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BY TIM BRYANT
      Of the Post-Dispatch

The acquittal Thursday of former Abbott Ambulance executive charged with Medicare fraud prompted his lawyers to describe him as just another victim.

"We view our client as a kind of victim of the Medicare fraud frenzy emanating from the Justice Department in Washington, D.C.," said one of the lawyers, Al W. Johnson.

After two weeks of trial, jurors in U.S. District Court deliberated over parts of two days and found Philip Salvati, formerly Abbott's executive vice president, not guilty of 17 counts of fraud or making false statements.

Salvati, 53, of St Louis, had been charged in what the U.S. attorney's office said was a scheme in which Abbott billed Medicare for ambulance trips that were medically unnecessary.  He left Abbott in 1995 and works now as a computer consultant.

Prosecutors declined to comment on the jury's verdict.

Johnson said that all the allegedly fraudulent ambulance runs resulted from calls to Abbott to pick up patients at either a hospital or a doctor's office at a hospital.  Therefore, it was correct for Abbott to assume that an ambulance was needed, Johnson added.

Sentencing is to be in October for Salvati's co-defendant former Abbott President Terrance Dougherty.

On July 27, another jury found Dougherty guilty of nine of 46 counts in, a federal indictment.  Dougherty submitted false Medicare claims involving patients who didn't really need a trip by ambulance, the U.S. attorney's office said.  Prosecutors said ambulance crews were told to falsify trip tickets to show that patients were bed confined and could be moved only by stretcher.