Father and Son Owners of Ambulette Company Plead Guilty To $8.6 Million Healthcare Kickback Scheme

Earlier today in federal court in Brooklyn, Igor Radinovskiy and Aleksandr Radinovskiy, co-owners of Sabe Ambulette Services Inc., d/b/a Mobility Transportation, located in Brooklyn and North Bellmore, New York, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to offer and pay health care kickbacks and one count of conspiracy to defraud the lawful functions of the Internal Revenue Service.

Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Brian A. Benczkowski, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), Scott J. Lampert, Special Agent-in-Charge, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General, New York Region (HHS-OIG), and Jonathan D. Larsen, Acting Special Agent-in-Charge, IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), announced the guilty pleas.

“The Radinovskiys used their ambulette company as a vehicle to falsely bill Medicaid for transportation services performed by drivers who were not enrolled in the Medicaid program, in exchange for kickbacks from the defendants,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue.  “With today’s guilty pleas, the defendants have been held accountable for this scheme that they carried out at the expense of the taxpayer-funded program.”

According to court filings and admissions by the defendants, Igor Radinovskiy and Aleksandr Radinovskiy, father and son respectively, paid kickbacks to co-conspirator drivers for recruiting Medicaid beneficiaries for transportation to clinics in Brooklyn and Queens, and referring those beneficiaries to the defendants’ company.  Those drivers were not enrolled in the Medicaid program, and were not authorized to bill Medicaid for the transportation.  The defendants, whose ambulette company was enrolled in Medicaid, billed the government program for the drivers’ services, kept 15 to 20 percent of the Medicaid reimbursements and kicked back 80 to 85 percent to the unauthorized drivers.  In total, between January 2008 and April 2018, the defendants and their co-conspirators paid more than $8.6 million in kickbacks.

For the calendar years 2008 through 2013, the defendants filed false tax returns, reporting the kickback payments as legitimate business expenses, under-reporting business income and claiming false business deductions.

The FBI, HHS-OIG and IRS-CI investigated the case, which was prosecuted by the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, under the supervision by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York and the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section.  Trial Attorney Andrew Estes of the Fraud Section is in charge of the prosecution.

The Defendants:

IGOR RADINOVSKIY

Age: 60

Brooklyn, New York

ALEKSANDR RADINOVSKIY

Age: 37

Brooklyn, New York

E.D.N.Y. Docket No. 19-CR-373 (FB)