Woman Accused of Sham Marriage, Defrauding U.S.

A Granada Hills woman was accused Thursday of entering into a sham marriage with a mentally ill man to gain access to his military health benefits, then billing the government for in vitro fertility treatments that resulted in her delivery of premature quadruplets.

Margaret McClay Garnett, 46, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of defrauding the government out of $303,000 that was paid out for her fertilization and maternity care.

Prosecutors said the veteran who married her was not the father of the four children that Garnett bore in 1995.

Identified only as J. Sistrunk, he is African American. During her fertility treatments, Garnett specifically requested that sperm from a “white male with good hair” be used to create the embryos that were to be implanted in her, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Alicia Villarreal.

This is not the first time that Garnett has been in trouble with the law.

She pleaded no contest two years ago to running an unlicensed, dilapidated board-and-care facility on Arlington Street in Los Angeles and was placed on probation for three years.

Several months later, she was hauled back into court when authorities learned that she had opened a new and equally bad facility in Palmdale a day after she was ordered to shut down the one in Los Angeles, a violation of her probation.

Calling her a danger to public safety, a municipal court judge sentenced her to a year in county jail.

Witnesses at that hearing testified that Garnett made money by taking in homeless people, putting them in unlicensed homes and then taking their government subsistence checks.

Sistrunk may have been one of them, federal sources said Thursday.

In 1991, the indictment said, Garnett tried to gain control of Sistrunk’s $1,700-a-month Veterans Affairs benefits by representing herself as his aunt on a joint banking account. The alleged scheme was foiled by Sistrunk’s cousin, his legal guardian.

The next year, she went to the Southern California Fertility Institute--Fertility, Gynecology and Endocrinology Medical Center and inquired about treatment. She told interviewers there that she was divorced and did not have insurance.

About a month later, though, she married Sistrunk, even though he was still wed to a woman in Pennsylvania.

When Sistrunk’s conservator learned about it, he had the marriage annulled.

Although a copy of the order dissolving the marriage was served on Garnett, the federal indictment said she claimed she was Mrs. Sistrunk on insurance forms that she filled out when she began her fertility treatments in 1994.

She authorized the clinic to bill the government-run Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniformed Services in Sistrunk’s name, according to the indictment.

Garnett gave birth July 16, 1995, at Santa Monica Hospital.

She will be summoned for arraignment in Los Angeles federal court on Oct. 19, If convicted on all 16 fraud counts, she could be sentenced to a maximum of 80 years in prison.

The case was investigated by the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and the FBI.