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TOO JUICY FOR JUST A GOTCHA
The woes of Ophthalmologist (oops, make that now FORMER Ophthalmologist) Joseph Mermelstein began almost ten years ago when he had an automobile accident in October 2003 — followed not long thereafter by FBI agents raiding his office as part of a 2004 Medicare fraud investigation.
As a result of the auto accident, Mermelstein filed claims attesting life-altering injuries, the most serious of which was that he had lost motor control of his left hand and could therefore no longer do surgeries. And the just-as-serious one, maybe even MORE serious, that he was impotent — his ding no longer donged, so to speak, or perhaps vice versa.
As a result of the FBI raid, federal prosecutors hit him with charges that he “submitted … to Medicare claims for services to beneficiaries, including eye surgeries, that [Dr. Mermelstein] claimed were medically necessary, but which in fact, as [the doctor] then and there well knew and believed, were not medically necessary.”
To confuse matters a bit more, there was Josephine Crone, a married woman (the doctor was married as well, although not to Josephine), and a rather torrid consensual relationship between the two that extended far beyond their doctor (him) and office manager (her) relationship. They also had a “history.” We’ll get to that shortly.
Back to the fraud prosecution (just for a moment, we promise): Mermelstein took a plea bargain deal in November 2007, agreeing to an admission of guilt in exchange for a five-year sentence. Nobody knows how much the “he said, she said” testimony might have impacted a trial; but the stories were quite different and Josephine was very much cooperating with the feds. After all, she’d been the office manager and had to have a fair amount of culpability when it came to “knew or should have known” items of fact. And, yes, they did indeed have a “history.”
She testified at a 2008 sentencing hearing that the two had dated in the past, and when she went to work for him at the Eye Institute of Staten Island in Meiers Corners in 2001, he wanted to resume the hanky-panky stuff even though she’d gotten back together with her husband in the interim. In much later testimony she told her side of what was going on and why she again began a routine of daily lunchtime encounters in a basement conference room or bathroom from when she was hired until the fateful FBI raid.
“He asked me if my husband knew that he was the doctor that I was seeing before him. I told him no, he didn’t know that,” she testified. “[Dr. Mermelstein] basically said that, you know, he would tell him, and he would believe him, and he would take my children from me, and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to go into that bathroom.”
No, no, noooooooooooooo — however, conference room/bathroom it was — even after the terrible auto accident that caused such severe injuries to his left hand and his middle leg.
Josephine’s informational cooperation with the feds included some interesting details. Lest this tale be misconstrued to contain too many prurient details, let’s just say that the injured doctor was quite adept at unfastening bras with his left hand, using the hand to position and hold in place the object of his afternoon delight sessions, and that he’d prop her up on a pillow and insert a functional winkie — thereby dispelling the whole impotence thing and the no motor skills in my left hand thing.
Armed with this testimony, the feds unsealed yet another indictment: this time on the disability claims. According to federal prosecutors the then Doctor had faked his injuries from the get go — and when the insurance company doctors examined him. “For example, during these physical examinations, he intentionally exerted less strength in his upper left extremity, and feigned a tremor,” federal prosecutors wrote.
Mermelstien’s lawyer challenged Josephine’s credibility and said that the doctor denied the encounters ever occurred. The attorney also questioned how it was that, in such a high-traffic medical practice, no one ever knew of the lunchtime antics or wandered downstairs to use the bathroom or the conference room?
Still, once again, the backed-into-a-corner Mermelstien went for a guilty plea. This time for mail fraud.
“I submitted fraudulent claims through the United States mail and made false statements to an insurance company,” he told Brooklyn Federal Court Judge John Gleeson. “By doing so I collected disability claims and other insurance funds, and I knew it was illegal.”
At Mermelstien’s next sentencing hearing, coming up in October, he faces 46 to 57 months.
Josephine’s own sentencing deal was for probation. Tat for tit.