A $46,000-per-year financial analyst working at the University of Massachusetts Medical School received a windfall and proceeded to drive a Porsche, collect Salvador Dali paintings and build himself a mansion of a home. He said he had inherited money, but the truth was quite different.
Leo Villani quietly siphoned nearly $3.4 million from payments intended for the state Medicaid insurance program over the past five years, according to an internal investigation.
The Boston Globe reports that this may be the biggest theft by a state employee in more than a decade.
However, Villani died last December in a one-vehicle incident, and only then did a review of his work find discrepancies in the account where he was supposed to deposit checks for Medicaid. Those payments had been diverted into Villani’s dummy corporation.
So far, one Commonwealth Medicine supervisor has been dismissed and several others disciplined while the medical school continues to try and understand what went wrong.