o the world, Dr. Tatyana Gabinskaya who purchased a luxurious Jersey City condo appeared to be a true immigrant success story -- a woman who left the former Soviet Union with a medical degree from Leningrad University to make it in America.

She established a pediatrics practice in Brooklyn and Gabinskaya soon made enough money to travel the world and claim privileges at busy city hospitals.

But her opulent lifestyle came crashing down around 6 a.m. Wednesday when Gabinskaya and nine other licensed physicians were busted by the FBI and NYPD as part of a massive insurance fraud ring, The NY Daily News reports today.

The ring was run by a group of Russians who defrauded insurance companies of $279 million by filing bogus car accident claims, the Manhattan U.S. attorney charged, according to the story.

They would bill insurers for unnecessary and, in some cases, fictional treatments such as MRIs after doctors deemed them medically necessary for the phony accident victims.

Gabinskaya could not be reached by the Daily News to comment about the charges.
Her attorney, Arthur Gershfeld, would only say "Remember, everyone is presumed innocent."

Gabinskaya claimed to speak nine languages and was, for a time, an assistant professor of pediatrics at prestigious Mt. Sinai College of Medicine, according to the Daily News.

In 2008, she was able to afford a $700,000 luxury condo on the Jersey City waterfront with marble bathrooms, 24-hour concierge and fitness room with sauna, the newspaper states.

On her Facebook page, she showed off sunny snapshots of her visits to exotic locales. She posed with police officers in London; she reclined on a sailboat floating on tropical waters.

But paradise first began to disappear for all 10 doctors in September 2010 when the insurance company Geico sued Gabinskaya, charging she was the front for a fraud mill secretly owned by Mikhail (Russian Mike) Zemlyansky, an alleged leader of the fraud ring, according to the Daily News.

The suit says she had submitted hundreds of charges for expensive MRI tests for car accident victims, despite the fact that -- as a pediatrician -- she had no training to actually read an MRI. In one year she billed for $2 million.
http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/20 ... _purchased_luxurious.html