Health insurance fraudster sentenced to 10 years in prison

A Connecticut health insurance manager whose company stole $17.9 million from Curry Automotive in Greenburgh was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on Aug. 20.

U.S. District Judge Philip M. Halpern also ordered Anthony Riccardi, 46, of New Canaan, to forfeit $2 million and pay $14.9 million in restitution.

Riccardi and his wife, Patricia, owned and operated Employee Benefit Solutions, a Wilton, Connecticut company that managed medical claims for Curry dealerships.

Curry was self-insured and for many years EBS managed the health insurance claims. From 2015 to 2018, EBS inflated and fabricated medical claims submitted by Curry employees and then billed Curry for the false charges.

Curry paid $26 million for purported medical expenses, according to court records, but EBS paid health care providers $8.1 million and pocketed $17.9 million.

In 2017, EBS began using fraudulent loan applications to borrow money and keep the scheme going.

The Riccardis concealed the scheme with fabricated bank statements and checks.

They used their ill-gotten gains to bankroll a lavish lifestyle, according to court records, such as paying the mortgage on a mansion and leasing luxury cars.

Anthony Riccardi pleaded guilty to bank fraud and conspiracy. His attorney, Michael Lambert, recommended no incarceration, in a sentencing memorandum submitted to judge Halpern.

Riccardi is a product of a broken home: an alcoholic mother, a father addicted to drugs, divorce when he was 12, and then the death of his father’s death by an Oxycodone overdose.

By age 15, he was drinking half a bottle of gin daily. As an adult, he began using prescribed Oxycodone for an injury but then secured and abuse his own supply of the opioid, plus cocaine and Xanax.

Despite attempts to commit himself to sobriety, he relapsed from time to time. At one point he was snorting more than 20 lines of cocaine a day, costing thousands of dollars a month, and spending as much as $20,000 a month on addictive painkillers.

In 2015, EPS began to decline as Riccardi continued to struggle with addictions and alcoholism. That was when he and began stealing money, his attorney says.

“Anthony’s dream and intentions of owning and operating an honest and profitable enterprise was coming to an end,” the sentencing memo states. “His management of the company, once sound, sober, and upright, would spiral rapidly out of control.”

Lambert blamed EBS’ accountant and later its chief financial officer, Erin Verespy, for sabotaging a teetering business.

“Under Anthony’s nose, in his drug addled state, Erin Verespy stole additional, vast sums of money from EBS’s bank accounts and appropriated it to herself.”

Riccardi also took steps to turn himself in, Lambert says, and met with a federal prosecutor in 2019.

Assistant prosecutor Nicholas S. Bradley recommended 11 years in prison.

“The defendant orchestrated a staggering, widespread fraud that stole millions of dollars of fiduciary funds from an employee health plan,” he advised the judge in a sentencing letter.

“The lies that the defendant told were almost limitless in scope, required a complex array of bank accounts, and inevitably resorted to sophisticated methods of forgery in order to keep victims in the dark.”

Riccardi, not Verespy, “masterminded the many facets of the fraudulent scheme,” the prosecutor says, and used EBS to fleece Curry Automotive.

Riccardi did not turn himself in, Bradley said. The federal investigation was long underway when he agreed to meet with investigators.

Co-conspirators Verespy and Patricia Riccardi also pleaded guilty to bank fraud and conspiracy.

Patricia Riccardi, 57, was sentenced this past December to 30 months in prison. She is an inmate at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution.

Verespy, 53, was sentenced in March 2022 to five-and-a-half years in prison. She is an inmate at Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.

Lambert asked the court to recommend that Anthony Riccardi be placed in a substance abuse treatment program at the federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland.