SACRAMENTO — Somewhere in Spain, perhaps at his villa on the Costa del Sol or at his luxury apartment in Madrid, Faustino Pascual lives comfortably on $6.5 million that authorities say he stole from California's Medi-Cal system.
Actually, federal court records show, Pascual is accused of defrauding the state poverty medical program of more than $20 million between 1988 and 1990. The $6.5 million is what agents say they could prove he transferred to overseas banks before fleeing the United States the day before investigators came to arrest him at his Diamond Bar condominium.
FBI agents serving at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid periodically check in on Pascual, whose full name is Faustino Pascual Crespo. The most recent information on him came from an informant less than a year ago, federal officials said.
The international police agency Interpol issued a "red notice" that Pascual is still wanted in California. But the 58-year-old Spaniard is protected under Spanish extradition laws and cannot be arrested unless he attempts to leave the country.
The Pascual case predates by nine years the current Medi-Cal scandal that has so far resulted in 75 arrests stemming from hundreds of millions of dollars in false billings for medical supplies. But the modus operandi is nearly identical. Pascual allegedly set up phony medical supply outlets in several Orange County locations and, using falsified prescriptions, billed the state for adult diapers and other items he never delivered.
How did the state, burned less than a decade ago, allow the same thing to happen again on an even larger scale? Why, given the huge sums of taxpayer money involved, wasn't the public more outraged and political leaders more motivated to do something about it earlier?
When the ongoing investigation into more than 200 cases is complete, FBI officials estimate, the total fraud committed over a period of about five years will exceed $1 billion. That would be one of the largest frauds ever committed against government, and more than the money taken in all the bank robberies in the United States in the past decade.
"People really get terrorized when an unarmed bank robber takes $500," said Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor and an expert on white-collar crime. "But it's hard for people to identify the government as victim. It is such a nebulous entity, and people can't make the connection between taxpayer dollars and what is being ripped off."
