Suburban business official sentenced over fake asbestos removal at former hospital site

The president of a suburban company that falsely claimed to have removed asbestos from a Lake County demolition site has been sentenced to nearly seven years in prison, according to federal prosecutors.

Carl Fioravanti, 58, of Lansing, received the 80-month prison sentence this month after pleading guilty earlier this year to federal wire fraud and tax charges, prosecutors said.

According to prosecutors, Fioravanti is president of Lansing-based Alliance Environmental Control, Inc., which was hired in 2023 to remove asbestos-containing materials ahead of a planned demolition of the St. Therese Hospital building in Waukegan.

The owner of the site agreed to pay Alliance nearly $1.8 million for the work, intended to prevent people from breathing or ingesting airborne asbestos fibers. Those fibers have been shown to cause lung cancer and other serious illnesses, authorities said.

However, prosecutors alleged, Fioravanti fabricated air-sampling clearance reports that fraudulently stated that the site had been scientifically tested and was clear of asbestos. Two months after Fioravanti certified the project as fully remediated, the property owner learned that Alliance had left enormous amounts of asbestos-containing materials throughout portions of the site, according to authorities.

Substantial amounts of the toxic materials had become commingled with ordinary demolition debris, causing the owner to spend more than $26 million on large-scale remediation of the property, prosecutors said.

In addition to the asbestos-related fraud, Fioravanti defrauded the IRS and Illinois of more than $2.7 million in combined tax revenues, authorities alleged.

“By falsely certifying that asbestos at an old hospital site had been properly abated, the defendant ensured that piles of friable asbestos wrongly remaining were cast about during demolition, contaminating the entire site and endangering workers and the community members,” Allison Landsman, acting director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division, said in an announcement of the sentence last week. “Fraud under environmental programs does more than financial harm — it places real humans in danger and poisons communities.”

ckeeshan@dailyherald.com