Rockville Centre doctor sentenced to 8 years

Rockville Centre orthopedist Peter J. Ajemian was sentenced last Friday to eight years in prison and ordered to pay back millions of dollars for his role in a Long Island Rail Road disability fraud scheme.

In January, Ajemian, 64, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud and health care fraud. He admitted that between the late 1990s and 2008, he recommended that at least 734 retiring LIRR employees be paid disability benefits.

“Today, Dr. Ajemian begins to pay the price for being a key facilitator of a massive disability fraud on the LIRR, that he admitted resulted in losses of millions of dollars,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. “This office will continue to pursue those who participated in this scheme to abuse the LIRR’s disability system and gain benefits to which they were not entitled.”

The fraud scheme was perpetuated by doctors and LIRR employees, according to prosecutors. Railroad employees would plan to retire at age 50, which would reduce the amount of their pensions. To make up the difference, they would plead disability to the Railroad Retirement Board. The RRB disability payments made their pensions equivalent to full salaries. From 1995 to 2011, more than 75 percent of LIRR employees stopped working and began receiving RRB disability benefits.

As his part of the scheme, Ajemian, whose practice was based in Rockville Centre, declared more than 94 percent of the LIRR employees he saw disabled. He created a paperwork trail of false documents that showed each employee’s supposed physical decline, and falsified medical documents to make it look like the employees could no longer work at the time they had planned to retire.

For his part, Ajemian received between $800 and $1,200 from each employee as well as millions of dollars in health insurance payments for unnecessary medical treatments.

In his testimony, Ajemian said he received approximately $2.5 million in payments from patients and insurance companies. He also estimated the railroad retirement system’s losses at $116.5 million.

In addition to his prison term, Ajemian was sentenced to three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to forfeit $116.5 million and pay $116.5 million in restitution.

“Dr. Ajemian corrupted the license publicly granted to him to practice medicine, and betrayed the public trust embodied in that privilege,” said U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, who sentenced him. “By his fraudulent actions, he not only distorted his professional duties, but flipped the physician’s medical function on its head and made health care a mockery.”

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