A company owned by Chicago criminal defense lawyer Santo Volpe repeatedly falsified employee records to obtain group plan health and dental insurance, saving thousands of dollars in premium costs, authorities said Tuesday.
A 46-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in San Francisco charged Volpe, 50, in a scheme to defraud the insurer, Western Employers Trust, over a 21-month period, ended in December, 1988.
During that time, the indictment said, Volpe`s firm, American Beverage Co., located in Chicago, sought and received cost-saving group plan rates by inflating the number of employees and providing names of non-existent workers.
Efforts to contact Volpe, owner and president of the firm, were unsuccessful.
But in an interview earlier this month, Volpe gave no hint of legal woes for himself. Volpe, a gun collector, spoke instead of a break-in at his Northbrook home over the Christmas holidays in which thieves made off with 23 handguns, rifles and shotguns.
Western Employers Trust, based in San Francisco, insures about 200 employee health and dental programs, mostly in that state.
An investigation of American Beverage`s claims by the FBI and the Office of Labor Racketeering preceded the indictment, and was assisted by government findings in another fraud case involving convicted swindler Angelo Commito.
Commito formerly owned two Chicago-based companies that managed employer health care plans. He pleaded guilty in California late last year to fraud charges arising from a federal investigation of a company that administered the plan accounts of Western Employers Trust. Commito is believed to be cooperating with authorities, detailing schemes affecting health plan providers.
