The unfolding international scandal around Mayor Eric Adams has fixed New York City’s attention on his odd ties to various Turkish government proxies.
But overlooked have been the equally strange ties one of those groups, a charity incorporated by the son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has to medical fraudsters in Brooklyn — the borough that catapulted Adams into power.
So far, public attention on the Turken Foundation has focused on the nonprofit’s 21-floor headquarters in Midtown, which Adams helped break ground for in 2018 as Brooklyn borough president, and on the donations some of its leaders made to his campaigns.
The group, which has a stated mission to “provide student housing, educational grants, and scholarships,” did not feature in the bribery and foreign agent charges the U.S. Justice Department brought against Adams in September.
But well before it secured a foothold in Manhattan for its glamorous home base, Turken acquired a dingy one-story doctor’s office in the remote reaches of Brooklyn. In doing so, the organization entangled itself in a network of insurance-related criminal schemes endemic to both the building and the surrounding neighborhood: what New York magazine once labeled “the Brighton Beach swindle.”
Property records show
Turken bought the beige stucco premises at 3057 Coney Island Avenue
from a company belonging to Aleksandr Burman, who later pleaded guilty
to using the location as a base for a $26 million fraud scheme.
Burman paid kickbacks to patients on Medicare and Medicaid in exchange
for helping him submit falsified bills to the government healthcare
programs.
The real estate purchase took place in October 2014, four
months after Turken was incorporated in Delaware, four months before it
registered to operate in New York State, and 10 months after Adams
ascended to Borough Hall.
During Turken’s ownership of the building, a directory of providers
for one Medicare/Medicaid plan listed two practitioners operating out
of 3057 Coney Island Avenue who both later went down for bilking
Medicaid in separate schemes to improperly access prescription opioids: Barry S. Sloan and Lazar Feygin.
Part of Turken’s mission is to “enforce restrictions against the use of drugs.”
It is unclear why Turken acquired the property. The
foundation’s secretary, Memis Yetim, did not explain — only saying he
would attempt to connect New York Focus with the organization’s
attorney, whose name he would not provide.
“You own a place and you rent it out and it’s some illegal
operation, you don’t have anything to do with it,” Yetim said in a phone
conversation.
It’s also unclear whether Turken benefited financially from
Sloan’s or Feygin’s use of its address. The organization reported
rental income during several years of its ownership, but in most
financial documents never identified the Brighton Beach space as a
revenue source.
Only in one filing did Turken acknowledge its ownership of
the building: an auditor’s report filed with New York State Charities
Bureau in 2018. Turken’s accountant described the $1.6 million sale of
“the Brooklyn property” that June, and also the receipt of a $36,000
security deposit for the location — though the report does not reveal
the source of the latter funds.
Google Maps images of the site from the 2014 to 2018 period of Turken ownership show it largely as it appears today: a facade dimmed with grime, a ragged blue awning, an occasional “for lease” sign, and a gate down over a darkened glass door.
But during that same period, Medical Office Magazine, a Russian-language trade publication, continuously listed a “Professional Medical Plaza” offering multiple specialties at 3057 Coney Island Avenue, just as it had before Turken acquired the premises. No entity called “Professional Medical Plaza” is registered to do business in New York State.
Medical Office Magazine’s publisher is based in Brooklyn, but incorporation records show its CEO is Yan Katsnelson, a Chicago-area surgeon who also controls practices in New York. In 2012, one of Katsnelson’s former employees accused him of fraudulently billing Medicaid and Medicare and claimed Katsnelson fired him in retaliation for prying into the practice. The case resulted in a 2019 monetary settlement in which Katsnelson admitted no wrongdoing, although a federal judge described some of the allegations against the physician as “clear, plausible, and particularized.”
Through an attorney, Katsnelson denied any knowledge or involvement in regard to the listings for 3057 Coney Island Avenue, and denied all claims of misconduct his ex-staffer brought against him, noting that no federal or state authority had pursued the matter further.
The illegal operations at 3057 Coney Island Avenue — before, during, and after Turken’s ownership — underscore the pervasive problem of insurance fraud in communities like Brighton Beach, where immigrants from the former Soviet Union have helped make the practice notorious.
“As in many bureaucracies there was, and is, difficulty in establishing accountability, there is inefficiency, and there is the potential for fraud and corruption.”
—James Finckenauer
Russian-speaking émigrés are by no means the only community to engage in such schemes. But Rutgers University Professor James Finckenauer, an expert on organized crime, described it as a cultural holdover from the desperate and repressive circumstances of the fallen communist state.
“I do believe there was a certain mentality formed by the experience of living in the U.S.S.R. — what some have called ‘connive to survive,’” Finckenauer told New York Focus, adding that government insurance programs make natural targets for those who grew up under a command economy. “In part at least, it stems from how ex-Soviets viewed government bureaucracy in general. As in many bureaucracies there was, and is, difficulty in establishing accountability, there is inefficiency, and there is the potential for fraud and corruption.”
New York’s massive $83.4 billion Medicaid program — the costliest per capita in the nation — makes an especially enticing mark for crooks, argued Bill Hammond, senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center think tank. The state has attempted to introduce oversight and enforcement mechanisms, both through the Medicaid Inspector General’s and the state Attorney General’s offices, but the program’s constant year-over-year expansion creates ever more opportunities for scamming.
“It’s gotten so big the Department of Health is sort of overwhelmed by it,” Hammond said. “I think that leaves them exposed to pretty blatant stuff.”
The political environment in New York, with its lofty social democratic rhetoric and cynical exploitation of ethnic bloc loyalties, only further enables abuse, he argued.
“You want to show you support the Chinese-American community or the Russian-American community or the Orthodox community, and the way you do that is by supporting their Medicaid-funded clinics,” he said. “And maybe that kind of opens the door to unscrupulous operators.”
The operators at 3057 Coney Island Avenue — both the Turken
Foundation and its tenants — have dabbled in the city’s political
scene. Paperwork for the 2014 purchase bears the signature
of Zurkani Vardar, a Turken board member and leader of Staten Island’s
Albanian Islamic Cultural Center, which has received hundreds of
thousands of dollars from the foundation. Adams has visited the mosque
for Ramadan each year of his mayoralty.
Haluk Gani, the president of the American wing of a Turkish state-owned boron mining concern, signed off on the sale documents.
Eight days after inking the property transfer, Gani made his first and
only donation to a politician in New York: $2,000 to Adams. Gani and
Zurkani did not respond to inquiries from New York Focus.
Meanwhile, Feygin donated $500 to Adams in 2016 (also a
first for him), the same year his LF Medical Services of NY appeared in
the Medicare/Medicaid provider directory at 3057 Coney Island Avenue.
But Feygin has even closer ties to a different Brooklyn politician.
Indicted alongside the doctor in 2017 was former Democratic
Assemblyman Alec Brook-Krasny, who had exited office two years prior to
take a job at a medical lab. Prosecutors asserted that he facilitated
Feygin’s fraud scheme both from his position inside the lab — and with
his political power without.
But Brook-Krasny beat the rap, and ultimately returned to
office, running and winning an Assembly seat as a Republican in 2022. He
told New York Focus he was unfamiliar with the 3057 Coney Island Avenue
location.
“I didn’t know anything about that office,” Brook-Krasny
said in a phone interview. “At that time I was at the laboratory, and he
was just one of the accounts.”
When Turken sold the Coney Island Avenue property in 2018 —
having not filed a single permit or application to convert the building
to any purpose connected to its mission of supporting Turkish students —
the property went to an entity controlled by Marianna Levin, who used
it as a base for her home health care agency.
Levin and her company got busted in a $100 million Medicaid false claims scheme in 2020.