Corruption ran rampant at Bronx hospital before shooting
It’s New York’s sickest hospital.
Long before a deranged doctor opened fire inside Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, the place was under an ongoing federal corruption probe, mobsters controlled the construction of its new outpatient center, executives were enjoying million-dollar pay packages and fat bonuses, doctors were allegedly offered per-patient bounties to drum up clinic business, and whistleblowing staffers sounded the alarm about poor patient care but were ignored.
Friday’s bloodbath was the latest black mark on a sprawling medical center that mainly cares for the poor and receives most of its funding from taxpayers in the form of state Medicaid.
Even its hiring of Dr. Henry Bello, the former resident who returned to Bronx-Lebanon on Friday to gun down the people who had once been his colleagues, is being held up at the latest — and most tragic — example of questionable recruitment. Bello, 45, had a criminal conviction for a 2004 sex attack on a 23-year-old.
Bronx-Lebanon has been headed for decades by Miguel Fuentes, who some describe as an imperious CEO who rarely leaves his office at the hospital’s Fulton Avenue campus to visit the main hospital facility on the Grand Concourse. When he does travel, he has a hospital-funded car and driver.
“This isn’t the Mayo Clinic,” one hospital observer bitterly noted.
Fuentes, 67, raised eyebrows with oversize incentive and retirement payouts which he was able to collect while still working. He took home $4.8 million in 2008, including $2.7 million in “other compensation.”
In 2015, his total compensation came to $1.7 million, according to the hospital’s latest tax filings.
Fuentes has homes on the Upper East Side and in Southampton. He had a $20,000 shower installed in his office bathroom and later removed it because of the optics of such a perk, a source told The Post. The hospital said he has a modest shower.
Federal investigators have been eyeing the hospital’s leadership in connection with a mob kickback scheme, sources have told The Post.
The probe concerns the construction of Bronx-Lebanon’s new nine-story outpatient treatment center which houses the hospital’s clinics.
Work on the $42 million annex began in 2009 and was mostly financed through the sale of taxpayer-backed state Dormitory Authority bonds. The hospital is paying back the authority over 25 years.
The project was supposed to be finished in 19 months, but it wasn’t completed until 2014.
Construction costs were padded, with cash allegedly ending up in the pockets of the Lucchese crime family and hospital executives, sources told The Post.
A major mob takedown against Lucchese crime family members in May included charges of wire and mail fraud against underboss Steven “Wonder Boy” Crea Sr. and associate Joseph Venice. The charges were linked to a project at “a major New York City hospital,” according to a federal indictment.
The indictment did not name the hospital, but sources have identified it as Bronx-Lebanon. The hospital has disavowed any knowledge of the allegations.
The hospital did not question those change orders, the source said.
Bronx-Lebanon, which got its start in the 1800s, was in such bad financial shape in the 1970s that it nearly declared bankruptcy but was saved by a state bailout.
The Bronx-Lebanon health system now includes a 642-bed hospital, two nursing homes and a mental health facility.
It likes to tout that it has more than 1 million clinic visits a year, but how it attained that number was questionable to at least one former high-ranking staffer.
Dr. John Cosgrove, the former chief of surgery, told The Post that the hospital offered bonus payments to doctors of up to $60 for every patient treated in the clinics.
He said the incentives came from Medicaid payments and were made at a time when Fuentes was pushing to reach, and trumpet, 1 million visits.‘I told Fuentes I could not sign off on a surgeon I didn’t even meet and had no idea how safe he was.’- Dr. John Cosgrove, former chief of surgery
Cosgrove said the system was distasteful and open to abuse from doctors who might schedule unnecessary visits in order to get more money.
The doctor also questioned the hospital’s vetting of key employees.
Cosgrove objected to a decision by Fuentes to hire Dr. Ira Kirschenbaum in 2008 as head of orthopedic surgery without consulting him first.
“I told Fuentes I could not sign off on a surgeon I didn’t even meet and had no idea how safe he was,” Cosgrove said.
He said Fuentes responded by unilaterally telling the head of the medical staff to change the bylaws and to make orthopedics its own department.
“Just like that,” Cosgrove said.
“Just like that,” Cosgrove said.
Kirschenbaum raised alarms among staffers when four patients died in a short period after he arrived.
Sources said complaints were made to both hospital leadership and the state Office of Professional Medical Conduct. The state did not take any disciplinary action against the doctor.
Bronx-Lebanon also took no action against the surgeon. “There was no reason to do any such thing,” said Fred Miller, the hospital’s lawyer.
Kirschenbaum maintained that the patients were all sick before surgery.
Kirschenbaum was brought in to do hip and knee replacements, which are money-making operations. He said he had done 3,000 at the hospital. He received a $314,210 bonus in 2014 and a $180,940 bonus in 2015, according to Bronx-Lebanon’s tax filings. The extra pay came on top of his $851,000 salary.
The Post received a copy of an anonymous letter that seven hospital employees, who said they were doctors, nurses and technicians, sent to the state with more recent allegations against Kirschenbaum. The letter discusses patients injured under his care, including one who lost a leg.
Kirschenbaum denied that to The Post and said he wasn’t aware of any recent state investigation of him.
A source told The Post that Kirschenbaum was responsible for hiring Dr. Peter Lesniewski, an orthopedist who was later convicted as being a top “lynchpin” in the $1 billion Long Island Rail Road disability-fraud scheme.
Lesniewski had been a consultant who between 1999 and 2008 “provided fraudulent medical narratives in support of the disability applications of at least 230 LIRR employees,” according to the US Attorney’s office. He was convicted in 2013 of mail fraud, wire fraud and health-care fraud.
He was sentenced in 2014 to eight years in federal prison. He declined, through a prison official, to speak to The Post about his time at Bronx-Lebanon.
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