ON A THURSDAY in September 2019, Philip Esformes arrived for his sentencing at the federal courthouse in downtown Miami looking pale and gaunt. The previous April, after an eight-week trial, Esformes, heir to a large, successful chain of nursing homes, had been convicted of fraud, kickback and money laundering crimes, and obstruction of justice. Citing more than $1 billion in false reimbursement claims, prosecutors described him as the linchpin of the “largest single criminal health care fraud case ever brought against individuals by the Department of Justice.” Esformes, then 50, had been in jail since his arrest more than three years earlier. The deep tan he ordinarily cultivated had faded. He’d developed skin rashes and shed some 50 pounds.
His father, Morris, an Orthodox rabbi, philanthropist, and founder of the family business, was notably absent, but the courtroom gallery was filled with other relatives, friends, and associates, some of whom had benefited from the family’s charitable giving. Several addressed the court, attesting to the defendant’s decency and asking for leniency. At the appointed moment, Philip, who’d remained silent throughout his trial, rose to speak.
“I want to talk from the heart to tell you the hard lessons I have learned,” he said. Through tears, he apologized to his family. “I stand before you a humbled and broken man…I have lost everything.” Referring to covert recordings played at his trial, Esformes continued, “The tapes depict me as a man willing to cut corners without fear of consequences, unappreciative of all the good that surrounded me, a man who acted as if the rules do not apply.” Now, he said, “I accept responsibility for what I have done.”
It was a striking departure from the defense’s closing arguments that March, wherein one of his lawyers had compared Esformes to Tom Robinson, the Black man falsely accused of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird. Yet Esformes went on to project a sense of victimhood. Behind bars, he’d been threatened and had witnessed terrible violence, he said. At night, “the inmates begin to shout, swear through the vents and the toilets, throw things against the walls.” He was sometimes prevented from speaking to his family or bathing regularly. “I haven’t felt the sun,” he said. “I have no control over any aspect of my life.”
Witnesses at the trial had detailed conditions at Esformes’ nursing facilities not dissimilar to those he was describing, but if he perceived the irony, he didn’t acknowledge it. Nor, Judge Robert Scola observed, did the defendant take full ownership of his crimes. His apologies were vague, seemingly crafted to preserve his ability to deny guilt on appeal. “I don’t know what he was accepting responsibility for,” Scola remarked, and, as such, Esformes would be ineligible for a reduced sentence. The judge gave him 20 years in prison.
By the time Esformes was indicted, he and his father had spent decades dodging a steady stream of lawsuits, criminal investigations, and regulatory inquiries. Court documents and testimony, together with dozens of interviews with experts and associates of the Esformeses, offer a vivid tale of how Morris and Philip, by exploiting the perverse incentives of the health care system, had managed to turn society’s failure to ensure proper care for the elderly, the mentally ill, the addicted, and the unhoused into an engine of enormous profit.
Again and again, Morris and Philip used loopholes and payoffs to escape serious consequences for alleged wrongdoing. Even a prison sentence didn’t mark the end of their lucky streak. Amid Philip’s prosecution, Morris donated $65,000 to the Aleph Institute, a Jewish criminal justice nonprofit with ties to Jared Kushner, and whose founder, Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, was on hand for the sentencing. Morris’ philanthropy more broadly appears to have paved the way for a decidedly unorthodox clemency grant from none other than President Donald Trump, who commuted Philip’s sentence shortly before leaving office.
Now, Justice Department officials, in an unorthodox move of their own, have decided to retry Esformes on outstanding charges, setting up a postclemency showdown that may well be unique in the annals of American jurisprudence.
was young, his father used to talk about building an empire. Wiry, with angular features and heavy eyebrows, Morris was witty and fiercely intelligent. An old friend from Chicago, Harry Maryles, remembers him as “one of the coolest guys in the Yeshiva.” Morris married, and after
