TOM DUBOCQ Herald Staff Writer

A Dade vacuum cleaner salesman who admitted helping cheat Medicare out of $1 million was sentenced to six months in prison Wednesday and ordered to repay the government. "I don't think I'm a bad person," Carlos J. Lastres, 32, said at his sentencing hearing. "I'll never work in the Medicare business again. Now I'm selling vacuum cleaners, which is much easier."

U.S. District Judge Ursula Ungaro-Benages said she gave Lastres a break for cooperating with investigators, sentencing him to a half-year in prison plus six months in a halfway house. He and his convicted codefendants also must pay $1 million in restitution.

The judge complained that Medicare fraud is so widespread that scam artists think they are doing nothing wrong. "Medicare fraud is becoming a huge problem in this community," Ungaro-Benages said. "There is kind of a prevalent attitude that somehow it's not a crime, that Medicare is a money tree there for the taking."

Lastres and 10 codefendants pleaded guilty to running a mill that defrauded Medicare by billing for medical services that were unnecessary or never provided between October 1989 and February 1992.

A 12th defendant in the case remains a fugitive : Cuban exile activist Huber Matos Araluce, son of a well-known former political prisoner.

The scam involved a clinic, Florida Medical & Diagnostic Center, 965 W. Flagler St., and five related companies. They hired unlicensed doctors and paid recruiters kickbacks of up to $150 for each patient used to bill Medicare, said Joseph Birdsong, a federal inspector who investigated the case.

Lastres admitted ordering diagnostic tests for patients who had not been examined by doctors. He then falsified medical charts to justify the exams. He said he was a salaried employee paid $35,000-$45,000 a year by the diagnostic center.

He was the first key defendant to receive prison time; the others face sentencing in March and April. One patient recruiter, Concepcion Gil, was sentenced last year to three years of probation and ordered to pay $6,212 in restitution.

Matos, 50, is living in Costa Rica, prosecutors said. Before his 1993 indictment, he was a spokesman for Cuba Independiente y Democratica, an exile group founded in 1981 by his father, Huber Matos Sr.