The doctor charged with certifying hundreds of fake disabilities in the LIRR’s “gravy train” scandal admitted to federal agents that he “exaggerated” paperwork for healthy employees, a G-man testified yesterday.
Dr. Peter Lesniewski allegedly made the stunning confession while two agents questioned him about the massive, $1 billion disability scheme in October 2008.
Lesniewski said he “would order an MRI. If [the results] had minimal findings, he would write the reports with subjective findings and put in complaints of pain in the back in neck,” said special agent Joseph Del Favero of the Inspector General’s Railroad Retirement Board Office.
Del Favero said the doctor then signed a damning document where he admits to “exaggerating” on “20 percent” of the so-called “narratives” he wrote for LIRR workers seeking disability pensions.
Manhattan federal prosecutors showed the paper to the jury yesterday.
Lesniewksi wrote that most of the narratives concluded with the statement: “reasonable degree of medical certainty that the patient is disabled for his occupation with the Long Island Rail Road.”
He wrote that, “I put this statement on the narratives to ensure that the patients would receive his occupational disability . . . If I were to prepare the narrative now, I would not make that statement.”
Lesniewski, former LIRR union president Joseph Rutigliano and Marie Baran, a former employee of the Railroad Retirement Board, are the first to stand trial for the scheme that the FBI broke up in 2011.
None of the defendants’ lawyers commented on the testimony in court or sought to cross-examine the agent.
Twenty-five greedy ex-LIRR workers have already pleaded guilty in the case, many of whom have agreed to cooperate with the feds in a bid for leniency.
Among those are former conductor Christopher Parlante, who testified how his last day on the job was one he’d like to forget.
Parlante, who describes himself as a 60-year-old avid weightlifter, detailed how he plotted for a year and a half to retire in late 2004. He said during that period he racked up hundreds of hours of overtime to boost his benefits and created a “paper trail” of needless medical appointments with Lesniewski.
He testified that documents Lesniewski and Rutigliano drafted to help push through his phony disability pension were filled with untruths — such as him suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome and severe back and neck pains.
But the documents didn’t mention that Parlante was knocked on his back and suffered a bad bruise after bumping into a train in a freight yard during a freak accident on Oct. 31, 2004 — his last day on the job.
When asked why he didn’t list the injury on his reports to claim disability, he said, “To get hit by a train on your last day of work is quite embarrassing . . . Quite frankly, I did not want it mentioned.”