Man Facing Fraud Charges Tries To Escape US Using Jet Ski

A Florida man accused of submitting more than $4 million in fraudulent health care claims to the federal government was arrested as he was headed toward Cuba on a jet ski, prosecutors announced Tuesday.

Coast guard and border protection officers found 54-year-old Ernesto Cruz Graveran in the waters south of Key West, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (USAO-SDFL) said in a statement.

The Hialeah, Florida, resident was onboard a "broken down" jet ski that was headed toward the direction of Cuba, which is around 90 miles away, according to prosecutors.

Graveran was accompanied by an unnamed individual who was known to law enforcement to be an alien smuggler.

The jet ski the two were riding was outfitted with a special fuel cell to allow for long trips, prosecutors said. A trove of food and water bottles was discovered within the vehicle's compartments.

Between February and April this year, Graveran owned Xiko Enterprises, a Florida corporation that claimed to provide durable medical equipment (DME) to eligible Medicare beneficiaries, according to allegations in a criminal complaint.

Xiko allegedly submitted approximately $4.2 million in fraudulent health care claims to Medicare for DME within two months, which resulted in the company receiving more than $2.1 million from the government health program.

However, the DME were never provided, and no Medicare beneficiaries requested them in the first place, the complaint alleged.

In one instance, Xiko billed Medicare over $1 million for DME that purportedly were prescribed by a physician for around 145 beneficiaries, but none of those beneficiaries were patients of that physician, and that physician never prescribed any of the billed-for DME, according to the complaint.

Magistrate Judge Alicia Otazo-Reyes agreed with the government that Graveran should not be released on bond. She ordered Graveran detained at the Federal Detention Center in Miami pending his trial.

It was unclear what happened to the individual who was with Graveran on the jet ski.

The Department of Justice filed criminal charges against 21 defendants in nine federal districts back in April over their alleged participation in various healthcare-related fraud schemes, which resulted in over $149 million in COVID-19-related false billings to federal programs and theft from federally-funded pandemic assistance programs.