On Friday, Farid Fata was sentenced to 45 years in prison for deceiving over 550 patients at his cancer clinic into getting treatments they didn’t need and sticking insurance companies with $34.7 million in illegitimate claims. This health care fraud was so callous and outrageous that federal prosecutors in Detroit would not even consider a lenient sentence when Fata pled guilty last fall. They wanted a 175-year sentence–the longest possible under federal sentencing guidelines. Fata was ultimately sentenced to only a fourth of that total, but at his age–he turned 50 earlier this year–it’s enough to all but assure he will die in prison.
As draconian as this sentence was, Fata really doesn’t know how lucky he got. Had this monster been self-absorbed enough to go to trial, he was putting himself at risk for being deported back to his native Lebanon in disgrace if convicted. I discovered this while perusing the 23-count indictment that Fata would have faced had he not pleaded guilty. According to the local U. S. Attorney, Barbara McQuade, this indictment spelled out “the most serious fraud case” of any sort in this country’s history, simply because of the harm Fata did to the patients who trusted him.
Count 21 accused Fata of “unlawful procurement of naturalization”–a fancy way of saying that Fata lied on his application for citizenship. Fata first applied for citizenship in March 2008, after being a resident of the United States since the early 1990s. On the standard application form, Fata stated that he had not committed “a crime or offense for which you were not arrested.”
According to the indictment, however, Fata turned his cancer clinic into a health care fraud racket as early as 2007. Based on the prosecutors’ timeline–one that Fata tacitly accepted with his plea–Fata knew that he was lying when he filled out that form. He repeated this lie when U. S. Citizenship and Immigration interviewed him in September.
Fata dug himself an even deeper hole four days before he officially sworn in as a citizen in March 2009. On the form notifying him of his naturalization ceremony, Fata stated that he had not “knowingly committed a crime or offense for which you were not arrested” between his interview with Citizenship and Immigration and the date he received the ceremony notice. As we now know, by this time he had been actively engaging in health care fraud for two years.
Had Fata gone to trial, he could have faced up to 15 years in prison for lying on his citizenship application. Under federal sentencing guidelines, Fata would have likely gotten anywhere from 10 to 16 months. More importantly, it would have been grounds for starting denaturalization proceedings.? The bar for yanking someone’s citizenship is very high. Among other things, the government must prove that someone obtained citizenship through “willful concealment or material misrepresentation.” If lying on a citizenship application to hide your involvement in a multi-million dollar health care fraud doesn’t clear that bar, I don’t know what does.
However, with Fata’s guilty plea, that charge was dropped. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall of McQuade’s office as Fata’s lawyers begged her to drop this charge if Fata pled guilty. That’s exactly how a good federal investigation is supposed to work–amass enough evidence to force the defendant to act like a supplicant begging for mercy.
If this quack had indeed gone to trial, having him deported would have been more than justified. This is a doctor who subjected perfectly healthy people to chemotherapy, knowing full well that he was pumping them with poison. One of his victims lost almost all of his teeth, and others were saddled with health care problems that they’ll have to live with for a lifetime. To my mind, there’s really no such thing as being too heavy-handed with a doctor who does something this heinous and then forces his victims and their loved ones to go through the additional agony of a trial.
There’s no doubt Fata opted to admit to his heinous crimes because he knew the sight of having his victims testify about what he did to them wouldn’t look good in front of a jury. But from the looks of it, he was also scared to death of being run out of this country on a rail.
