Bruce Mindich at The Valley Hospital in 1999, when he was called the state's top heart surgeon. An author says he led a secret life.Posted on 10/06/2004 1:55:40 PM PDT by Coleus
New book says top surgeon has dark mob past
| Wednesday, October 6, 2004 |
| Bruce Mindich at The Valley Hospital in 1999, when he was called the state's top heart surgeon. An author says he led a secret life. |
The author of a new book says that the star of The Valley Hospital's cardiac surgery "dream team" once led a secret life as a Mafia doctor, caring for mobsters and throwing away the bullets he cut out of them.
But the surgeon, Dr. Bruce Mindich, says it's a work of fiction better suited to Hollywood than Ridgewood. He and author Ron Felber developed the story of "Il Dottore" based on some kernels of truth in his own life, he says.
"This is an idea that went haywire," the doctor said Tuesday as he paused between patients on a busy operating day. "I have never done anything illegal.
"The only facts that I can attest to in that story - despite having spun this story - is that I was born in the Bronx, I went to Syracuse [University], I went to medical school, I was at Mount Sinai [Medical Center] and I left Mount Sinai."
The book, published by Barricade Books, the Fort Lee publishing company owned by Lyle Stuart, describes a wild life in which a pseudonymous "Elliot Litner" worked by day as a surgeon and partied by night at Studio 54 and Plato's Retreat, a sex club. It says he paid off his gambling debts by working as a mob courier on trips to international medical conferences, and made house calls on John Gotti, Carlo Gambino and other Mafia chieftains.
A statement by Stuart on the book's copyright page says, "The account that follows is entirely true."
The doctor "is one of the top cardiac surgeons in the country, working at a major hospital. The decision not to use his real name was made because to do so would suggest that he was cashing in on his notorious past. All the facts about him as described in the pages that follow are accurate."
Mindich "participated in the book process," said Jennifer Itskevich, Barricade's publicist. "His one stipulation was he didn't want to tell people who he was. He wanted people to figure it out."
Felber, too, said Tuesday that the book was an actual account of Mindich's colorful past. But later, presented with Mindich's denials during a second interview, he said, "It's a dramatization that's based on his true life story, let me leave it at that."
Stuart is known for publishing books that other houses won't touch, such as "The Anarchist's Cookbook." Barricade Books recently settled a nine-year legal battle with casino mogul Steve Wynn over a libel suit about allegations in the marketing of an unauthorized biography that said Wynn had connections to organized crime.
Mindich, one of the state's busiest heart surgeons, is seen on billboards across North Jersey advertising his surgical team at Valley Hospital - he's the boyish-looking 56-year-old with a serious mien seated in front of three men in white surgery coats. He directs The Valley Columbia Heart Center and has headed cardiac surgery at the Ridgewood hospital since 1988. He also has a teaching appointment at the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons.
Mindich performed 489 open-heart operations in 2000, for example, more than all the heart surgeons in the state except one, according to the state's cardiac surgery report cards. The death rate among his patients was the same as the state average.
Michael Azzara, the former health-system president who recruited Mindich to start Valley's heart surgery program, said the premise of the book "is outrageous. It's laughable. ... This guy was a workaholic. All he wanted to do was operate.''
Stephen Mindich, the surgeon's older brother and publisher of the Boston Phoenix alternative newspaper, said, "There was no time for Bruce Mindich to have done any of this. This guy did nothing but operate his entire life. ... My brother is not a mob doctor and never was a mob doctor."
Felber said he taped his interviews with Mindich, who took him back to Anthony Avenue in the Bronx and showed him the spot where he witnessed a Mafia rubout as a child of 5. His involvement with La Cosa Nostra began when the hit man turned to him and said, "You didn't see nothin', did you, kid?'' according to the book.
Steve Mindich said that he was the one who actually found the body, and that it was not a mob hit, but a kid murdered by another kid. That was one of the reasons the family moved from the Bronx to Long Island, he said. They left when Bruce Mindich was 8 years old.
"I don't want to get into a debate about it," said Felber, the chief executive of a Berkeley Heights chemical company and author of eight other books. "He approved everything. He saw it well in advance. He's entitled to say what he wants."
Felber said he split his advance with Mindich.
The dramatic centerpiece of the book is an operation that Mindich performed on Ralph Scopo, a star witness in former federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani's case against five Mafia bosses. Scopo collapsed of a heart attack at the trial on Nov. 13, 1986.
According to the book, Gotti, boss of the Gambino family, called the surgeon before the operation to say that he had to handle it just right, so that the witness would die on the operating table. If he did, he'd become director of heart surgery at Mount Sinai; if he didn't, more than his job was at stake.
At the same time, Giuliani's staff told him that if anything happened to Scopo, it would be considered a criminal matter, the book says.
The operation was a success: Scopo survived.
The book says that the surgeon, after a visit at his Englewood home from a mobster, left town for his own safety, returning years later, only after many of the crime bosses were dead or locked up.
Mindich doesn't deny that he operated on Scopo - not because the mob requested it, but because he was the go-to heart surgeon at Mount Sinai. He never was pressured one way or the other, he said, and he never left town. In fact, a check of his résumé shows that he left the New York-New Jersey area for only nine months of his career, from October 1977 to June 1978, for fellowships in Cleveland and Birmingham, Ala.
In 1986 and the years following, he was an attending physician at The General Hospital Center at Passaic and St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York, and on the Columbia University faculty - not on the run from organized crime. He never knew Gotti or mob bosses Paul Castellano and Aniello Dellacroce personally, he said Tuesday.
"This is where Hollywood and medicine begin to mix," he said. "It makes a good story. For better or worse, this just got out of hand."
Itskevich, told of his denials, said, "I think he's lying to you. He told Ron [the author] he would deny the whole thing if somebody asked about it. What I personally think is the doctor's scared."
The Valley Hospital issued a statement through its spokeswoman, Megan Fraser:
"The hospital had no knowledge of the publication of this book or the events it describes. And we cannot comment for Dr. Mindich."
"What I find ludicrous is that anybody would believe this," Mindich said.
Book hype. What some people won't say or do to sell books, and snag movie deals. So manipulative.
Sometimes all the rumors that everyone knows about turn out to be true. >>
Like NJ's governor.
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