A man who was hired to recruit foreign nurses for a Pittsburgh company pleaded guilty this week to illegally taking at least $400,000.

Anthony J. Aliucci, 39, of Mars, entered a plea to one count of mail fraud in federal court on Wednesday.

According to the U.S. attorney's office, Mr. Aliucci was contracted by Global Nursing Solutions in 2003 to recruit foreign nurses to come to work in the United States. As part of the agreement, Global paid Mr. Aliucci for his expenses for recruiting, qualifying and supplying the nurses. Global then provided the nurses to a variety of health care facilities across the country.

Prosecutors said Mr. Aliucci failed to spend the money on the nurses and instead used it for himself. When company officials questioned Mr. Aliucci about the delays, he gave several excuses.

Believing those, in 2005, Global hired Mr. Aliucci as an employee. Shortly after that, the government said that Mr. Aliucci secretly formed a shell company, IHC, and told Global that IHC had provided recruitment services for the company. Global paid IHC $176,000 that went directly to Mr. Aliucci.

As a third part of the fraud, Mr. Aliucci told Global that another company in North Carolina, NNI, had provided services to it. Global paid NNI hundreds of thousands of dollars. When officials at Global became suspicious, they contacted NNI and learned that Mr. Aliucci owed the company a large sum of money from when he was a self-employed nurse recruiter. He was funneling Global's money to pay that debt.

Mr. Aliucci will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Nora Barry Fischer on March 13.