Wife of Jackson Memorial Fraud Ringleader Sentenced To House Arrest
MIAMI (CBS4) – Maria Victoria Suarez, wife of the Miami-Dade businessman convicted of stealing patient records from Jackson Memorial Hospital to sell has been sentenced to house arrest for 18 months by a judge.
U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard passed the sentence plus 300 hours of community service on Suarez last week after she pleaded guilty in November to conspiring with her husband, Ruben E. Rodriguez.
There was a recommendation by federal prosecutor Christopher Clark that Suarez be imprisoned from 10 to 16 months for her role in the fraud conspiracy.
Suarez, a 53-year-old mother of two, worked as a cosmetologist and introduced her husband to a customer who was a longtime employee at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
Rodriguez paid the employee, Rebecca Garcia, to steal at least 3,360 patients' names, addresses, telephone numbers and medical diagnoses between 2008 and 2009. Rodriguez paid Garcia $1,000 a month for the records of patients treated for slip-and-fall accidents, car-crash injuries, gunshot wounds and stabbings.
Then, he called the patients to screen them for referrals to lawyers.
In October, Rodriguez, 62, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for the elaborate scam, which generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks for himself. He received payoffs from the lawyers after they obtained personal-injury damages for the patients.
Garcia, who was fired from Jackson in 2009, served a 10-month prison sentence.
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