| A San Francisco attorney convicted of insurance fraud was forced to
resign from the State Bar as part of his sentence. JORGE COROALLES DeQUESADA
[#103440], 42, resigned March 13, 1999. DeQuesada was placed on three years of
probation, sentenced to perform 480 hours of community service and ordered to pay a $1,000
fine and $5,000 to the San Francisco district attorney's office and the California
Department of Insurance for the cost of the investigation. A spokesman for the district
attorney's office said DeQuesada was arrested in 1995 at the end of a three-year
undercover investigation.
In 1992, the DA and the insurance department were tipped off that employees at San
Francisco General Hospital were selling the names of accident victims to cappers, who then
resold the information to law offices.
An investigator posing as a traffic accident victim at the hospital was contacted and
signed up as the client of another attorney, Conrad A. Salumbides Jr., and referred to a
physical therapy clinic, the spokesman said.
Salumbides pleaded guilty to felony insurance fraud and also was forced to resign from
the bar as part of his sentence. He resigned last November.
A second undercover investigator posing as a victim of the same accident went to the
same clinic and was referred to DeQuesada's office.
DeQuesada's former law office manager, Roger Estrada, pleaded guilty to insurance fraud
and was sentenced last September.
The undercover investigator met with Estrada, and according to tapes of their meetings,
was told to lie about how he was referred to DeQuesada. Estrada also told the investigator
to ram his car into a lamppost to boost the value of his accident claim.
Estrada told the investigator that he had not gone to the doctor enough times to
support his accident claim, so Estrada arranged for 19 additional "visits" to a
doctor.
According to the district attorney's spokesman, the investigator visited the clinic
only one time, but the clinic submitted a bill to DeQuesada's office for 20 visits.
The attorney then made a claim to an insurance company based primarily on the
fraudulent medical billings.
Although the investigator told DeQuesada he had not received the claimed treatments,
the attorney told him to tell a representative of the insurance company that he could not
remember how many treatments he had received.
The investigator later told the insurance company representative, in DeQuesada's
presence, that he had been treated between 15 and 20 times by the doctor.
DeQuesada has a prior record of discipline; he was privately reproved in 1995 as a
result of two counts of failing to return funds or properties to a client. |
