12 Indicted in Sting on Insurance Fraud

Two doctors, three lawyers and seven of their employees were indicted by a U.S. grand jury in San Francisco on Thursday as part of a two-year federal and state insurance fraud investigation.

The indictments charging mail fraud and money laundering are expected to be the first in a series arising from an undercover sting operation that the FBI and other agencies ran in the Bay Area, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Steve Meagher.

All of those charged are from the Bay Area, but one of the lawyers also has an office in South Pasadena.

In the sting, law enforcement agents posed as “cappers”--middlemen who introduce auto accident victims to unscrupulous lawyers and doctors, who then produce inflated insurance claims based on trumped-up medical records.

Law enforcement officials believe that fraud accounts for 15% to 20% of all auto insurance claims in California, or as much as $1 billion a year, Meagher said.

Investigators compiled about 2,500 hours of taped conversations between the undercover cappers and the lawyers, physicians and others who were involved in generating the phony claims. Additional information was gathered in November when agents executed 19 search warrants in the Bay Area.

“Doctors were routinely allowing patients to sign in for two, three and sometimes 10 times the number of office visits they actually had,” Meagher said. “One doctor kept using the expression, ‘You want to double down today?’--meaning sign in twice.”

In one of the taped encounters, an investigator posing as an accident victim told a lawyer that another attorney had already refused to file his claim. The lawyer chuckled and said, “That’s probably because you didn’t really go to the doctor all these times,” Meagher said. But the lawyer filed the claim anyway.

The amounts of money involved in the incidents detailed in Thursday’s indictments were fairly small--none more than a few thousand dollars, Meagher said. However, that squares with the investigators’ theory that the majority of fraud cases are relatively penny-ante, making insurers more likely to settle them without a fight.

Indicted were San Francisco attorney Geronimo Amigable and his employees Agnes Marbella and Laguya Doan; attorney Alfred Perez Jr. of Burlingame and South Pasadena and his employees Joseph Der-Yeghiayan and Vivian Ocampo; attorney Mark A. Roney of Oakland and his employee Levi Baranda; Dr. Rolando Bueno of Daly City and his former wife and clinic manager, Lamar Bueno; Dr. Appolonia Dimapilis of San Francisco, and Zoila Coronel, an employee of St. Jude Medical Center in San Francisco.

Besides the FBI, other agencies involved in the probe are the state Insurance Department, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the San Francisco Police Department, the California Highway Patrol and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Five insurance companies also assisted by providing claims forms, money and technical help: Aetna, Farmers, Fireman’s Fund, United Services Automobile Assn. and California State Automobile Assn., the AAA-affiliated automobile club in Northern California and Nevada.