as prominent philanthropists. Morris Esformes has an endowed medical professorship named for him at the University of Chicago, and they have given millions of dollars to synagogues, schools and medical facilities in the United States and Israel.

The Esformeses sold their Illinois nursing facilities about four years ago but kept their headquarters in the Chicago suburbs as they continued to operate 20 or so homes in Florida, government records and Tribune interviews show.

The new federal indictment alleges that Philip Esformes and a handful of Miami co-conspirators bilked Medicaid and Medicare for 14 years by cycling some 14,000 patients through various Esformes facilities, where many received unnecessary or even harmful treatments. Drug addicts were allegedly lured to the facilities with promises of narcotics, and prosecutors say some received OxyContin and fentanyl without a physician's order to entice them to stay.  (Click to Continue)

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Nursing home operator from Chicago jailed as feds allege $1 billion scheme