A former manager at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC) has been sentenced to 6 months in federal prison for his part in a bribery scheme.
Ralph Johnson was convicted of accepting $30,000 in kickbacks and bribes for steering contracts to Earron and Carlicha Starks, who ran Ekno Medical Supply and Collondale Medical Supply from 2009 to 2019. Johnson served as chief of environmental services at the medical center. He admitted to receiving cash in binders and packages mailed to his home between 2018 and 2019.
The Starkses pleaded guilty first to paying kickbacks on $7 million worth of contracts to Florida VA facilities, then participated in a sting that implicated Johnson.
The VA Office of Inspector General began investigating Johnson in 2018 after the Starkses, who were indicted for bribing staff at US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals in Miami and West Palm Beach, Florida, said they also paid officials in VA facilities on the East Coast .
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer , the judge credited Johnson’s past military service and his “extensive cooperation” with federal authorities investigating fraud within the VA. Johnson apologized to his former employers: “Throughout these 2 and a half years [since the arrest] there’s not a day I don’t think about the wrongness that I did.”
In addition to the prison sentence, Johnson has been ordered to pay back, at $50 a month, the $440,000-plus he cost the Philadelphia VAMC in fraudulent and bloated contracts.
Johnson is at least the third Philadelphia VAMC employee indicted or sentenced for fraud since 2020.