Federal prosecutors charged three associates of Frank Carone, the former chief of staff to Eric Adams, in what they describe as a large no-fault insurance fraud scheme. Carone, a prominent lobbyist and attorney, said he was scammed as well.
Before Adams became mayor and brought Carone into City Hall, Carone had been building a company designed to provide cash advances to doctors waiting on insurance payouts tied to no-fault auto claims.
That company, according to Carone’s lawyers, was Finance Vision Capital Group II, according to THE CITY.
The business depended on recruiters who could bring in doctors willing to sign on. Among them were Carone’s longtime friend Zhan Johnny Petrosyants and two of Petrosyants’ associates, Vladislav Vlad Stoyanovsky and Dmitriy Dimi Khavko.
By the end of last week, all three men had been indicted on charges of running a major no-fault insurance fraud ring.
Prosecutors said the scheme relied on a finance company that Carone’s lawyers later confirmed was Finance Vision.
Carone has not been charged. He declined repeated requests for comment on the three defendants, though he has said in the past that once he entered City Hall in 2022 he no longer had any involvement with Finance Vision Capital.
In a statement, Carone’s lawyers Russell Capone and Andrew Goldstein said both Carone and Finance Vision had long maintained that they were victims of the fraud and lost millions of dollars.
They said the indictment itself shows that money from Finance Vision often never reached the doctors it was meant for and was instead stolen.
The charges against Petrosyants, Stoyanovsky, and Khavko add to the long list of legal troubles surrounding figures once close to Adams in professional and political circles.
That list already includes former chief adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin, longtime associate Jesse Hamilton, and former Buildings Commissioner Eric Ulrich. Adams himself was charged with corruption in September 2024, though that case was later dismissed by the Trump administration.
Even as Carone’s lawyers cast him as a victim, Finance Vision has already come under direct attack in civil court.
Last year, GEICO sued the company in federal court in Brooklyn, accusing it of aiding and abetting a large fraud operation that submitted tens of thousands of false insurance claims for treatment that either never happened or had no medical value.
GEICO named Stoyanovsky and Khavko as defendants and sought to question Petrosyants. The insurer’s allegations in that lawsuit closely track the charges now laid out in the federal indictment unsealed last week by Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton.
Prosecutors said the three men built a system that used licensed doctors’ signatures to generate tens of millions of dollars in fake claims.
According to the indictment, they worked through a finance company that advanced money to doctors and clinics, then collected full insurance payouts plus fees.
Some of those advances, prosecutors said, were routed to shell companies that clearly were not medical clinics, including one business called Blue Tech Supplies.
That finance company was Finance Vision Capital Group.
In GEICO’s civil complaint, the insurer said Finance Vision knowingly took part in the scheme. GEICO argued the company had no direct contact with at least one doctor whose signature was used to support medical claims sent to GEICO and other insurers.
Instead, the lawsuit says, Finance Vision sent advances to shell companies and fake clinics established by the alleged ring and not licensed to provide healthcare.
Documents filed in another case also show that Abrams Fensterman, the politically connected law firm where Carone was a partner, handled Finance Vision’s collections from insurers.
GEICO said Finance Vision knew the funding arrangements between itself and one doctor’s clinic were a sham and existed only to create the appearance of legitimate financing or factoring agreements. The insurer alleged the real purpose was to pay the ring’s operators upfront.
The company also said Finance Vision submitted fraudulent bills backed by fabricated documents to GEICO and other insurers, falsely claiming the services had been performed by the doctor and his clinic.
Emails filed in the GEICO suit and another case also show direct contact between Carone or his firm and all three men now facing federal charges. That detail, more than anything, keeps the case politically and legally charged.
