The Bureau of Immigration (BI) has deported an American fugitive who is wanted for perpetrating a scam that defrauded America’s Medicare and Medicaid programs of more than $2 million.
Jerome Howard Feldman, 67, was deported last March 18 aboard a Continental Airlines flight that brought him to Guam en-route to the US mainland.
Immigration Commissioner Marcelino Libanan said Feldman was deported pursuant to a deportation order that the BI board of commissioners issued against him last March 9 for being an undocumented and undesirable alien.
“There will be no letup in our campaign against foreign fugitives so long as they use the Philippines as a refuge to evade prosecution and punishment for crimes they committed in their homeland,” Libanan said in a press statement.
Records showed that BI operatives arrested the fugitive last February 3 at the Makati Medical Center where he had gone for medical checkup.
The US embassy in Manila, which sought his arrest, said Feldman is wanted to stand trial before a US District Court in Florida where he was charged with a felony case for “knowingly and willfully executing a scheme or artifice to defraud the Medicare and Medicaid programs.”
He was already an undocumented alien at the time he was arrested as his US passport already expired in October last year.
According to BI technical assistant for intelligence, Feldman has been on wanted list of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) since 1999.
He had reportedly agreed with prosecutors to enter into plea negotiations but instead he fled the US before he could be arraigned.
The FBI said the fugitive initially fled to Thailand and stayed there for two years before moving to the Philippines in 2002.
While in the Philippines Feldman was said to have used several aliases and even managed to acquire two British passports which he had used to travel from Manila to Singapore and back to Manila in October 2007.
At the time of his arrest, he was caught in possession of a British passport in the name of Michael Adams, which, according to the British embassy, belonged to a native of Scotland who died in 1948.
The US embassy also bared that Feldman, who was a licensed and practicing psychiatrist in Florida, has been associated with a website that allegedly brokers human organ transplants in the Philippines and elsewhere.