For fleecing food program for poor kids, Miami duo get prison and must repay millions
For years, Sandra Ruballo and Carlos Montoya teamed up to provide meals for low-income children at about 200 daycare centers in South Florida.
Their contracts with the federal government produced millions of dollars.
But now the two, convicted of building a business model on bribes and kickbacks, have to pay it all back — and spend some time in prison, too.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke incarcerated Ruballo for 10 years and ordered her to repay $26 million to the government. The judge sentenced Montoya to eight years and ordered him to pay back $13 million.
The restitution orders, while hefty, are largely symbolic because neither has that kind of money.
Until the feds figured out their scam, Ruballo and Montoya had a thriving business relationship. Her North Miami-Dade company represented the daycare centers that received federal subsidies for food programs benefiting low-income kids. His Hialeah catering business provided the daily meals for them.
Until their arrests last year, Ruballo and Montoya exchanged bribes and kickbacks to secure catering contracts and inflated the number of meals provided to the daycare centers to boost revenue, according to an indictment.
In April, a Miami federal jury found Montoya, 47, guilty of conspiring to commit wire fraud and bribery.
Ruballo, 47, pleaded guilty to the wire-fraud conspiracy and related charges before Montoya’s trial started in March.
At Montoya’s trial, defense attorney Joseph Rosenbaum argued that his client ran a legitimate business, paid no kickbacks or bribes to Ruballo for the food contracts, and delivered all the meals to the child care centers.
But federal prosecutors Daniel Marcet and Lisa Miller asserted that Montoya paid $680,000 in kickbacks and an additional $160,000 in bribes to maintain his business relationship with Ruballo over six years. The prosecutors said she rigged catering bids and food contracts subsidized by the U.S. government’s Child Care Food Program.
Marcet noted that Ruballo even came to Montoya’s defense when parents complained to state Department of Health regulators about their children getting sick from his food.
“Sandra Ruballo wasn’t doing her job,” Marcet said at trial. “She was just lining her pockets.”
Between 2012 and 2017, Montoya’s Healthy Children Catering did about $14 million in contracts with Ruballo’s company, Highland Food Resources. According to an indictment and other court records, Ruballo’s business represented the 200 South Florida daycare centers and arranged to provide their meals on a sliding scale through the federal program.
Prosecutors accused Ruballo of boosting government reimbursements for children’s meals “by adding food stamp numbers, falsifying signatures and modifying reported family income levels, in order to qualify for more free and reduced meals as part of the [program],” according to court records.
In turn, Ruballo earned higher government reimbursements for her company and kept greater fees in representing the daycare centers.
This story was originally published June 26, 2019 at 6:24 PM.
