Under the Knife: A Beautiful Woman, a Phony Doctor, and a Shocking Homicide (13 page)

Channel 9’s hidden camera caught the professionally defrocked Dr. Lopez doling out medical advice and offering to perform procedures to make the phony patient “more beautiful.” Now they had proof that Lopez was violating the law, but it seemed like the authorities were never going to make a move. On the day the story was scheduled to air, Barbara and her cameraman barged into Dr. Lopez’s offices. They caught him on tape in the middle of surgery with his hands in a patient’s body.

They called the police. Dr. Lopez raced out a side door and into the street. The crew followed him outside where, to Barbara’s amazement, Lopez denied being the person performing the surgery they just witnessed and recorded.

Channel 9 aired the story that night as Dr. Lopez fled to Florida. There, he set up a new practice and got busy
risking the lives of more people. The attorney general’s office moved swiftly when they learned of his location, and extradited him back to New York. Lopez pled guilty to practicing medicine without a license and received a sentence of 2 to 6 years in the New York state prison system.

While covering the Lopez story, Barbara expanded her focus to encompass the cosmetic surgery industry as a whole, including the proliferation of laser use by people outside of the medical profession. The pieces produced and aired as a result of these investigations prompted a patient of Dean Faiello to call the station’s hot line, claiming that Dean told his clients that he was a physician. Here was an individual who was not just using laser in possibly illegal ways, but who was also pretending to be a doctor. Barbara believed this situation posed a huge threat to the public. She placed a call to Dr. Laurie Polis, who filled her in on Dean Faiello’s history.

In August 2002, Linda Sachs, a Channel 9 producer, made an appointment with the imposter. Using a hidden camera, she and the videographer caught Dean passing himself off as a physician. Barbara knew she had a hot story now. It was time to dig deeper.

ANOTHER DOGGED MEMBER OF THE MEDIA ENTERED THE
fray—Jeane MacIntosh of the
New York Post
. She moved in to research and write the story after getting a tip from a
New York Times
reporter who had interviewed Dr. Polis. The writer submitted a story about bogus skin care doctors that the
Times
turned down for publication because it was too sensational. She provided several names to Jeane, who chose to pursue information about one of the doctors in particular—Dean Faiello—when she learned he was under investigation by the Office of Professional Discipline.

Jeane was an Army brat born on May 21, 1961, in Munich, Germany. She grew up in Michigan and graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with a degree in English in 1983. Like many English majors before her, she faced a limited number of options for employment and so she worked as a bartender for a while, much to her parents’ dismay. One of her customers at the bar was the manager of a Detroit-area chain of suburban newspapers. She asked him for a job, to get her parents off of her back. He hired her and Jeane started her career in journalism writing for the
Northville Record
and the
Brighton Argus
.

A few months later, she accepted a job with a “crappy little newspaper” in New Jersey, where she lasted for two
weeks, then quit and moved to Boston. There, she wrote copy for a mutual fund group. In 1985, she returned to the newspaper business as a financial writer and business reporter for
Women’s Wear Daily
. She stuck with that employer for ten years.

Her next position was deputy editor of the
New York Post’s
Page Six, in 1995. As a contributor to the notorious and salacious gossip column, Jeane developed her contacts and learned to dish with the best. It was a glamorous job—nights of star-studded parties, days of celebrities whispering deep secrets in her ears.

The
Post
was part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Jeane took advantage of one perk of working for that massive conglomerate—an exchange program that enables reporters to work for other publications in the group for a short time.

Jeane chose a newspaper in Australia, where she worked for four months. There, she hit it off with an Australian reporter. While they were involved, she thought the romance was the real thing. However, when she returned to the United States, the relationship died faster than it began. To the Australian, Jeane was only another conquest—a momentary fling with a woman from the States. The situation was far more serious for Jeane—both romantically and in the long term. Upon her return, she discovered that she was pregnant with his child. Jeane considered her options and told herself, “Hey, I’m 37 years old. How hard can this be?” She decided to raise the child as a single mother.

In March 1998, other gossip columnists reported that Jeane was six months pregnant with the child of another Rupert Murdoch employee. In response to questions, Jeane said, “I’m spawning a hybrid tabloid warrior.”

When Jean’s little girl was 6 months old, Tom Parker stepped back into her life. She’d known Tom in high
school. She’d even attended his first wedding, telling herself that if he was ever available again, she would marry him. He was available now and the romance began.

Her personal life entered a gratifying phase, but professionally the going got rough. The destructive impact of her seemingly frivolous job hit hard in November 1999. Jeane reported on the life of talent agent Jay Moloney.

She wrote a piece about his cocaine addiction and how it drove him from a position running Paradise Music into a rehabilitation clinic. Within hours of the story’s release, the reverberations struck an already depressed Jay. He wrapped a belt around the shower nozzle and then around his neck, killing himself. Jay’s friend Dana Grachetto was more than happy to talk to the media, describing how he warned Jeane that if she published the story, it would push Jay over the edge.

The controversy wounded Jeane, and in December 1999, she and her toddler daughter left New York to join Tom Parker in the more peaceful Midwestern environment of Chicago. The
Post
did not want to lose Jeane and offered her a part-time job as Midwest correspondent. Her original agreement called for three days of work each month. Soon, though, the demand for her services expanded to twenty days a month, the
Post
flying her to Texas, North Dakota, Minnesota and elsewhere to cover stories. Meanwhile, she wrote freelance stories for Chicago magazines, covering weightier stories than the typical celebrity fluff, like a high-profile prostitution scandal—one that also brought a suicide threat to her door. Fortunately, this time, another dead body was not laid at her feet.

She referred to herself as a “recovering gossip columnist” and vowed she would never return to that work again. “Some days,” she wrote, “I don’t regret leaving at all. Other days I miss Page Six: it’s like a phantom limb that I
keep groping for, and I’m still surprised when I realize it’s not there.”

Then
Women’s Wear Daily
made her an offer she couldn’t refuse—a job she could fit in with her responsibilities to the
Post
. They wanted her to write a bi-weekly column on fashion industry gossip for the launch of their new website. Jeane was hooked again on the gossip habit. “Obviously, the world cannot exist without gossip and neither can I.” They produced one or two issues of the zine before 9-11. After that, the project fizzled into nothing.

Soon she and Tom were married and in early 2002, the
Post
urged Jeane back to New York to work as a general assignment and crime writer.

Jeane agreed and the family found a place in Hell’s Kitchen, then eventually moved to a home in New Jersey.

In the flamboyant and provocative language of the
Post
, Jeane wrote stories about serial killers, cult leaders, bigamist barbers, child killers, battered but wealthy wives, and sects who abused children. She reported on pivotal events like the tsunami disaster of December 2004. Jeane finally she made her mark with her coverage of the Elizabeth Smart story, which would evolve into a book.

IN SEPTEMBER, BARBARA NEVINS TAYLOR LEARNED THAT THE
state was also investigating Dean Faiello. Their probe was prompted by complaints from Dr. Laurie Polis, Dean’s former employer, and Dr. Roy Geronemus, a physician who claimed he treated a number of patients whose procedures were botched by Dean.

Now three separate entities—Channel 9, the
Post
, and the state—staked out the 18
^th
Street office. By September, each had figured out who the other players were, exchanging frequent waves and nods. It was a race to see who would get to the finish line first. The attorney general’s office was at a disadvantage in this contest. They needed
enough evidence to convict. The media outlets only needed enough to protect themselves should a lawsuit arise after the story had broken.

BARBARA MADE AN APPOINTMENT WITH DEAN FAIELLO. AGAIN
, the Channel 9 news department extended an invitation to the attorney general’s office to come along as an observer. Again, authorities declined.

Barbara entered Dean’s offices with a hidden camera. The visit began with a consultation. Dean interviewed Barbara about what she wanted and documented her medical history. Then, he examined her features. “You could benefit from laser resurfacing on your face. To do that, though, I would want to have the other doctor here to participate, since it is a very complicated procedure,” he said, referring to Dr. Frank Spinelli. He went on to explain that on his own, he could use the laser to remove beauty marks or moles. Barbara asked him about the spider veins in her legs. “They can easily be removed with laser,” Dean said.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Um-hum, yeah,” he said.

Barbara noticed that he appeared drowsy and slow, as if he were medicated.
Is this just his manner?
she wondered.
Or is he on drugs?

Later in the visit, she repeated her query in her best imitation of an airhead: “So, you’re a doctor, so I can trust you? I don’t, I don’t have to worry?”

Dean nodded his head. “Everything will be fine,” he said.

“Where did you go to medical school?”

“I went to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey,” Dean said.

He then escorted Barbara into the treatment room where he showed her his laser equipment and demonstrated how
he would apply it to her leg. He didn’t explain the medical procedures as a doctor would; he just told her what he could do and how he would do it.

Barbara left his office ready to write her story, edit her tape and hit the air. Investigators from the attorney general’s office, though, asked her to hold the story—an arrest was imminent.

MEANWHILE, JANE MACINTOSH, HEARING DEAN WAS GAY
, traipsed down to Christopher Street and flashed his picture around. She learned about his former job at The Beach and also heard about his drug problem. She staked out a club he was said to frequent, but Dean remained elusive.

Surprisingly, Jeane had a skin lesion on her left arm. It looked as if it could be malignant. A physician performed a biopsy, and though the results were negative, without that testing, she would have run a huge risk having it removed: if it had been cancer, the excision would have destroyed the outward indications of malignancy, allowing it to spread unseen to other parts of the body.

Jeane took advantage of the situation and made an appointment with Dean for a consultation. He told her that he could remove it with two or three laser sessions. The charge for each treatment was $250. In response to her questions, he assured her that he was a doctor and detailed his credentials, just as he had done for Barbara.

Then Jeane asked the really important question: “Does it need to be biopsied?”

“No. There’s no need for a biopsy,” Dean said.

“Even though I have a history of cancer?”

“There is nothing to worry about,” he assured her.

TO A HANDFUL OF PHONY PATIENTS FROM THE MEDIA, AND TO
the authorities, Dean admitted to using the anesthetic lidocaine, the sedative Diprivan and the highly addictive
synthetic narcotic fentanyl in the course of his treatments. There was no longer any doubt that his actions were criminal. But Barbara sat on her scoop until the arrest date, getting more impatient with each passing day. She knew Jeane MacIntosh was ready to publish her story in the
New York Post
. Barbara had to break the story first.

On the day of the planned arrest, Barbara couldn’t wait any longer. She and a crew went down to Dean Faiello’s office.

DEAN AND GREG STAYED AT GREG’S APARTMENT IN TOWN ON
the night of Monday, September 30. The next morning before Dean left for work, the phone rang. It was his receptionist.

“There’s a camera crew at the door wanting to come into the office,” she warned.

“You can’t let them in there,” Dean told her.

The crew—and particularly Barbara Nevins Taylor—intimidated her. She told Dean that Barbara would not go away.

“Put her on the phone,” Dean said.

Dean listened to what Barbara had to say, then, hoping she would just leave, he told her, “I don’t want you in the office with cameras.”

Dean hurried off to the office and when Barbara spotted him, she rushed toward him, putting a microphone to his face. “Why are you practicing medicine without a license?” she asked.