After Joseph G. Ecker was apprehended in a Medicare fraud scheme, he told his wife to hide $10,000 worth of wine he had purchased and to burn or abandon their home to prevent authorities from obtaining their possessions.
But she didn’t destroy the home, and authorities found the wine.
And Ecker, 53, now must forfeit his property, repay the government and serve prison time for distributing more than $200,000 of prescription drugs through the scheme.
In federal court in Alexandria, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Ecker must also repay Medicare the $201,465 he defrauded from it, pay the government the $200,000 in profit he made from prescription drug sales and forfeit his home.
Ecker was indicted in May and pleaded guilty in June to distributing prescription narcotics and health care fraud. He admitted that, from 2007 to 2010, he distributed prescription drugs that he obtained at little or no cost through Medicare.
Ecker sold Methadone, oxymorphone and hydromorphone from his Middleburg, Va., home, according to his plea agreement.
Ecker then tried to prevent government officials from seizing the items he had purchased with his profits, according to pre-sentencing documents filed by federal prosecutors.
In the court filings, prosecutors asked for a sentence of at least 15 years and eight months in prison.
The day of his guilty plea, Ecker told authorities he owned about $10,000 worth of highly priced wine, but his wife was depressed and had probably consumed it, according to court documents.
But a few days later, the document say, Ecker wrote a letter to his wife, telling her to take the wine to a friend’s house.
“Just remember you drank it,” Ecker wrote. “They asked me about it last week and I said I knew nothing but that you were depressed and had probably drank either most or all of it.”
In an earlier phone conversation with his wife, court documents show, Ecker told her to either “burn the house to the ground” or “just leave it, abandon it” because he didn’t “want the government to get [anything].”
Ecker’s directions to hide their belongs was “a misguided effort to provide some financial support to his wife while he is incarcerated,” his attorney, Aamra Ahmad, wrote in a pre-sentencing filing.
The defense had asked for a sentence of less than seven years and three months.
