The nurse is charged with cashing disability checks from New York while working in Palm Harbor.
By RICHARD DANIELSON
Published August 7, 2003
PALM HARBOR - Richard Vacanti was working as a licensed practical nurse at a psychiatric hospital in Buffalo, N.Y. when he slipped in a puddle and wrenched his back in the late 1980s.
As a result of that injury, he began to collect disability payments from the New York State Insurance Fund. Those payments continued when he moved to Fort Lauderdale in 1994 and to Palm Harbor in 1997.
This week, state officials said Vacanti, 50, of 1430 Indiana Ave., kept on cashing disability checks even after he went back to work in 2001 and 2002. They charged him with workers' compensation fraud and stealing $4,770 in disability payments while employed at Arden Courts assisted-living facility in Palm Harbor.
Vacanti, free on $10,000 bail, denied the charge Wednesday. He said he sent New York officials a written notice of his plan to return to work.
"I could never get anybody to speak with on the telephone," said Vacanti, who no longer works at Arden Courts. "I filled it out and sent it back to them."
In a sworn statement, however, a fraud investigator with the Florida Department of Financial Services said that Vacanti not only didn't notify New York officials about the job before he took it, but he signed a report saying that he wasn't working after nearly seven months on the job at Arden Courts.
"There might have been some other silly forms that I might have made some mistakes on because I was in such a state of craziness," Vacanti said. He said that medication he took for back pain, plus diabetes, depression and other criminal charges that he was contending with at the time put him "in a state where I wasn't even aware of what I was doing."
His employers at Arden Courts put Vacanti on a "non-work" status in April 2002 after learning that he had previously been charged with exploiting elderly patients at another Palm Harbor assisted living facility.
In 2000, Vacanti was charged with exploitation of the elderly, grand theft and scheming to defraud after authorities said he applied for credit cards in the names of three patients in their 80s at the Balmoral assisted-living facility in Palm Harbor and at a similar facility where he worked in Fort Lauderdale. He used those cards to receive numerous cash advances and to go on several trips, authorities said.
In 2001, Vacanti pleaded no contest to exploitation of the elderly, was convicted and sentenced to 10 years probation. He also was ordered to pay more than $80,000 in restitution.
On Wednesday, Vacanti said he used most of the money on home renovations in an attempt to start his own assisted-living facility for two or three patients. He acknowledged that what he had done was wrong but said he did not mean to hurt anyone.
"As far as this (the workers' compensation fraud charge) goes, I'm hoping it will be resolved in my favor," he said.
Vacanti said he quit the Arden Courts job. A representative of Arden Courts could not be reached for comment Wednesday night.
