Federal Felon Who Defrauded Government of $1.9 Million Arrested on Kidnapping Charge in Palm Coast

Six years ago Dino Ajloni, 39 at the time, stood before a federal judge in Jacksonville, contrite and apologetic for having defrauded the federal government of nearly $2 million through pharmacy he’d owned in St. Augustine.

“There is not a moment in time that ticks by where I do no feel the wrath or the calamity of what I have done,” he told the judge. (He’d been arrested on a charge of defrauding Tricare, the health care program for members of the military and their families.) “The air I breathe is not of a free and righteous man, it is of a stained and cursed soul, whose country has found him–to deem him fit as a cowardly lawbreaking man.” He said he could never be the man he once was or own a pharmacy again, “that ignorance of the laws of this great nation is not an excuse. And for that, I am extremely ashamed and apologetic.”




District Judge Marcia Morales Howard had wanted to impose prison–Ajloni was facing close to five years in federal prison–but she was persuaded otherwise by his health and his pleadings at sentencing. “I don’t think Mr. Ajloni poses a threat of future criminal activity,” the judge said. He was sentenced to five years’ probation and required to surrender his firearms, which included a silencer. He was also banned from ever again owning a pharmacy or working in a related field.

Two years ago, while he was still on federal probation, he was arrested on a charge of aggravated battery  after an argument with a friend at the No Name Bar in St. Augustine allegedly devolved into a physical altercation. The charge was dropped.

Last Thursday (Aug. 8), Ajloni was again arrested, this time in Palm Coast, on charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault and domestic battery in an odd incident that began at Bunnell’s Rehab Sports Bar, involved his girlfriend, and was initially reported as a car crash. An uninvolved person who was trying to render aid and who called in the crash to 911 reported to a Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy that, as he was approaching the crashed car, he heard a woman in the car scream four times “don’t shoot me.” He then saw a man and a woman exit the car. Neither was armed.




The two people involved in the incident gave different accounts of what had happened. Ajloni told deputies that his girlfriend of the past year had been staying with him the last three days, and had gone with him to the bar where, he said, she consumed large amounts of alcohol. As they were driving north on U.S. 1, she allegedly threw a drink at him, kicked him, grabbed the steering wheel, and jerked it, causing the 2012 black Ford F350 to veer into the woods at U.S. 1 and Royal Palms Parkway.

Covered in sweat, smelling of alcohol and showing a small laceration on his hands, He told deputies that he at no time had a firearm in his possession. He was wearing a holster. He said it was from a “black powder antique” that did not rate as a firearm, and that he had left at home. (During his sentencing, the gun, referred to as a “powder pistol,” had been a matter of debate, but the judge left it to a probation officer to decide whether it was lawful for Ajloni to hold on to it.)

Ajloni’s girlfriend, who had a laceration on her right eyebrow and “a large amount of blood on her chest and a bruise on the left side of her face,” according to Ajloni’s arrest report, initially told deputies that he’d lost control of the car. But after being informed of what the witness had heard, she said that while at the bar in Bunnell, not a long distance south, she’d asked Ajloni if her friend and her friend’s child could join them at Ajloni’s house in St. Augustine. Ajloni got irate, and the two began arguing. Ajloni, she said, told he that she had “disrespected him.”

The argument intensified in the car, according to her account. She asked him to stop the car. She said he refused, then grabbed a firearm from behind his back and pointed it at her head, allegedly threatening to kill her before striking her in the face with his other hand: he’d removed both hands from the steering wheel. She said she struck the gun away from her and out of his hand, causing Ajloni to lose control of the vehicle and leading to the crash.




At the scene, Ajloni developed a “medical issue,” according to his arrest report, and was transported to AdventHealth Palm Coast before he was cleared to be booked at the county jail. In court testimony six years ago his sister described Ajloni a shaving a “deteriorating” heart and a pulmonary condition. “He’s so genuine. He’s so kind. We’ve always been brought up to do what’s right, expecting nothing in return,” his sister testified. “He’s never going to break the law. He actually supported the law.”

She and Ajloni had owned Wellness Pharmacy–a compound pharmacy–in St. Augustine starting in 2014 (their surgeon father had moved the family from Germany when they were young, to get away from discrimination there, she said.) In 2017 he was arrested on the felony charge of defrauding Tricare of $1.92 million in a scheme that involved recruiting patient and writing prescriptions without a doctor’s order.

He pleaded guilty and though he was facing 46 to 57 months in federal prison, in September 2018 he was sentenced to five years’ probation and ordered to pay restitution as the judge recognized that his health had to be taken into account, and she did not think the “need to protect the public from future crimes” weighed in favor of a prison sentence.

A judge has ordered Ajloni to have no contact with the victim or the witness to the crash, and to surrender all firearms. He is being held on $15,500 bond on the aggravated assault and domestic battery charges, and on no bond on the kidnapping charge.