Case of David Carl Arndt, MD
(AKA: David Arndt, David C. Arndt, Dave Arndt, Dovid Arndt)
(AKA: David Arndt, David C. Arndt, Dave Arndt, Dovid Arndt)
Boston, MA
Cambridge, MA
1992 Graduate of Harvard Medical School - Boston, MA
Brigham and Women's Hospital - Boston, MA
Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital - Boston, MA
New England Baptist Hospital - Boston, MA
Newton Center, MA
Jamaica Plain, MA
Newton-Wellesley Hospital - Boston, MA
Fort Dix Federal Prison - New Jersey
Cambridge, MA
1992 Graduate of Harvard Medical School - Boston, MA
Brigham and Women's Hospital - Boston, MA
Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital - Boston, MA
New England Baptist Hospital - Boston, MA
Newton Center, MA
Jamaica Plain, MA
Newton-Wellesley Hospital - Boston, MA
Fort Dix Federal Prison - New Jersey
Dr. David Arndt was charged with four counts of statutory child rape and one count each of indecent assault and battery, drugging a person for sexual intercourse, contributing to the delinquency of a child, and possession of the drugs ketamine hydrochloride ("Special K") and methamphetamine. He plead guilty to drug charges and was sent to federal prison for 10 years. It is unknown what happened to the sex abuse charges. David Carl Arndt's name does NOT appear on the National Sex Offender's Registry.
According to reports, Arndt was driving through Central Square in Cambridge and stopped to invite two boys, ages 15 and 14, into his car to get high. Allegedly after dropping off the 14-year-old, he had sex in his car with the 15-year-old.
The boys waited four days before contacting police. They said that Arndt had given them his cellphone number and told them his name was David.
According to court records, when police dialed the number, Arndt answered, and he later admitted to having the boys in his car but said he had no physical contact aside from brushing one of the boys on the shoulder.
In 2010 it was reported that Arndt is now an ultra-Orthodox Jew who keeps kosher, wears a beard, keeps his head covered, works to follow hundreds of commandments governing all aspects of life, and spends the bulk of the day in prayer or studying. If you have any more information about him, please contact The Awareness Center. It is believe he now goes by his hebrew name and might have possibly moved to Israel.
There are several people by the name of David Arndt. The individual mentioned on this page was born in 1957.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer: Inclusion in this website does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement. Individuals must decide for themselves if the resources meet their own personal needs.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents:
2001
2002
- Board Says Surgery Halted for Bank Trip Doctor Suspended for Leaving Patient (08/08/2001)
2002
- Newton-Wellesley doctors lose licenses (08/07/2002)
- Doctor Will Appeal Board Suspension Hospital Say Privilegeds Ended Doctor Who Left Patient Will Board (08/09/2002)
- Records: Suspended doc in debt to former lover (08/09/2002)
- Massachusetts Doctor to Appeal Board Suspension (08/09/2002)
- Doctor Is Suspended Over Errand; Health: Boston surgeon left patient in operating room midway through procedure to go to the bank to deposit a check (08/09/2002)
- Surgeon Who Left an Operation To Run an Errand Is Suspended (08/09/2002)
- Suspended Boston MD held in rape of boy (08/11/2002)
- Patient Left On Operating Table Speaks Out (08/15/2002)
- Board Raps Arndt For Passport Fraud (08/22/2002)
- Suspended Doctor Charged In Rape of 15-Year-Old Boy (09/11/2002)
- Disgraced doc charged with rape of teen in Cambridge (09/11/2002)
- Doc pleads innocent in rape of teenager (09/12/2002)
- Drugs Found In Car of Doctor, DA Says (09/12/2002)
- Judge Redues Bail For Rape Suspect (09/13/2002)
- Cambridge surgeon pleads not guilty to child rape charges (10/09/2002)
- Surgeon pleads innocent to child rape charges (10/19/2002)
- Man sues doctor who left surgery for bank (12/12/2002)
2003
2004
2005
- Doctor asks state for help in fighting teen sex abuse charges (02/25/2003)
- Suspended Surgeon Asks State To Help Pay Legal Fees Defense Seeks Investigator For Teen Sex Abuse Charge (02/25/2003)
- Suspended Surgeon Faces Drug Charges (08/09/2003)
- Doctor Says He Was Only Doing Favor (08/13/2003)
- Doctor Indicted in Pinata Drug Case (09/20/2003)
2004
- Suspended Doctor Arrested On Drug Charges (06/03/2004)
-
Postal inspector: Arndt had drugs, marijuana (06/04/2004)
- Ex-Surgeon Gets Psychiatric Evaluation (06/15/2004)
- Arndt to undergo psychiatric evaluation (06/24/2004)
- United States of America V. David Carl Arndt (08/08.2004)
- Bail denied for alleged meth-dealing troubled doc (08/10/2004)
2005
- What Went Wrong? (03/21/2004)
- Surgeon Left In Midst Of Operation: Dotor Departed In Scheduled Break (04/22/2004)
- Surgeon indicted on drug charges (06/03/2005)
- Former Cambridge Surgeon Convicted on Federal Drug Charge as (06/29/2005)
- List of Disciplinary and Other Public Board Actions (06/29/2005)
- Ex-Doctor Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges (06/30/2005)
- Errand-running doc admits errors of druggie days (06/30/2005)
- Surgeon barred from renewing license (09/21/2005)
- Surgeon Who Left Patient Loses License (09/22/2005)
- Doctor Who Left Patient On Operating Table Gets License Pulled (09/22/2005)
2006
2007
- $1.25M Settlement Said Reached in Arndt Case (01/06/2006)
- Judge delays disgraced doc's sentencing on drug charges (12/20/2006)
2007
- USA v. Arndt (2007)
2010
- For a fallen surgeon, a higher power “What Went Wrong?” (02/28/2010)
- David C. Arndt Released From Prison (06/25/2012)
_________________________________________________________________________________
Board Says Surgery Halted for Bank Trip Doctor Suspened for Leaving Patient
By Anne Barnard
Boston Globe - August 8, 2001
The patient was on his stomach, anesthetized, with an open incision in his back. Six hours into spinal surgery, according to the state medical board, the surgeon told the operating staff at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge that he needed to "step out."
Then, the board said, Dr. David C. Arndt went to Harvard Square to deposit a paycheck.
Arndt hitched a ride with a sales representative from a medical device company, the board alleges, leaving nurses and anesthesiologists wondering where he was and when he would be back. He returned around 35 minutes later and completed the surgery, the board alleges.
The Board of Registration in Medicine yesterday suspended Arndt's medical license pending further investigation, calling him "an immediate and serious threat to the health, safety, and welfare of the public."
In the July 10 operation, the patient was unharmed, but the board contends that Arndt's absence placed the man at risk.
The alleged incident appears to be one of the most unusual and blatant cases of "patient abandonment" to come before the board.
"I've never seen anything quite like this," said Nancy Achin Sullivan, the board's executive director.
The medical board investigates many allegations of patient abandonment, said Sullivan, but they typically involve what she called "in artful termination of the doctor-patient relationship" - situations where patients feel the doctor did not properly conclude a consultation or refer them to another physician. She could not recall a case of a doctor leaving a patient on the operating table.
An attending anesthesiologist immediately notified Mount Auburn officials, and operating room staff told Arndt they were upset. Mount Auburn suspended Arndt and reported the incident to the board.
Arndt, 45, has the right to appeal the board's suspension and to present evidence at a board hearing on the incident, after which the board will issue a ruling. Neither Arndt nor his lawyer, Claudia Hunter, could be reached yesterday.
An orthopedic surgeon, Arndt is a 1992 graduate of Harvard Medical School. He has operating privileges at some of the largest hospitals in the state, including Brigham and Women's, Beth Israel Deaconess, New England Baptist, and Newton-Wellesley.
According to the allegations, Arndt initially seemed "surprised" that the anesthesiologist was upset by his absence, and explained that he had to get to the bank before it closed because he was in "a financial crisis" and had to pay overdue bills. But on Tuesday, he told the board's investigator that he regretted his actions and had "exercised remarkably horrible judgment."
Arndt has practiced since 1998 at Mount Auburn. He had no prior record of discipline there, according to a hospital spokeswoman. He is also licensed to practice medicine in Louisiana.
The board's allegations, culled from a board investigator's interviews with operating room staff and other hospital employees, portray an unusual chain of events: The patient was anesthetized for spinal fusion surgery at around 9:20 a.m. The first incision was made around 11 a.m. During the surgery, Arndt several times asked a nurse to call his office in Wellesley to see if his paycheck had arrived.
At around 5:30 p.m., when the surgery was about three-quarters completed, a general orthopedic surgeon headed to the operating area to perform surgery on another patient.
On the way, a woman handed that surgeon an envelope for Arndt, which contained his paycheck. The surgeon stepped into Arndt's operating room with the envelope, and Arndt asked him to wait there for five minutes while he took a break. The surgeon told the board he assumed Arndt was going to the bathroom.
Arndt then left the hospital with the sales representative, who had been in and out of the operating room during the surgery. The sales representative told the board they drove from the hospital on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge to a bank in Harvard Square, approximately a mile away.
While he was gone, Arndt failed to answer several pages. The general surgeon he had asked to wait was not credentialed to perform spinal fusion surgery and was not scrubbed in. Nurses and the anesthesiologist summoned supervisors, and soon the chief of anesthesia, the chief of orthopedics, and the chief of surgery were consulted.
They decided to wait for Arndt and agreed not to mention the incident until he had completed the procedure. He returned after about 35 minutes, according to the board, and completed the operation about two hours later.
Arndt later explained he had thought the surgery would be over before the bank closed at 7 p.m., but that the operation was taking longer than he had expected. He also told the board he had left his outside pager number at the hospital desk; according to the hospital's internal suspension memo, employees assumed he was in the building and used the in-house paging system.
When Arndt returned, he asked a surgical technician if she was angry with him, she told the board. She answered, "I would not want you to leave my mother on the table."
Anne Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com.
_________________________________________________________________________________
By Norman Miller
Daily News - August 7, 2002
Waltham — A state
agency that licenses physicians in Massachusetts yesterday suspended the
medical licenses of two doctors affiliated with Newton-Wellesley
Hospital in Newton.
Dr. David C. Arndt of Boston and Dr. Eric Nisbet-Brown had their rights suspended for various violations at the Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, said Nancy Achin Sullivan, executive director of the Board of Registration in Medicine in Boston.
None of the violations took place at Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
Arndt, an orthopedic surgeon with privileges at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and New England Baptist Hospital, was removed because he posed an "immediate threat to public health, safety and welfare," Achin Sullivan said.
Earlier this year, Arndt abandoned an anesthetized patient in the Mount Auburn Hospital's operating room to go to a bank in Harvard Square during surgery, the board said.
Mount Auburn suspended the 1992 Harvard Medical School graduate on July 11.
Nisben-Brown, a 1983 gradate of the University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine, had his license suspended indefinitely for practicing while impaired.
Along with Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Nisbet-Brown had privileges to practice at Children's Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham & Women's Hospital and the Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates.
Achin Sullivan applauded Mount Auburn's help in the investigations.
"We commend Mount Auburn for its effort to support an environment which maximizes the high quality of health care in Massachusetts," she said.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Doctor Will Appeal Board Suspension Hospital Say Privilegeds Ended Doctor Who Left Patient Will Board
By Anne Barnard
Boston Globe - August 9, 2002
A lawyer for Dr. David C. Arndt vowed yesterday to fight the suspension of his medical license as hospitals scrambled to distance themselves from the allegations against the orthopedic surgeon who, the state medical board contends, left a patient anesthetized on an operating table for 35 minutes as he went to the bank to deposit a check.
As the incident drew attention around the country, a contradictory picture of Arndt emerged. He attended top training programs at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, maintained a practice in highly specialized spinal surgery, and was viewed as brilliant and attentive by many patients.
Yet in a move that astonished doctors and patients alike, on July 10 he left a man with an incision in his back to deposit a check, saying he was in the midst of "a financial crisis."
"It's a shock," said Theresa Conway, of Boxborough, a patient of Arndt's. "He's a Harvard grad . . . He obviously didn't understand the consequences of his action at that very moment in time. He had to have been extremely distracted."
It was unclear yesterday what sparked Arndt's financial problems. But in October 2000, a Suffolk County judge ordered Arndt, 45, of Boston, to pay a portion of his income for the next 15 years to a former domestic partner, a fellow doctor who had paid Arndt's way through medical school and expected support in return, court records show.
Arndt's lawyer, Claudia Hunter, declined to elaborate on why he left the operating room, but said the medical board should have found a way of dealing with his disappearance from the operating room at Mount Auburn Hospital, short of taking away his right to practice medicine.
"Dr. David Arndt is a competent and skilled orthopedic surgeon. He regrets his actions of July 10 and apologizes to his patient," she said. "At the time of these events, the patient was stable and the surgery was successful."
On Wednesday, the Board of Registration in Medicine suspended Arndt's license to practice medicine in Massachusetts pending the outcome of a board hearing. Hunter said Arndt plans to appeal the suspension and explain himself further at the hearing.
When Arndt left the operating room he asked a general surgeon to cover for him, but that surgeon was not sterilized for surgery or qualified to perform the operation. Arndt returned to complete the surgery without incident and the patient was unharmed, but could have been at risk because of being anesthetized for a longer period, the board said.
Mount Auburn Hospital, where Arndt performed most of his surgeries, revoked his privileges - the right to practice at the hospital - the next day, and reported the incident to the medical board.
"Mount Auburn Hospital is dedicated to excellent patient care and maintains high standards of care," spokeswoman Kelly McDade said in a statement. "Those standards were breached in this incident. Our medical staff and the hospital took this action in the interests of patient care excellence and safety."
Yesterday, officials at other hospitals informed their patients that Arndt had done little work there recently and in many cases, no longer had privileges.
"He's like a ghost to us," said Erin Siano, a spokeswoman for New England Baptist, where Arndt maintained privileges from November 1999 through April, when he failed to submit a complete renewal application. "He did one surgical case here. One case."
"His privileges have been suspended," said Judy Glasser of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Arndt's father, Kenneth Arndt, was formerly chief of dermatology.
"He no longer has privileges here," said spokesman Vin Petrini of Brigham and Women's Hospital, saying they had ended in June 2001 but providing no information about why.
Arndt was employed at Harvard Vanguard through September 2001, according to a spokesman, who also declined to describe the circumstances of his departure.
The case was the talk of the medical world yesterday.
"It's not something I've ever heard of in my entire adult life in Boston health care," said Siano.
But Boston doctors were reluctant to weigh in publicly on the case, partly because of an ongoing debate within medicine about how publicly and aggressively doctors should be punished for lapses that may be an aberration within a long career - a particularly vexing question in a profession where even one slip can endanger a life.
Such blatant cases of patient abandonment are rare but not unprecedented. In 1998, a North Carolina doctor settled a lawsuit in which a patient was left brain-damaged after the doctor stepped out of the operating room during brain surgery for 25 minutes to get something to eat.
Dr. Raymond Sattler, a surgeon at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C., previously had his medical license suspended by the state's medical board in 1994 for behavior such as telling a nurse to drill holes in a patient's head and nearly passing out during an operation, the Wilmington Morning Star reported. But 150 doctors wrote letters of support and his license was restored.
For Arndt, the incident was his first discipline in front of the medical board.
One former patient, Mike Roy of Medford, said he had a bad experience when Arndt operated on him around four years ago and took 14 hours to perform surgery he had said would take eight hours. He said he ended up with a scar on his forehead and nerve damage in his arm.
When he asked about the scar, Roy said Arndt told him, "That's because your head stuck to the table - you were on the table too long, and when we flipped you over it stuck to the table."
Several other patients had nothing but praise.
Theresa Conway, whose appointment today with Arndt was canceled, said Arndt had cured a debilitating back problem and discouraged her from having unnecessary surgery. "I could barely walk when I went to him," she said.
"He was very focused and paid really good attention and asked good questions," said Ted Prato, of Cambridge, who was operated on by Arndt this spring when he broke his leg in a softball game. "It's rare that you get such focused attention from a doctor."
Anne Barnard can be reached at abarnard@globe.com.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Records: Suspended doc in debt to former loverBy Michael Lasalandra
Boston Herald - August 9, 2002
A Cambridge surgeon who had his license suspended for leaving a patient on the operating table to go cash a check is thousands of dollars in debt to a former gay lover, court records show.
Dr. David C. Arndt, who abandoned the spinal fusion patient at Mount Auburn Hospital for 40 minutes, is under a mountain of debt after losing a nasty court fight.
"David has had a checkered personal history and it has rolled over into his professional life,'' said Dr. Hyman Glick, chief of orthopedics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who helped train him.
On breaking up in 1994, Arndt had agreed to pay his former lover, Dr. Stephen M. Goldfinger, a psychiatrist, 9 percent of his income for 15 years.
When he challenged the agreement and lost in 2000, Arndt was ordered to pay court costs, legal fees and other bills of nearly $25,000, as well as to continue to make support payments of up to $500,000 to Goldfinger, court records show.
Arndt was stretched so thin financially that he failed to take part in a 1999 arbitration hearing because he couldn't afford the fees, records show.
Besides having his license suspended for abandoning his patient, Arndt is also being disciplined in connection with a conviction on a charge of filing a false affidavit to help another gay lover stay in the country illegally.
Board of Registration in Medicine officials say they can't comment on the pending matter, but documents show Arndt pleaded guilty to the charge in 1998 and was sentenced to three years probation and fined $3,000. He was charged in U.S. District Court in Louisiana, where he was
licensed as a doctor at the time and enrolled in a training program. Arndt had his Bay State license summarily suspended Wednesday after leaving his patient in surgery last month. The patient was not harmed, but other doctors at the hospital said the abandonment had put his life at risk.
licensed as a doctor at the time and enrolled in a training program. Arndt had his Bay State license summarily suspended Wednesday after leaving his patient in surgery last month. The patient was not harmed, but other doctors at the hospital said the abandonment had put his life at risk.
In a statement, Arndt's lawyer, Claudia Hunter, said the suspension is being appealed. "Dr. Arndt is a competent and skilled orthopedic surgeon,'' she said. "He regrets his actions of July 10 and apologizes to his patient. At the time of these events, the patient was stable and the
surgery was successful.''
surgery was successful.''
Arndt, 41, is a 1992 graduate of Harvard Medical School and has been practicing in Massachusetts since 1993. He has no prior disciplinary actions against him.
In the Louisiana case, board documents charge he accompanied his friend, a resident alien, to the New Orleans passport office in 1998. The friend submitted a passport application under a false name, together with an affidavit signed by Arndt falsely stating he had known his friend by that name for 10 years.
On Oct. 27, 1998, Arndt was charged with a misdemeanor. The matter is now before the Massachusetts medical board because the board may discipline a doctor who has been convicted of any crime.
According to board documents, Arndt falsified the document so his then "life partner,'' Alfredo Fuentes, would not be deported. Fuentes apparently was having immigration problems, but didn't want to return to his native Venezuela. He and Arndt had determined "that this option was highly dangerous as homosexuals were not accorded basic human rights and being relatively wealthy homosexuals made them targets for violence and/or execution,'' documents state.
In her recommended decision that disciplinary action be taken against Arndt, Joan Freiman Fink, administrative magistrate for the Division of Administrative Law Appeals, urged the board to consider mitigating factors. She noted that Arndt apologized for his conduct and testified he was "very sorry'' for filing the false document, and that he feels "humiliated and disappointed in himself for his misconduct. He acknowledged that filing the false report was the dumbest thing he ever did.''
The board has not yet acted on the matter. Patients advocates blasted Arndt. "This is totally irrational behavior,'' said Linda DeBenedictis, head of the New England Patients Rights Organization. "Nobody would want to be that patient. It's truly outrageous.''
In the legal fight with his prior domestic partner, Arndt sued Goldfinger, currently of Brooklyn, N.Y., challenging a prior arbitration award.
The two met in San Francisco in 1983 and lived together for nine years in a "domestic partnership,'' documents show. Goldfinger, who was 10 years older than Arndt and more established in his profession, paid for much of the property collected by the couple, records show. In addition, documents say Goldfinger paid for much of their living, traveling and entertainment expenses while Arndt studied to be a doctor.
In an agreement they reached on deciding to end their relationship, Arndt agreed starting in 1998 to pay Goldfinger 9 percent of his adjusted gross income for 15 years, with payments due quarterly.
In a celebrated legal case, Arndt later challenged the validity of the agreement, saying he was coerced to sign the pact and Goldfinger had taken advantage of "the fragility of (Arndt's) mental condition,'' which resulted from long work days and depression caused by the deaths of loved ones.
Goldfinger responded with a motion to dismiss Arndt's challenge - and won in a 1996 decision. Subsequently, the matter went to arbitration, as the original agreement called for, and the arbitrator ruled in January 2000 in Goldfinger's favor.
Arbitrator David A. Hoffman's ruling ordered Arndt to pay Goldfinger's legal fees of $18,113, plus $5,162 in arbitration fees and $626 in credit card charges. Arndt was also ordered to continue to pay the support arrangement as outlined in the agreement and help Goldfinger obtain life insurance on Arndt's life.
David Weber contributed to this report.
David Weber contributed to this report.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Massachusetts Doctor to Appeal Board Suspension
By Anne Barnard
Boston Globe - August 1, 2002
Aug. 9--A lawyer for Dr. David C. Arndt vowed yesterday to fight the suspension of his medical license as hospitals scrambled to distance themselves from the allegations against the orthopedic surgeon who, the state medical board contends, left a patient anesthetized on an operating table for 35 minutes as he went to the bank to deposit a check.
As the incident drew attention around the country, a contradictory picture of Arndt emerged. He attended top training programs at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, maintained a practice in highly specialized spinal surgery, and was viewed as brilliant and attentive by many patients.
Yet in a move that astonished doctors and patients alike, on July 10 he left a man with an incision in his back to deposit a check, saying he was in the midst of "a financial crisis."
"It's a shock," said Theresa Conway, of Boxborough, a patient of Arndt's. "He's a Harvard grad ... He obviously didn't understand the consequences of his action at that very moment in time. He had to have been extremely distracted."
It was unclear yesterday what sparked Arndt's financial problems. But in October 2000, a Suffolk County judge ordered Arndt, 45, of Boston, to pay a portion of his income for the next 15 years to a former domestic partner, a fellow doctor who had paid Arndt's way through medical school and expected support in return, court records show.
Arndt's lawyer, Claudia Hunter, declined to elaborate on why he left the operating room, but said the medical board should have found a way of dealing with his disappearance from the operating room at Mount Auburn Hospital, short of taking away his right to practice medicine.
"Dr. David Arndt is a competent and skilled orthopedic surgeon. He regrets his actions of July 10 and apologizes to his patient," she said. "At the time of these events, the patient was stable and the surgery was successful."
On Wednesday, the Board of Registration in Medicine suspended Arndt's license to practice medicine in Massachusetts pending the outcome of a board hearing. Hunter said Arndt plans to appeal the suspension and explain himself further at the hearing.
When Arndt left the operating room he asked a general surgeon to cover for him, but that surgeon was not sterilized for surgery or qualified to perform the operation. Arndt returned to complete the surgery without incident and the patient was unharmed, but could have been at risk because of being anesthetized for a longer period, the board said.
Mount Auburn Hospital, where Arndt performed most of his surgeries, revoked his privileges -- the right to practice at the hospital -- the next day, and reported the incident to the medical board.
"Mount Auburn Hospital is dedicated to excellent patient care and maintains high standards of care," spokeswoman Kelly McDade said in a statement. "Those standards were breached in this incident. Our medical staff and the hospital took this action in the interests of patient care excellence and safety."
Yesterday, officials at other hospitals informed their patients that Arndt had done little work there recently and in many cases, no longer had privileges.
"He's like a ghost to us," said Erin Siano, a spokeswoman for New England Baptist, where Arndt maintained privileges from November 1999 through April, when he failed to submit a complete renewal application. "He did one surgical case here. One case."
"His privileges have been suspended," said Judy Glasser of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where Arndt's father, Kenneth Arndt, was formerly chief of dermatology.
"He no longer has privileges here," said spokesman Vin Petrini of Brigham and Women's Hospital, saying they had ended in June 2001 but providing no information about why.
Arndt was employed at Harvard Vanguard through September 2001, according to a spokesman, who also declined to describe the circumstances of his departure.
The case was the talk of the medical world yesterday.
"It's not something I've ever heard of in my entire adult life in Boston health care," said Siano.
But Boston doctors were reluctant to weigh in publicly on the case, partly because of an ongoing debate within medicine about how publicly and aggressively doctors should be punished for lapses that may be an aberration within a long career -- a particularly vexing question in a profession where even one slip can endanger a life.
Such blatant cases of patient abandonment are rare but not unprecedented. In 1998, a North Carolina doctor settled a lawsuit in which a patient was left brain-damaged after the doctor stepped out of the operating room during brain surgery for 25 minutes to get something to eat.
Dr. Raymond Sattler, a surgeon at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C., previously had his medical license suspended by the state's medical board in 1994 for behavior such as telling a nurse to drill holes in a patient's head and nearly passing out during an operation, the Wilmington Morning Star reported. But 150 doctors wrote letters of support and his license was restored.
For Arndt, the incident was his first discipline in front of the medical board.
One former patient, Mike Roy of Medford, said he had a bad experience when Arndt operated on him around four years ago and took 14 hours to perform surgery he had said would take eight hours. He said he ended up with a scar on his forehead and nerve damage in his arm.
When he asked about the scar, Roy said Arndt told him, "That's because your head stuck to the table -- you were on the table too long, and when we flipped you over it stuck to the table."
Several other patients had nothing but praise.
Theresa Conway, whose appointment today with Arndt was canceled, said Arndt had cured a debilitating back problem and discouraged her from having unnecessary surgery. "I could barely walk when I went to him," she said.
"He was very focused and paid really good attention and asked good questions," said Ted Prato, of Cambridge, who was operated on by Arndt this spring when he broke his leg in a softball game. "It's rare that you get such focused attention from a doctor."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Doctor Is Suspended Over Errand; Health: Boston surgeon left patient in operating room midway through procedure to go to the bank to deposit a check
By Elizabeth Mehren
Los Angeles Times - August 9, 2002
A Boston orthopedic surgeon has been suspended from practice after disclosures that he abandoned a patient midway through back surgery so he could go to the bank to deposit his paycheck.
Although the unnamed patient was resting comfortably after a successful spinal fusion procedure, the Board of Registration in Medicine on Wednesday labeled Dr. David C. Arndt "an immediate and serious threat to the health, safety and welfare of the public."
Arndt was not available for comment at his Cambridge office Thursday.
But a report from the state medical board said that six hours into spinal surgery July 10, Arndt abruptly told colleagues in the operating room at Mount Auburn Hospital that he had to "step out."
His patient was under anesthesia at the time, with his back cut open.
Grabbing a ride from a medical device salesperson, Arndt went to his bank in nearby Harvard Square. He returned to complete the surgery about 35 minutes later.
"Patient abandonment" is the term the medical board uses to describe such behavior. Executive director Nancy Achin Sullivan said she had never seen anything quite so flagrant.
Arndt, 45, is a Harvard Medical School graduate with operating privileges at some of Boston's most prestigious hospitals. He can appeal his suspension at an upcoming hearing of the state board.
The incident came to the board's attention after nurses and an anesthesiologist on duty during the surgery reported Arndt's behavior to hospital officials. The hospital suspended Arndt the next day.
An affidavit filed by a state medical investigator said, "The supervising anesthesiologist observed the patient in a prone position with an open incision in his back."
Another surgeon who was present but was not scrubbed or authorized to perform the fusion procedure said he assumed Arndt had just "stepped out" to use the restroom, according to the medical board report.
Earlier in the week, Arndt told an investigator for the state medical board that he "exercised remarkably horrible judgment."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Surgeon Who Left an Operation To Run an Errand Is Suspended Associated Press - August 9, 2002
Massachusetts has indefinitely suspended a surgeon's medical license because he left a patient anesthetized on an operating table with an open incision in his back while he went to a bank several blocks away.
The patient was not harmed, but the surgeon, Dr. David C. Arndt, created an immediate threat when he left the patient at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge to go to a bank in Harvard Square, the State Board of Registration in Medicine said on Wednesday.
''I've never seen anything quite like this,'' said Nancy Achin Sullivan, executive director of the board.
An investigator for the board who interviewed the operating room staff and other hospital employees said the incident took place on July 10.
Dr. Arndt, an orthopedic surgeon who is a 1992 graduate of Harvard Medical School, asked a nurse several times during the six-hour surgery to call his office to see if his paycheck had arrived. Around 5:30 p.m., with the surgery about three-quarters completed, another surgeon stepped into the operating room and handed Dr. Arndt his pay envelope.
Dr. Arndt, 45, asked that surgeon, who was not credentialed to perform the surgery and had not scrubbed in, to wait there for five minutes while he took a break, the investigator said. The other surgeon told the board he assumed Dr. Arndt was going to the restroom.
While he was gone, Dr. Arndt did not answer several pages. He told the board's investigator that he regretted his actions and had ''exercised remarkably horrible judgment.''
Dr. Arndt said that the surgery had run longer than he expected and that he had to get the check to the bank because he was in ''a financial crisis'' and had to pay bills.
Mount Auburn officials suspended him the day after the incident, and reported the matter to the state board.
In suspending Dr. Arndt's license, the board called him a ''serious threat to the health, safety and welfare of the public.''
His lawyer, Claudia Hunter, said today that Dr. Arndt would appeal the suspension. He has a right to a hearing, but no date has been set.
''He regrets his actions of July 10 and apologizes to his patient,'' Ms. Hunter said. ''At the time of the events, the patient was stable and the surgery was successful.''
_________________________________________________________________________________
Suspended Boston MD held in rape of boy
Toronto Star - September 11, 2002
The Boston doctor under fire for abandoning an unconscious surgery patient to go to the bank was arrested yesterday and accused in the rape of a 15-year-old Cambridge boy.
Dr. David Arndt, 45, held in lieu of $250,000 bail, was scheduled for arraignment in Cambridge District Court today on three counts of child rape and one count of indecent assault and battery on a person over 14.
Prosecutors say Arndt spotted the boy on a street last Thursday and lured him into his car, where the boy was repeatedly raped.
The boy reported the attack to police Monday morning.
The arrest marks the most serious turn in the Harvard-trained surgeon's troubles.
Last week Arndt's name was found on prescription slips at the scene of an alleged drug dealer's arrest.
On Aug. 7 the medical board suspended his medical licence after he abandoned a patient at Mount Auburn Hospital six hours into back surgery in order to deposit a cheque.
He returned 35 minutes later and successfully completed the surgery.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Patient Left On Operating Table Speaks Out - Patient Questions Why Surgeon Left Him On Table
NBC News (Channel 10) - August 15, 2002
BOSTON -- Last week, News Channel 10 reported that a Massachusetts surgeon allegedly left his patient on the operating table while he went to the bank and cashed a check.
The patient, Charles Algeri, appeared on the Today show Thursday morning.
"I am amazed, I feel abandoned, I just couldn't believe this had happened to me," Algeri said.
It has been over a month and Charles Algeri said he's still in a great deal of pain since undergoing a complicated back surgery July 10 at Mount Auburn Hopsital.
About six hours into the procedure, his doctor, David Arnt reportedly left and went to the bank to cash a check. Charles Algeri was still under anesthesia and had an open incision.
He asked a surgeon passing through the area to watch his patient.
Mark Breakstone, Algeri's attorney said, "He asked the surgeon, who was not scrubbed up to step in, not only was he not scrubbed, but he was not qualified to do that type of spinal procedure."
Through his attorney Arnt issued this statement: "Dr. Arndt is a competent and skilled orthopedic surgeon. He regrets his actions of July 10 and apologized to his patient. At the time of these events, the patient was stable and the surgery was successful."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Board Raps Arndt For Passport Fraud
Boston Globe - August 22, 2002
[A PUBLISHED CORRECTION HAS BEEN ADDED TO THIS STORY.] David
Arndt, the orthopedic surgeon who left a patient unconscious on the
operating table while he went to the bank, was reprimanded by the
state medical board yesterday for another offense - violating federal
law by helping his domestic partner falsify a passport application in
1998.
The Board of Registration in Medicine had already suspended Arndt's license Aug. 7 for leaving the operating room last month. A hearing on whether that summary suspension will stand is expected later this month.
Yesterday, the board issued a formal reprimand based on Arndt's guilty plea to a federal misdemeanor charge of possessing a …
The Board of Registration in Medicine had already suspended Arndt's license Aug. 7 for leaving the operating room last month. A hearing on whether that summary suspension will stand is expected later this month.
Yesterday, the board issued a formal reprimand based on Arndt's guilty plea to a federal misdemeanor charge of possessing a …
_________________________________________________________________________________
Raja Mishra
Boston Globe - September 11, 2002
Globe correspondent Jenny Jiang contributed to this report.
CAMBRIDGE - The Boston doctor under fire for abandoning an unconscious surgery patient to go to the bank was arrested yesterday and charged with the alleged rape of a 15-year-old youth he picked up in Central Square.
Police last night held Dr. David C. Arndt, 45, in the station lockup in lieu of $250,000 bail. He was scheduled for arraignment in Cambridge District Court today on three counts of child rape and one count of indecent assault and battery on a person over 14.
According to Middlesex County prosecutors, Arndt spotted the male youth on a street near Central Square on Sept. 5 and allegedly lured him into his car. The two had never met before, said prosecutors. Arndt then repeatedly raped the boy in the car, they allege.
The boy reported the alleged attack to police Monday morning. Police searched for Arndt's car throughout Cambridge yesterday, finally spotting him driving near Central Square, a police spokesman said. He was arrested without a struggle.
The boy last evening was at home with his parents.
"It wasn't like a kidnapping," said Cambridge police spokesman Frank Pasquarello. "He wasn't forced into the car."
Claudia A. Hunter, a lawyer representing Arndt in the suspension of his medical license, was reached last night but said she was unaware of the criminal case.
On July 10, Arndt abandoned an anesthetized patient at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge six hours into back surgery in order to deposit a check in a nearby bank, according to the state medical board. He returned 35 minutes later and successfully completed the surgery, according to the medical board.
Arndt explained to colleagues that "a financial crisis" forced him to run to the bank, according to the board.
The medical board suspended Arndt's medical license on Aug. 7, calling him "an immediate and serious threat to the health, safety, and welfare of the public." Arndt has vowed to fight the suspension, but has not disputed the allegations.
The case has prompted widespread outrage, and his patient has been interviewed on national television shows. The case opened the door into Arndt's seemingly troubled recent past.
On Sept. 4, a law enforcement official disclosed a possible connection between Arndt and a drug dealer arrested in June at a downtown Boston hotel. The official said prescription slips signed by Arndt were found at the arrest scene.
In October 2000, a Suffolk County judge ordered Arndt to turn over 9 percent of his income for the next 15 years to a former domestic partner who bankrolled Arndt's medical schooling in exchange for future financial support, according to court records. Arndt unsuccessfully protested the order, contending that his partner, a psychiatrist, emotionally manipulated him into signing the agreement.
In 1998, Arndt pleaded guilty to falsifying an immigration document in an attempt to illegally obtain a US passport for his Venezuelan boyfriend. Arndt called it "the dumbest thing" he ever did.
That same year, Arndt faced assault charges for allegedly breaking into a Provincetown house and attacking a man he found with his domestic partner. After he agreed to pretrial probation, the charges were dropped.
Arndt has specialized in certain back surgeries, practicing at several Boston area hospitals, though he is presently not authorized to work anywhere in the state. He has not renewed his practicing privileges at New England Baptist Hospital, where he occasionally performed surgeries from November 1999 to last April. His privileges at Brigham and Women's Hospital ended in June 2001, as they did at Harvard Vanguard in September 2001, both for unspecified reasons.
And at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, his privileges were suspended after the Mt. Auburn surgery incident.
_________________________________________________________________________________
By Kevin Rothstein
Boston Herald - September 11, 2002
The surgeon who lost his license after leaving a patient on the operating table to cash a check was charged yesterday with raping a 15-year-old boy he met in Cambridge last week, authorities said.
Dr. David Arndt, 41, didn't know the teenage boy he "picked up" near Central Square on Sept. 5 and allegedly raped repeatedly, said Seth Horwitz, spokesman for Middlesex County District Attorney Martha Coakley.
The orthopedic surgeon is being held on $250,000 bail at the Cambridge police station pending his arraignment this morning in the city's District Court for three counts of child rape and other charges, said Cambridge police …
_________________________________________________________________________________
By David Weber
Boston Herald - September 12, 2002
[David C. Arndt] became front-page news in early August when the state medical board summarily suspended his license because he left a Mount Auburn Hospital operating room July 10 to cash a check in Harvard Square. Arndt was gone for 35 minutes while his patient, who was undergoing spinal fusion surgery, lay prone on the operating table with an open incision in his back.
[Jennifer Koiles] said that on Sept. 5, Arndt approached the two teenagers in Central Square and asked them if they "wanna smoke." The boys told police they got into the car and drove around with Arndt while they smoked from the glass pipe.
She said Arndt had sex with the boy inside the car. Before Arndt and the 15-year-old parted ways, Arndt said his first name was David and gave the teen his cell phone number, the prosecutor said.
_________________________________________________________________________________
By Ralph Ranalli
Boston Globe - September 12, 2002
CAMBRIDGE - Surgeon David Arndt was smoking a white powdery drug in his car with two teenagers before having sex with an underage boy, a charge that could land him in prison for life, a Middlesex prosecutor said at his arraignment yesterday.
Arndt, the South End back specialist whose medical license was suspended this summer after he allegedly left an anesthetized patient on the operating table while he went to the bank, has admitted to having been with two boys in his car last Thursday but denied doing anything more than touching one of the boys "on the shoulder," officials said.
The 41-year-old Arndt pleaded not guilty to three counts of statutory rape and one count of indecent assault and battery on a 15- year-old boy and was ordered jailed on $10,000 cash bail by Cambridge District Court Judge Roanne Sragow.
Arndt was not charged with any drug offenses, but Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Koiles told Sragow a glass pipe and a "white powder substance" found during a search of Arndt's car were still being tested.
Koiles said that Arndt approached the two boys, a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old, in Central Square on Sept. 5 and offered them drugs.
"He asked them if they wanted to smoke," Koiles said. "The two boys got in the car, and he [Arndt] brought out a glass pipe and they smoked from that."
After the younger boy left, Arndt pulled over and had sex with the 15-year-old, Koiles said. He gave the boy his cellphone number and said his name was "David," the prosecutor said.
After seeing Arndt's car again four days later, the boys decided to call Cambridge police to report the incident, Koiles said. After locating the car, police called the cellphone number and arrested Arndt after he answered, she said.
Police are now testing a fluid they found in the car, believed to be semen, Koiles said.
Koiles said she was asking for $10,000 cash bail because "the defendant is facing three life felonies and because of the strength of the government's case."
Defense attorney Geoffrey Packard asked Sragow to release Arndt without bail, saying his client was not a risk to flee and that he strongly denied the boys' allegations.
Packard also suggested that the prosecution's position on bail had been affected by the national media attention focused on Arndt after the operating room incident.
"If his name was David Smith, would the press be here and would the Commonwealth be asking for bail? I don't know," he said. "These allegations, while not benign, are not the most horrendous to ever come before this court."
The arrest is the most serious of the Harvard-trained orthopedic surgeon's recent troubles. Last week, authorities said Arndt's name was found on prescription slips at the scene of an alleged drug dealer's arrest in June.
On July 10, Arndt left an anesthetized patient at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge six hours into back surgery in order to deposit a check, according to the state medical board. He returned 35 minutes later and successfully completed the surgery, according to the medical board.
The medical board suspended Arndt's medical license on Aug. 7, calling him "an immediate and serious threat to the health, safety, and welfare of the public."
In 1998, Arndt was charged with falsifying an immigration document in an attempt to illegally obtain a US passport for his Venezuelan boyfriend. Arndt pleaded guilty. That same year, Arndt faced assault charges for allegedly breaking into a Provincetown house and attacking a man he found with his domestic partner. He agreed to pretrial probation and charges were dropped.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Judge Redues Bail For Rape SuspectBoston Globe - September 13, 2002
A Middlesex Superior Court judge yesterday lowered the bail for a Boston orthopedic surgeon who was arrested on statutory rape charges Wednesday. David Arndt, whose medical license was suspended this summer for leaving a patient on the operating table for a trip to the bank, was arrested after a 15-year-old boy told police that he had shared drugs and had sex with Arndt in his car last week. Arndt's lawyer, Geoffrey C. Packard, said yesterday that his client denies the charges and would soon be home in the South End after posting his bail, which Judge Peter W. Agnes lowered from $10,000 to $1,000.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Cambridge surgeon pleads not guilty to child rape charges
By Associated Press - October 9, 2002
CAMBRIDGE -- Dr. David Arndt, a surgeon whose license was suspended after he left a patient on the operating table to go to the bank, pleaded innocent Wednesday to child rape charges.
Prosecutors allege Arndt picked up a 15-year-old boy in Cambridge on Sept. 5 and sexually assaulted him in his car.
Arndt pleaded innocent in Middlesex Superior Court to charges including four counts of rape of a child, indecent assault and battery on a person over 14, drugging a person for sexual intercourse and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Arndt is free on $1,000 cash bail. Conditions of his release require him to stay away from the victim, to have no unsupervised contact with children under 16 and to check in with a probation officer once a week.
Arndt is due back in court Oct. 31 for a pretrial conference.
Arndt pleaded innocent on Sept. 11 in Cambridge District Court. He was arraigned on the charges Wednesday in Middlesex Superior Court.
"He pleaded not guilty, and our position is that there was no illicit sexual conduct," Arndt's attorney, Geoffrey Packard, said after Arndt's arraignment.
Arndt's medical license was suspended by the state Board of Medicine in July after he walked out of a spinal fusion operation at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge to make a 35-minute trip to a bank to cash a check.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Surgeon pleads innocent to child rape chargesDaily News - October 9, 2002
Dr. David Arndt, a surgeon whose license was suspended after he left a Waltham man on the operating table to go to the bank, pleaded innocent yesterday to child rape charges.
Prosecutors allege Arndt picked up a 15-year-old boy in Cambridge on Sept. 5 and sexually assaulted him in his car.
Arndt pleaded innocent in Middlesex Superior Court to charges including four counts of rape of a child, indecent assault and battery on a person over 14, drugging a person for sexual intercourse and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Arndt is free on $1,000 cash bail. Conditions of his release require him to stay away from the victim, to have no unsupervised contact with children under 16 and to check in with a probation officer once a week.
Arndt is due back in court Oct. 31 for a pretrial conference.
Arndt pleaded innocent on Sept. 11 in Cambridge District Court. He was arraigned on the charges yesterday in Middlesex Superior Court.
"He pleaded not guilty, and our position is that there was no illicit sexual conduct," Arndt's attorney, Geoffrey Packard, said after Arndt's arraignment.
Arndt's medical license was suspended by the state Board of Medicine in July after he walked out of a spinal fusion operation at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge to go to a bank to cash a check.
Charles Algeri, 45, of Waltham, was left on the operating table for 35 minutes while Arndt made the trip. Arndt was suspended by Mount Auburn Hospital and the state medical board.
_________________________________________________________________________________
CNN - December 6, 2002
The
patient who was left on an operating table while his doctor went to the
bank filed a malpractice suit against the surgeon Wednesday.
Charles Algeri, who was undergoing spinal fusion surgery, says he suffers severe pain because Dr. David C. Arndt abandoned him on the operating table with an open incision for half an hour while he went to cash a check.
The Massachusetts hospital suspended Arndt after the July 10 incident, and issued a statement that said it's been taking "a very hard and critical look" at its procedures.
Charles Algeri, who was undergoing spinal fusion surgery, says he suffers severe pain because Dr. David C. Arndt abandoned him on the operating table with an open incision for half an hour while he went to cash a check.
The Massachusetts hospital suspended Arndt after the July 10 incident, and issued a statement that said it's been taking "a very hard and critical look" at its procedures.
CNN's
Connie Chung spoke with Algeri for an exclusive interview, his first
since filing the lawsuit, along with his attorney Marc Breakstone on
"Connie Chung Tonight."
CONNIE CHUNG, CNN: Mr. Algeri, tell me, since the surgery, how have you been?
CHARLES ALGERI: Not very good. The pain is getting progressively worse every day.
CHUNG: Well, I know that this operation was a spinal fusion and that the doctor left for 35 minutes. Did you have any idea that he was gone?
ALGERI: No, none at all. I was under general anesthetic at the time. I didn't find out for, like, a month. Almost a month after the surgery is when I actually found out.
CHUNG: How did you find out?
ALGERI: The hospital called me up and they told me there was something they thought I might like to know, that the doctor left. And I said, "Well, everybody needs a break."
And they said, "Well, he left the building and he went down to Harvard square and to the bank." ... They wanted to tell me that my confidentiality would be left out -- my name would be left out in case there was an investigation into it.
CHUNG: Do you know what prompted the hospital to call you right at that time, because it was a month later?
ALGERI: The next day, I picked up the newspaper and I turned on the news and my phone started ringing. I was all over the place -- well, the case was all over, not my name -- because the media had a hold of it and it broke the next day. That's why I believe they told me that day.
CHUNG: Mr. Algeri, you must have been just astounded. I mean, what were you thinking and feeling inside once you heard that this doctor had left you on the operating table?
ALGERI: I hung up the phone. And they told me. And I said, "Goodbye." And I didn't believe it. It was surreal. And I said, 'No, that couldn't have been happening. This must be like a dream.' And I just hung up the phone.
Doctor asks state for help in fighting teen sex abuse charges
By Associated Press - February 25, 2003
A suspended orthopedic surgeon who left a patient on the operating table while he ran a bank errand is asking the state to help him pay legal fees for his defense against charges that he sexually assaulted a teenager.
The state medical board suspended Arndt's medical license in August. Arndt said he would fight the suspension.
CONNIE CHUNG, CNN: Mr. Algeri, tell me, since the surgery, how have you been?
CHARLES ALGERI: Not very good. The pain is getting progressively worse every day.
CHUNG: Well, I know that this operation was a spinal fusion and that the doctor left for 35 minutes. Did you have any idea that he was gone?
ALGERI: No, none at all. I was under general anesthetic at the time. I didn't find out for, like, a month. Almost a month after the surgery is when I actually found out.
CHUNG: How did you find out?
ALGERI: The hospital called me up and they told me there was something they thought I might like to know, that the doctor left. And I said, "Well, everybody needs a break."
And they said, "Well, he left the building and he went down to Harvard square and to the bank." ... They wanted to tell me that my confidentiality would be left out -- my name would be left out in case there was an investigation into it.
CHUNG: Do you know what prompted the hospital to call you right at that time, because it was a month later?
ALGERI: The next day, I picked up the newspaper and I turned on the news and my phone started ringing. I was all over the place -- well, the case was all over, not my name -- because the media had a hold of it and it broke the next day. That's why I believe they told me that day.
CHUNG: Mr. Algeri, you must have been just astounded. I mean, what were you thinking and feeling inside once you heard that this doctor had left you on the operating table?
ALGERI: I hung up the phone. And they told me. And I said, "Goodbye." And I didn't believe it. It was surreal. And I said, 'No, that couldn't have been happening. This must be like a dream.' And I just hung up the phone.
_________________________________________________________________________________
By Associated Press - February 25, 2003
A suspended orthopedic surgeon who left a patient on the operating table while he ran a bank errand is asking the state to help him pay legal fees for his defense against charges that he sexually assaulted a teenager.
Dr. David C. Arndt, in a request filed Monday
in Middlesex County Superior Court, asked for $15,000 in state money,
according to his lawyer, Alfred E. Nugent.
Prosecutors allege the Arndt lured a 15-year-old boy into his car in
Cambridge on Sept. 9. Arndt has been charged with child rape and assault
and battery.
Nugent, in his filing, said that Arndt's parents, a Harvard-affiliated
dermatologist and psychologist, are in the process of retiring, and are
unable to provide any money for their son's defense.
Nugent said he met for two hours with Arndt's parents last fall at his Beacon Street office, but they declined financial help.
However Dr. Kenneth A. Arndt, who was chief of dermatology at Beth
Israel Deaconess Medical Center and now practices privately at SkinCare
Physicians of Newton, told The Boston Globe on Monday that Nugent's
account was ''not completely accurate.''
''The information about us retiring is false, and neither David nor his
lawyer have specifically ever asked us for funds,'' the elder Arndt
said.
''We
remain open to such discussions with David, with our son,'' Anne Arndt, a
psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School, told the Globe.
''I don't want to make them the villains,'' Nugent said of Arndt's
parents. However he said he needed to cite the lack of support from them
in order to persuade the state to pay for investigations and expert
witnesses for David Arndt's defense.
Nugent said he took the case thinking Arndt's parents and friends would
pay, but has now committed to representing Arndt, even if it means
working for free.
Arndt still faces a civil suit in connection with the operating room
incident at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge on July 10. Charles
Algeri, the patient who had an incision in his back while Arndt left the
room, has filed the civil suit.
Arndt's malpractice insurance is paying for his defense in that case, Nugent said.
_________________________________________________________________________________
By Anne Barnard
Boston Globe - February 25, 2003
Dr. David C. Arndt, the orthopedic surgeon who left a patient on the operating table for a 35-minute bank errand, yesterday requested $15,000 in state money to help defend himself against charges that he sexually assaulted a teenager.
In an unusual request filed yesterday in Middlesex County Superior Court, Arndt's lawyer, Alfred E. Nugent, says that Arndt's parents, a Harvard-affiliated dermatologist and psychologist, are in the process of retiring and are unable to provide any money for their son's defense.
Dr. Kenneth A. Arndt, who was chief of dermatology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and now practices privately at SkinCare Physicians of Chestnut Hill, said yesterday that Nugent's account was "not completely accurate."
"The information about us retiring is false, and neither David nor his lawyer have specifically ever asked us for funds," he said.
"We remain open to such discussions with David, with our son," said Anne Arndt, a psychologist and instructor at Harvard Medical School.
According to Nugent, friends of Arndt hired him for a "modest retainer," and Arndt believed that his parents would help him pay to fight the assault charges when a court date is set in the coming weeks. Nugent said Arndt's parents met with him last fall for two hours at his Beacon Street office, but declined financial help.
"He said, `We're going to retire soon, and we need to keep all our money assembled . . . and I said, `Good day, sir,' " Nugent said.
In their first public comments since the operating room incident, Arndt's parents said they remembered the meeting differently, but declined to comment in detail. "It's all very complex," Kenneth Arndt said.
"I don't want to make them the villains," Nugent said of Arndt's parents. But he said he needed to cite the lack of support from them in order to persuade the state to pay for investigations and expert witnesses for David Arndt's defense - a request he says he has made for a private client only three or four times in 40 years as a defense lawyer.
Some of those funds would pay for an investigator to look into the background of the alleged teenage victim and other prosecution witnesses in an attempt to cast doubt on their credibility, he said.
Arndt's problems went from civil to criminal last September, when he was charged with child rape and indecent assault and battery. According to Middlesex County prosecutors, he spotted a 15-year-old boy on a Cambridge street near Central Square on Sept. 5 and allegedly lured him into his car.
Arndt was represented by a public defender at his arraignment. Mutual friends put him and Nugent in touch, Nugent said. Nugent said he took the case thinking Arndt's parents and friends would pay, but has now committed to representing Arndt even if it means working for free.
Nugent argues that paying for Arndt's defense, not counting attorney's fees, would cost taxpayers less than providing him with a public defender.
Nugent has had a variety of notable cases. He won acquittals for two police officers accused of murder in the shooting of a 19-year- old suspect in 1983.
In 1994, the state appeals court overturned the juvenile murder conviction of a boy accused of shooting a friend, ruling that Nugent had failed to challenge prosecution experts who said the friend could not have shot himself.
Arndt's financial situation has been the focus of questions since July 10, when he walked out of the operating room, leaving a patient with an incision in his back. According to the state medical board, Arndt told colleagues he had to cash a check because of "a financial crisis."
Later, he said a problem in his personal life had prompted the lapse.
The case has drawn attention to the need to identify doctors' personal problems early. Some of Arndt's patients have said he behaved erratically, while others said Arndt was caring and skilled and expressed shock at the allegations against him.
Arndt returned 35 minutes later and completed the surgery on Charles Algeri, who has filed a civil lawsuit against Arndt. Arndt's malpractice insurance is paying for his defense in that case, Nugent said.
The medical board suspended Arndt's medical license in August; he has vowed to fight the suspension, but has not disputed the allegations about his conduct in the operating room.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Suspended Surgeon Faces Drug Charges
By Jared Stearns
Boston Globe - August 9, 2003
The Boston orthopedic surgeon who lost his medical license after he left a patient on the operating table while he went to the bank last summer was arrested yesterday on drug possession charges.
David C. Arndt was arrested yesterday afternoon at a South End hotel, after a package that Arndt picked up was found to contain a kilo of the narcotic methamphetamine, worth about $25,000, said David Procopio, spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office.
The package, addressed to a third party in care of the Chandler Inn, was sent from Los Angeles, where postal inspectors flagged it a few days ago, said Procopio. After authorities in California obtained a search warrant, they opened it and found a paper pi nata containing the drugs, Procopio said.
Postal inspectors in California notified Boston authorities, who put the hotel under surveillance. After the package was delivered yesterday afternoon, Arndt arrived around 1:30 p.m. and asked for the package sent to the name listed, which authorities did not disclose. After Arndt picked up the package, he was arrested for possession of a Class B narcotic, with intent to distribute.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Doctor Says He Was Only Doing Favor
By Anne Barnard and John Ellement
Boston Glober - August 13, 2003
Dr. David C. Arndt, the orthopedic surgeon who left his patient on the operating table to go to the bank, plans to argue in court that he was just doing a friend a favor when he signed for a package allegedly containing a kilogram of methamphetamine shipped across the country inside a pinata, and did not know what was inside, his lawyer said yesterday.
The Harvard-trained doctor gained national notoriety last summer when his medical license was suspended for running out to go to the bank in the middle of performing spinal surgery at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. Last September, with his discipline case pending before the state medical board, he was arrested on charges of child rape for allegedly luring a Cambridge teenager into his car to have sex.
Arndt is back in jail. His arrest on drug charges Friday at a South End hotel violated the terms of his $1,000 bail agreement in Middlesex County Court. Now prosecutors in Suffolk County are asking for $50,000 bail, a sum Arndt, who has petitioned the court for financial assistance in hiring defense experts, says he does not have.
"It's a strange situation," Alfred E. Nugent, Arndt's lawyer, said yesterday. "What a story, going from a year ago being a top surgeon, to all this."
The package was delivered Friday afternoon to the Chandler Inn, addressed to a Frank Castro, prosecutors say. "We have not been able to find Frank Castro or even determine if Frank Castro actually exists," said David Procopio, spokesman for the Suffolk County District Attorney.
But Arndt, who was registered at the hotel a few blocks from his home, had told hotel staff that a Frank Castro might be meeting him or visiting him, authorities say. He signed for the package, but the signature was illegible, Procopio said.
Nugent said Arndt signed for the package, sent from Los Angeles, simply as a favor to a friend and had no idea what was inside.
Postal authorities became suspicious of the package, partly because of the return address, Procopio said, though he refused to elaborate. The address was not publicly disclosed because of the ongoing investigation. Officials said they opened it up and found the drugs. They repackaged them and sent them on, but not before setting up an undercover agent behind the hotel desk.
Arndt had traveled to California recently, Procopio said. Nugent said he makes periodic visits to the state, where he attended college in San Francisco.
Arndt was charged with possession with intent to distribute drugs, a felony.
Boston Municipal Court Judge Thomas C. Horgan yesterday ordered Arndt imprisoned for at least the next 60 days for violating bail conditions.
_________________________________________________________________________________
New York Times - September 20, 2003
NEW ENGLAND IN BRIEF / BOSTON
A Suffolk County grand jury yesterday indicted Dr. David C. Arndt on charges of receiving two pounds of methamphetamine shipped across the country inside a pinata. Arndt, the doctor who gained national attention last year after leaving a patient on the operating table at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge while he ran to the bank, was indicted on one count of possessing drugs and intending to distribute them. He was to be arraigned in Suffolk Superior Court Oct. 3. Arndt was arrested after he signed for a package containing the drugs at the Chandler Inn in the South End last month. Arndt's lawyer has said his client accepted the package for a friend, but did not know what was inside.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Suspended Doctor Arrested On Drug Charges
By Shelley Murphy
Boston Globe - June 3, 2004
David C. Arndt, the orthopedic surgeon who gained national notoriety after leaving a patient on the operating table at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge while he ran to the bank, was arrested yesterday on federal drug trafficking charges.
The two-count indictment charges Arndt, 43, of the South End, with plotting with unnamed accomplices in Boston and New York to import methamphetamine, better known as speed, into Boston between April and August of last year.
He is also charged with drug possession for signing for a package containing 2 pounds of methamphetamine while staying at the Chandler Inn in the South End last August. The drugs had been shipped from California hidden inside a pinata.
Arndt had been arrested on state drug charges last August after accepting the drug shipment, but David Procopio, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office, said the state charges will be dropped now that the case has been folded into a larger federal indictment.
"They had an investigation of a larger scope ongoing with him and it just seemed natural to incorporate our allegations into theirs," Procopio said.
While Arndt faced a maximum of five years in prison if convicted of the state charges, he now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of at least 10 years in prison if convicted of the federal charges, according to his attorney, Stephen R. Delinsky.
US Chief Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler ordered Arndt held without bail until a hearing tomorrow on the prosecution's claim that Arndt is "a serious risk of flight" and should remain jailed until his trial.
The Harvard-trained doctor had his medical license suspended after he left a patient on the operating table during spinal surgery in July 2002, while he went to a nearby bank to cash a check. Two months later, Arndt was arrested on charges of child rape for allegedly luring a 15-year-old Cambridge boy into his car to have sex.
Arndt arrived in federal court yesterday with his hands cuffed behind his back and federal deputy marshals at his side. When questioned about his employment history, he told the judge that he last worked as a spine surgeon two years ago. But, he said he was able to afford his own lawyer and did not need the court to appoint one.
By J. M. Lawrence
Boston Herald - June 4, 2004
Ex-Surgeon Gets Psychiatric Evaluation
Boston Globe - June 15, 2004
Former orthopedic surgeon David C. Arndt, who lost his medical license after leaving a patient on the operating table while he went to cash a check, has been sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for a 30-day psychiatric evaluation. Arndt, 43, of Boston's South End, who has been held without bail since his June 2 arrest on federal methamphetamine trafficking charges, was found last week in his cell at the Norfolk County Jail in Dedham huddled in a fetal position and noncommunicative, a lawyer told US Chief Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler during a sidebar conference yesterday that could be overheard by spectators.
By Shelley Murphy
Boston Globe - June 3, 2004
David C. Arndt, the orthopedic surgeon who gained national notoriety after leaving a patient on the operating table at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge while he ran to the bank, was arrested yesterday on federal drug trafficking charges.
The two-count indictment charges Arndt, 43, of the South End, with plotting with unnamed accomplices in Boston and New York to import methamphetamine, better known as speed, into Boston between April and August of last year.
He is also charged with drug possession for signing for a package containing 2 pounds of methamphetamine while staying at the Chandler Inn in the South End last August. The drugs had been shipped from California hidden inside a pinata.
Arndt had been arrested on state drug charges last August after accepting the drug shipment, but David Procopio, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office, said the state charges will be dropped now that the case has been folded into a larger federal indictment.
"They had an investigation of a larger scope ongoing with him and it just seemed natural to incorporate our allegations into theirs," Procopio said.
While Arndt faced a maximum of five years in prison if convicted of the state charges, he now faces a mandatory minimum sentence of at least 10 years in prison if convicted of the federal charges, according to his attorney, Stephen R. Delinsky.
US Chief Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler ordered Arndt held without bail until a hearing tomorrow on the prosecution's claim that Arndt is "a serious risk of flight" and should remain jailed until his trial.
The Harvard-trained doctor had his medical license suspended after he left a patient on the operating table during spinal surgery in July 2002, while he went to a nearby bank to cash a check. Two months later, Arndt was arrested on charges of child rape for allegedly luring a 15-year-old Cambridge boy into his car to have sex.
Arndt arrived in federal court yesterday with his hands cuffed behind his back and federal deputy marshals at his side. When questioned about his employment history, he told the judge that he last worked as a spine surgeon two years ago. But, he said he was able to afford his own lawyer and did not need the court to appoint one.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Postal inspector: Arndt had drugs, marijuanaBy J. M. Lawrence
Boston Herald - June 4, 2004
Out of work since he left a
patient on the operating table to cash a check, Dr. David Arndt became a
crystal meth dealer busted with 900 grams of "ice" worth more than
$100,000 and a suitcase full of marijuana and Viagra, a postal inspector
testified yesterday.
U.S. Postal Inspector Michael J. McCarran said he posed as an express mailman to catch Arndt accepting a drug shipment Aug. 8 in a box mailed from Los Angeles and addressed to Frank Castro.
"He became extremely nervous and started asking what was in the package," McCarran claimed Arndt said after he flashed his badge at the Chandler Hotel, where Arndt had a room.
Agents later searched Arndt's apartment and found a suitcase containing other drugs and drug paraphernalia.
Federal prosecutors began arguments before a magistrate yesterday to try to keep the doctor behind bars pending trial. The government claims he poses a flight risk because he faces a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years to life in prison.
The Harvard-trained spine surgeon wore an orange prisoner's jumpsuit and put his head down on the table as family members watched the hearing. His father is also a doctor.
The inspector testified that Arndt, 43, claimed Castro was a friend he met on manhunt.com, who was going to meet him at the hotel. He claimed no prior knowledge of the package.
But inspectors discovered Arndt had logged six phone calls to an 800 number to check the status of the package.
Castro is a college acquaintance of Arndt and a surgeon who was working in Knoxville, Tenn., that day, McCarran told the court.
The hearing resumes June 14.
U.S. Postal Inspector Michael J. McCarran said he posed as an express mailman to catch Arndt accepting a drug shipment Aug. 8 in a box mailed from Los Angeles and addressed to Frank Castro.
"He became extremely nervous and started asking what was in the package," McCarran claimed Arndt said after he flashed his badge at the Chandler Hotel, where Arndt had a room.
Agents later searched Arndt's apartment and found a suitcase containing other drugs and drug paraphernalia.
Federal prosecutors began arguments before a magistrate yesterday to try to keep the doctor behind bars pending trial. The government claims he poses a flight risk because he faces a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years to life in prison.
The Harvard-trained spine surgeon wore an orange prisoner's jumpsuit and put his head down on the table as family members watched the hearing. His father is also a doctor.
The inspector testified that Arndt, 43, claimed Castro was a friend he met on manhunt.com, who was going to meet him at the hotel. He claimed no prior knowledge of the package.
But inspectors discovered Arndt had logged six phone calls to an 800 number to check the status of the package.
Castro is a college acquaintance of Arndt and a surgeon who was working in Knoxville, Tenn., that day, McCarran told the court.
The hearing resumes June 14.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Boston Globe - June 15, 2004
Former orthopedic surgeon David C. Arndt, who lost his medical license after leaving a patient on the operating table while he went to cash a check, has been sent to Bridgewater State Hospital for a 30-day psychiatric evaluation. Arndt, 43, of Boston's South End, who has been held without bail since his June 2 arrest on federal methamphetamine trafficking charges, was found last week in his cell at the Norfolk County Jail in Dedham huddled in a fetal position and noncommunicative, a lawyer told US Chief Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler during a sidebar conference yesterday that could be overheard by spectators.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Arndt to undergo psychiatric evaluation
By Denis Lavoie
Associated Press - June 14, 2004
Bail denied for alleged meth-dealing troubled doc
By J. M. Lawrence
Boston Globe - August 10, 2004
ABSTRACT
[David Arndt], 43, faces a minimum 10 years in prison on charges of receiving a pink penis-shaped pinata filled with $100,000 worth of the highly addictive stimulant a year ago at a South End hotel.
After his dermatologist dad and psychologist mother bailed him out from state charges last year, Arndt still went on five meth-buying trips to New York, paying $25,500 cash per pound, government witnesses claim.
Arndt still faces charges he plied a minor with crystal meth and performed sex acts on the boy in October 2002.
By Neil Swidey
Boston Globe - March 21, 2004
The son of a prominent Boston doctor, David Arndt was on his way to becoming a leading surgeon in his own right when a bizarre blunder interrupted his climb: He left his patient on the operating table so he could cash his paycheck. A series of arrests followed, exposing a life of arrogance, betrayal, and wasted promise, leaving only one question left to answer:
The kid was born into medicine. He was on track to becoming one of Boston's next great spine surgeons, taking his place alongside his father among the city's medical elite. But on this day in January, the 43-year-old sits on the dark bench in the dimly lit gallery of Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, watching the parade of career criminals take their familiar positions, wearing expressions of defiance or boredom. Look in his eyes, however, behind the boxy glasses, and you can see flashes of bewilderment. How did I get here? He watches as a paunchy guy charged with conspiring to kill a cop asks the court officer if he can give the large, weeping woman in the front row "a kiss and my lottery tickets" before being led away. And then the clerk calls out his number: "Case number 38 - David Arndt."
As the prosecutor and the defense lawyer take their positions before the judge, Arndt advances to his designated spot in front of a tattered computer printout that reads "DEFENDANT," stooping his 6-foot-2 frame a little so his right hand can reach the railing. He is wearing a brown pin-striped suit. A taupe trench coat hangs over his left arm.
His appearance has rebounded from the unshaven, sunken-eyed mess that was on display in his mug shot last summer, though his physique is still a ways from the chiseled, rippled showpiece it was before everything fell apart. The pretrial hearing is over in just a few minutes, and he pulls his trench coat close to his chest and exits the courtroom.
You follow him into the hallway and call to him, "Dr. Arndt."The words stop him in his tracks. Dr. Arndt. For the better part of a decade, that wasn't just his name, it was his identity. The domineering surgeon cutting his path - loved by some, loathed by others. But respected. That identity has been confiscated along with everything else he valued so much - standing, status, power. Now he's just another David standing in a criminal courtroom wondering what his future holds.
He turns to look when he hears the words. But he recognizes you, throws up his hands to block his ears, shakes his head, and walks away. You suspect he'll come back. When you'd met a week earlier, in another court, in another county, he'd walked away then as well, at his lawyer's instruction, only to return and demand that you hold off on writing about him. "To do otherwise," he told you in his sonorous voice, "would be to engage in Murdoch-style journalism." You found it surprising that this man, given what he so infamously did in his operating room, not to mention what he's accused of doing in the weeks and months that followed, would choose to deliver a lecture about professional standards.
On this day in Cambridge he returns again, and the lecture is more expansive and comes with a reading list. "Are you familiar with Janet Malcolm's piece in The New Yorker entitled 'The Journalist and the Murderer'?" he asks. "It was published in two parts. Do you know her work?"
You shake your head no.
"You should," he says.
You ask him how he came across the article.
"I read," he says, narrowing his eyes. "Didn't you take any journalism courses?"
That's when, for the first time, you begin to understand the experience many of his former colleagues have described to you. Now you're the lowly scrub nurse. Or even the seasoned superior whose competence is being so pointedly challenged by Dr. David Arndt. And, just as they have explained it, he does it in a way that suggests he has no choice but to do it, and that he is confident, in the end, you will appreciate being made aware of just how far you've fallen short of his expectations.
There's an intensity to David Arndt that never seems to slacken, a way in which he seems both hyper-aware of his very public collapse and oblivious to it. Overnight, the high-octane, Harvard-trained Arndt became the doctor who left his patient on the operating table so he could go to the bank to cash a check. In an instant, that summer of 2002, the news went national. But the profound professional embarrassment would turn out to be only the beginning. Within two months, Arndt would be charged with statutory child rape, indecent assault, and drug possession. He would file a "poverty motion," the surgeon in one of medicine's most lucrative specialties asking the court to pay his costs. And then, in a separate case nearly a year later, he would face one more charge, this one for possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute.
"His downfall is almost operatic in its tragedy," says Grant Colfax, a Harvard-trained doctor who was once one of Arndt's closest friends.
As Arndt prepares to stand two separate criminal trials, Colfax is like many of the people who knew him well and are now left scratching their heads. Their emotions oscillate between two poles: There's the lingering disbelief that such a brilliant and compassionate doctor - some say the most brilliant and most compassionate they had ever known - could seem to self-destruct in such a spectacularly public way. Then, perhaps more troubling, there's that voice inside them, which had been muffled deep for so long, the one that kept telling them it was only a matter of time before David Arndt's self-absorption and sense of invincibility finally got the best of him.
David Carl Arndt was born on October 10, 1960, in New Haven. Kenneth Arndt was attending Yale medical school and living in student housing with his wife, Anne. Many of the other med students weren't even married yet, never mind parents. The couple's baby became an immediate attraction for Ken's classmates. "From the time he was extremely small, David was a very bright guy," says Jack Barchas, one of Ken's good friends at Yale and now chairman of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. "And he just radiated happiness. We'd go over there for brunch - lox and bagels - and here was this little kid, always interacting."
When David was almost 2, the Arndts packed up for Boston, so Ken could do his residency in dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. They had another child, a daughter. Ken would begin climbing the ranks of Boston medicine, joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School and eventually becoming chief of dermatology at Beth Israel Hospital. Years later, Anne, a psychologist, would also join the Harvard Med faculty. Friends describe the couple as charming, warm, stylish, and smart.
Growing up in Newton, David stood out. Extremely bright, no doubt about that. Tall, too. Kathy Sias was his neighbor and one of his best friends. She ate dinner with his family, accompanied them on ski trips to their place in New Hampshire. Longhaired David was intense and intellectual but fun to be around. What did they do together? "A lot of drugs," she says, chuckling. "Just about everybody in our clique did during those days."
She and other friends say David, who attended Weeks Junior High School in Newton and the private Cambridge School of Weston, was always pushing limits. (He kept a boa constrictor as a pet, says Sias.) They also say Anne and Ken seemed hipper and easier for teens to talk to than other parents in the neighborhood. But Sias says that as she spent more time with the family, she changed her mind. "They were as unclued-in to teenagers as most parents, but they thought they were more clued in," she says. "His father was remote. His mother thought she knew everything because she was a psychologist. 'Oh, it's just a phase,' she would say about anything going on with David."
(Through their attorney, Stephen R. Delinsky, Ken and Anne Arndt declined to comment for this story, and David declined to talk beyond his brief conversations outside of the courtroom. "Dr. Arndt's parents respect, love and admire him very much and are deeply concerned that your proposed article about David will seriously compromise his ability to achieve justice," Delinsky wrote in a letter to the Globe. The couple "are confident that when all the facts are presented in court, David will be found not guilty in both cases.")
Though David would eventually become comfortable in his homosexuality, it's not surprising that his teenage years were more difficult. "Looking back, I think he was aware of it, but I don't think he wanted to be," Sias says. "If he had admitted that he was gay, he would have probably lost a big part of his circle of friends." He dated girls, including Sias. "For about a week and a half," she says. "We went back to being best friends."
After logging time at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1978 to 1979, Arndt left the state for San Francisco. He immediately soaked up the ethos of the city - part tie-dyed Haight-Ashbury hippie, part Tales of the City free spirit. The son of Harvard faculty members enrolled in a "university without walls" college called Antioch West. The downtown school awarded students course credit for their life experience. It no longer exists. He quickly earned a bachelor's degree and became a mental health counselor, working with the homeless who, in the parlance of San Francisco, were housed in "homeless hotels." Arndt's living quarters weren't much better.
On April 7, 1982, Arndt married a woman from India named Shobha Hundraj Nagrani. They would file for divorce four years later, and it became official in December 1987. Many of his friends say they knew little about the circumstances surrounding the marriage. What they did know about Arndt during this period was that he was into writing, literature, the arts scene. He was passionate, smart, insightful, alive.
And arrogant.
"One of a kind," says Harvey Peskin, who was a professor in San Francisco State University's clinical psychology graduate program when Arndt enrolled in 1983. What set him apart was the way he put everyone around him, especially the professor, on notice. "Professors tend to believe that students have to work to earn their respect," Peskin says. "David felt that the professor was the one who had to earn the right to have his respect."
As the yearlong class wore on, Peskin, who had initially been irritated by Arndt's chutzpah, found himself wanting to pass his brilliant student's test. David Arndt has that effect on people. "I don't think his behavior changed much," Peskin says, "but I think I changed."
But Arndt would begin changing in other ways. One day in 1983, he walked into a San Francisco clinic where Stephen M. Goldfinger, a psychiatrist who oversaw mental health services for the homeless, was presiding over a case conference. Afterward, they talked, and soon they were dating and then living together. Goldfinger was 32, Arndt 23.
Arndt earned his master's degree and turned in his tie-dye for extensive travel throughout Asia, gourmet cooking, and an intensified focus on his career. He began contemplating medical school and took some supplemental pre-med classes.
It was around this time that Jack Barchas got a call from Ken Arndt. Barchas was then the director of a prestigious research laboratory at Stanford. His old Yale med school pal told him that David was living in California and for the first time was thinking about pursuing medicine. "Ken, it's probably easier for me to talk to him about it than you," Barchas said. "Have him come see me."
As it turned out, Barchas's lab had just been given a very early and crude MRI machine, which the researchers were about to experiment with using rats. Arndt volunteered to help. In no time, he had all but taken over the project. "He was like a Navy SEAL," Barchas recalls. "Just willing to do it and not waiting to be told." Arndt suggested to Barchas that they write an academic paper about their findings. When it was published, the name of David Arndt was listed first, followed by a bunch of respected researchers with actual titles after their names.
Years later, when Barchas was serving with Ken Arndt on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and he would ask about David, Ken would say, "It's all coming together for him."
In 1988, David Arndt came home. He made his way to the hallowed ground of Harvard Medical School, where his father, one of the nation's top dermatologists, was a heavyweight. If relations between him and his parents had been strained during some of his time in San Francisco, they appeared to be back on track. But David didn't advertise his connections. Occasionally, a classmate would notice the author's name on their dermatology textbook. "Kenneth A. Arndt - any relation to you?"
"Yeah, that's my father," David would reply casually.
And no one who saw David in class - with his burning intelligence and remarkable self-possession - would question whether he had the goods to get into Harvard on his own. Soon after Arndt joined the medical school's class of 1992, Steve Goldfinger joined the Harvard faculty. They shared a gracious Victorian in Jamaica Plain that was well appointed with the artwork they had collected together on their travels - Balinese puppets, Burmese wall hangings, Borneo masks. They frequently had Arndt's med school friends over for dinner or cocktail parties. What those friends saw was a couple that seemed to enjoy life and each other's company. They had a couple of dogs and a garden that Goldfinger faithfully tended to.
This is not the average med student experience. "Most of us came as unformed characters, having spent all of our time studying to get to Harvard," says Timothy Ferris, a classmate of Arndt's who is now a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. "We came as receptors of knowledge, not producers. David immediately stood out as someone who appeared to have a fully formed character. He could do the work. He was confident. Most medical students were still so afraid that they spent all their time studying. David was organizing parties. He had a life. He had a car. He had a nice house. While the rest of us were putting our personal lives on hold for four to eight years, David had balance. He was where we all hoped to be. The fact that he was gay only added to that. The most mysterious part of us - our sexuality - and here is a guy who has it all figured out."
Not that there weren't moments that gave his friends pause.
Grant Colfax appreciated Arndt's tremendous warmth and easy ability to talk intelligently about literature, politics, life. Like most of Arndt's friends, he found something magnetic about him. "But he had some clear character flaws," Colfax says. "To my dearest friend, he was outwardly rude and uninterested. He couldn't even exude the bare social graces. She asked me, 'How can you be friends with such a jerk?' I saw what she was saying, but he had always been really kind to me and fun to be around."
A few years into med school, Arndt accompanied Colfax to a gym near campus. "David was totally dismissive of the whole thing," Colfax recalls. "Then, overnight, he had to be the best." And so David Arndt, who up until this point had stood out only by what he said, also began to stand out by how he looked.
His nondescript physique was soon gone. He became even more toned as his weight training intensified during his general surgery internship at Beth Israel Hospital. On a warm spring day in 1993, Alexandra Page, a med school friend and fellow intern, had brunch with Arndt and Goldfinger. Afterward, Arndt showed her the new gym he had just switched to. "We went inside," she remembers, "and it was just flush with attractive young men."
It's only looking back now that Page can recognize that visit as a sign of trouble ahead. Goldfinger, she says, "was a wonderful guy, incredibly bright and interesting, but he wasn't an Adonis."
The relationship with Goldfinger would last through Arndt's first year of residency. But friends detected a change in Arndt's priorities, starting with his surprising choice of residency. He had always talked about neurosurgery. But when he didn't get into the Harvard neurosurgery residency program, he decided against pursuing the field elsewhere and switched gears. He secured a spot in orthopedic surgery at Harvard. In medical circles, neurosurgery has the reputation - fair or not - of attracting the intellectuals and orthopedics, the jocks. Arndt's interest in fixing other people's bones and muscles dovetailed with his growing concern with developing his own.
The breakup with Goldfinger came in the summer of 1994. They had been together for almost 11 years. Their lives were interwoven. Arndt had found someone new and wanted out. He moved into an apartment in the South End. Goldfinger had an exhaustively detailed legal agreement drawn up providing for the division of their art collection, arrangements for the care of their dogs, and a financial settlement. For more than a decade, Goldfinger would argue, he had paid for nearly all of Arndt's living, travel, and entertainment expenses (but not his tuition). The expectation had been that Arndt would absorb more of their shared costs after he entered private practice. So the most controversial provision in the agreement was this: Beginning in 1998, Arndt would be required to pay Goldfinger 9 percent of his income over the next 15 years, not to exceed $500,000. Arndt signed the agreement.
Given the punishing schedules that doctors in training are forced to endure, it's not uncommon for personal relationships to become casualties. But what Arndt's friends did find curious - alarming even - was the way he handled the breakup.
"Here David is, a very good friend of mine. I was not as close to Steve. But clearly David was the one responsible for the breakup. And David had absolutely no insight into it," says Grant Colfax. "It was all about his problems. It was shocking to me."
He and other friends began to pull back from their relationship with Arndt.
Then there was the whiplash of seeing the guys Arndt dated right after Goldfinger. "He ran around with all these Barbie doll boys," says Colfax, who is also gay and is now the director of HIV prevention studies with the San Francisco Department of Public Health. "Is that any different from a straight man who gets divorced in middle age and runs around with trophy wives? No, but it was something that was disturbing to me."
It was as though his friends were seeing a David Arndt, version 2.0 - a better-looking package but one that lacked the charm of the original release. "He once told me, 'I'm like Dorian Gray. I just get better looking as I get older,' " Colfax recalls. "It takes a certain personality to just state that. And I thought it was an interesting literary reference, considering what the novel was about."
The central character in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray manages to defy age and remain youthfully handsome. But he loses his inner compass. In the end, Dorian Gray pays dearly for his vanity.
David Arndt sounds a little too intense, a little too arrogant, ask yourself this: Aren't those exactly the qualities you want in a surgeon? Because this is what his arrogance looked like for most of his time in the operating room: An intolerance for error. An eagerness to take on the toughest cases. A fearlessness about confronting anyone - be it an orderly or a chief of surgery - who he thought was underperforming. Even as an intern, he would routinely challenge the attending physicians. "Interns are supposed to always back down, but not David," recalls Alexandra Page. "The rest of us were like, 'You go, man!' "
As an orthopedic surgical resident, Arndt would finish a grueling shift at Mass. General and then, instead of going out for a beer with his co-workers, would head back to Brigham and Women's to check on a patient he had treated during his last rotation.
Sigurd Berven, one of Arndt's fellow residents, recalls a memorable case: A teenager was rushed to the emergency room with multiple fractures to his spine and pelvis. He had jumped from the roof of a tall building. Arndt operated on him, but that was only the beginning of his care. "David was the only person who figured out why he jumped," says Berven, now a faculty member and spine surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco. Turns out the boy had just been outed at school.
This, says Berven, was typical Arndt care, no matter who the patient was. Sure, he complained a lot. "But the physicians who get angry, who are difficult to get along with, are almost invariably the physicians who really care," Berven says. He compares Arndt to Eriq La Salle's Dr. Benton character on ER and wonders if his friend's intense compassion ultimately became an unmanageable source of stress. In the face of all the defects and demands of medicine, "there's no precedent for somebody surviving in the field who cared as much as David cared."
But here's another way to view Arndt's commitment, his determination to stay involved in patients' care even after they had ceased to be his patients. "He didn't necessarily know where to draw the line," says Stephen Lipson, who was chief of orthopedics at Beth Israel during Arndt's residency. Maybe that surplus of compassion and of self-centeredness came from the same place. "He wanted to be in charge," Lipson says.
Lipson had known Ken Arndt since their residency days at Mass. General, and thought the world of him. Now, here they were, both chiefs at Beth Israel, both watching their own sons follow in their footsteps. (Lipson's son was several years behind David at Harvard Medical School.) "Ken and I had a real kinship," Lipson says.
Lipson found David to be a superior surgeon in the OR and intellectually stimulating outside of it. So he took him under his wing. While David would soar to great heights, it would be prove to be a bumpy flight.
"David wanted nothing but exceptional results," says Lipson, a soft-spoken 57-year-old who now works at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. But he says Arndt's interpersonal skills didn't always measure up, whether he was twisting around language to confuse people or tearing into them. "If a nurse was doing something and he didn't like the way it was being done - a dressing change, medications, or whatever - he might bark at them: No, you shouldn't do this! It's wrong! Do it this way! He wanted to run the show. Some nurses would go away crying." Lipson would take him aside, tell him to cool it. "But he would just commit the same flaw another time," Lipson says. "He could not turn himself off from being himself."
Lipson was particularly troubled by one area of Arndt's behavior that arose as his residency progressed. Some male orderlies and nurses were complaining that Arndt had made what they felt were inappropriate comments to them, he says. "I had to warn him not to pursue sexual interactions with other male staff," Lipson recalls. "Otherwise it was going to be a problem, and he could be chastised and reported to the administration."
But still, but still: David Arndt was an extremely gifted surgeon. Lipson found him fun to teach - he would do research on his own, push relentlessly for higher performance from everyone, especially himself. Although some of his patients were put off by his manner, most loved him - they could tell he genuinely cared about what happened to them.
And around this time, friends say, Arndt began talking about needing to get his personal life back in order so he could be a good role model - for his son. Arndt told friends that the boy had been born during his early days in San Francisco but that it was only after the boy was in his teens and wrote to Arndt that the connection was revived. Arndt kept a picture of him, proudly updated his friends on the teen's achievements in school. One time when Arndt was visiting California, Grant Colfax got a chance to meet the boy and his two female parents.
Things were coming together at work as well. As the capstone to Arndt's residency, Lipson advocated for him to be named chief resident at Beth Israel in 1997. Given his father's longstanding connections there, "it felt like home for David."
Lipson still envisioned Arndt becoming one of Boston's next top spine surgeons, if he could just keep himself in check. He helped arrange for Arndt to do his fellowship in spine surgery (the branch of orthopedics that is closest to neurosurgery) at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. When Arndt returned to Boston and began working at Harvard Vanguard and at a private group practice, Lipson sent him a steady supply of referrals - a crucial lifeline for a young doctor starting out in an over-doctored place like Boston.
Lipson and his wife, Jenifer, had always enjoyed socializing with Ken and Anne Arndt at hospital functions. "They're a nice Jewish couple," Lipson says, "and so are we." Still, his wife sensed trouble in his continued advocacy for David and cautioned him to keep his distance. Lipson would hear none of it. "I wanted to have to do with him," he says. "But my wife said, 'He's out of control.' Which, in the end, I think was true."
You want warning signs? They were there. In fact, the year 1998 was packed with them, though many of the people who worked with David Arndt wouldn't find out about them until much later.
When Arndt returned from New Orleans, Stephen Lipson asked his protege how it went. Arndt told him it went great, neglecting to mention the federal law he had broken while he was there. On May 29, Alfredo Fuentes submitted a passport application under a false name, and Arndt filed a supporting affidavit. Fuentes had been Arndt's domestic partner for several years, and he had moved with Arndt from Massachusetts to New Orleans. But Fuentes was a Venezuelan who was in the States illegally. The fraudulent passport application, Arndt would say later, was their attempt to head off deportation.
Three months later, in the early-morning hours, Fuentes was sitting on a bedroom couch talking to a man named Roger Volzer in Volzer's Provincetown home. After Volzer got up to blow out some candles, Arndt, who had been staring at the men through a window, used his surgeon's hands to rip out a screen and climb into the house, according to the Provincetown police report. Volzer would tell police that Arndt punched him in the head, pushed him out of the bedroom, and then threw a chair at him. Arndt was charged with assault and battery, burglary, and malicious destruction of property.
Volzer eventually decided not to press charges in exchange for Arndt agreeing to pay him $30,000 and to attend weekly anger-management counseling. Christopher Snow, Volzer's attorney, says Arndt's supporters lobbied his client, telling him a conviction could derail a promising medical career.
But if Arndt dodged a bullet, he hardly acted grateful during their meetings, says Snow. "In the 'if looks could kill' category, he was a murderer. He acted if the proceedings were an incredible invasion on his otherwise important life. He had absolute contempt for the fact that someone might have the audacity to hold him accountable for his bizarre and destructive behavior."
In the end, Snow has said, Arndt paid only $18,700 and failed to follow through on counseling.
In the fall of 1998, Arndt pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor passport violation in federal court in Louisiana. He was sentenced to three years' probation and fined $3,000. But because he had renewed his medical license a few months earlier, he would not have to report that conviction to Massachusetts authorities until his next renewal period two years later.
The fines and legal fees, meanwhile, were adding up. His breakup agreement with Goldfinger, the one that required Arndt to pay 9 percent of his income to his former partner, was slated to go into effect in 1998. So just when Arndt had finished up his lengthy medical training and was about to start making some real money - the 2002 median salary for spine surgeons was more than $545,000, according to the Medical Group Management Association - the financial vise was beginning to tighten.
Arndt argued in court filings that the Goldfinger agreement should be invalidated because he had signed it under duress. The case slogged through the courts and arbitration until a Superior Court judge upheld it in 2000. Goldfinger would never collect a dime.
Even with so many distractions, Arndt seemed able to wall off his personal problems from his professional work.
James A. Karlson, chief of orthopedics at Mount Auburn Hospital, had known Arndt since residency and practiced with him both at Harvard Vanguard and in their four-surgeon group practice. Arndt had privileges at most of Boston's top hospitals but began focusing his attention on Mount Auburn when the veteran spine surgeon there started to cut back. Karlson says there were a few low-level concerns about Arndt, such as tardiness, but no indication of his mounting personal problems. "He had certain problems that we didn't pick up on," Karlson says. "Should we have? 'Could we have?' is a better question."
The care of Raymond LaVallee-Davidson offered a few clues. In the summer of 2001, Arndt operated on his back at New England Baptist Hospital. LaVallee-Davidson says Arndt told him the surgery would take about eight hours. It took 18, and even after that, Arndt told him he had been unable to finish the job. Because LaVallee-Davidson suffered serious complications, it wasn't until December that follow-up surgery was scheduled at Mount Auburn. Just after 6 o'clock on the morning of surgery, he was being prepped by hospital staff and about to be anesthetized. "I had asked them to hold off, because I had a few questions I wanted to ask Dr. Arndt before I went under," the 44-year-old recalls. Four and a half hours later, hospital staff told him they had been unable to locate Arndt, and so LaVallee-Davidson got dressed and made the four-hour drive back to his home in Skowhegan, Maine. Four days later, he says, he got a call from Arndt saying he had overslept. LaVallee-Davidson, who says that initially he found Arndt to be "probably one of the most compassionate people I have ever met," is now among Arndt's former patients suing him for malpractice.
Early on the morning of July 10, 2002, Charles Algeri, a former Waltham cabdriver with a history of back problems, arrived at Mount Auburn Hospital and was prepped for fusion surgery on his lumbar spine. Algeri says Arndt arrived late and unshaven, with dark circles under his eyes. "He said his car had been towed because he had parked in a bus stop," Algeri says.
Like most of the cases Arndt took on, the surgery for Algeri would be a complex, all-day affair. According to state investigative reports and interviews with some of the people involved, this is what happened: The first incision was made around 11 a.m. In the OR during the afternoon, Arndt twice asked the circulating nurse to call his office and ask if "Bob" had arrived. By the second call, the receptionist informed the nurse that "Bob" was Arndt's code name for his paycheck and told her to tell Arndt the check would be delivered to him there.
Just before 6 p.m., Leo Troy, one of Arndt's fellow orthopedic surgeons from their private practice, was passing by the front desk near the operating room when a secretary asked him if he could take the check to Arndt in the OR. Troy had a few minutes before he was scheduled to operate on another patient, so he had planned to look in on Arndt anyway. He went into the OR, handed Arndt the check, and then observed the surgery for a couple of minutes. Then, Arndt asked him if he would watch his patient for "about five minutes." At the time, Arndt was about seven hours into the surgery. Algeri was under anesthesia and had an open incision in his back. It's not unusual for surgeons doing long procedures like this one to step out to use the bathroom. Although he is not a spine surgeon, Troy says he had assisted Arndt before and was "qualifed to close up the patient in an emergency." Arndt then turned to a salesman from a medical device supplier - sales reps often sit in on complex surgeries in case there are questions about the equipment - and said, "Let's go."
A few minutes later, a nurse walked into the OR and asked where Arndt was. Told he had stepped out for a few minutes, she said, "I bet he went to the bank." She had apparently overheard Arndt talking about it earlier. Troy and the rest of the OR staff were incredulous. They tried paging Arndt. Hospital administrators were notified. The decision was made to wait for Arndt to return and, if he didn't come in a timely manner, to try to find a spine surgeon from another hospital. Troy, who calls Arndt an excellent surgeon, says he never had any doubt that he would return.
And he did. Thirty-five minutes later. He admitted he had gone to the bank, and the OR staff said he seemed surprised that they would be upset with him. He finished the surgery about two hours later. Mount Auburn suspended Arndt's privileges the next day, and after an internal review process, the suspension was reported to the state medical licensing board.
"This has got to be a joke," Nancy Achin Audesse said after the report hit her desk.
It was July 25, 2002. Audesse is the executive director of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. By the summer of 2002, she was more than familiar with the name David Arndt. The board's year-plus investigation into Arndt's conviction on the passport violation was wrapping up. (He would get a formal reprimand.) He told the board he had no choice but to lie - if he didn't, he said, his partner would have been deported to Venezuela, where he said wealthy homosexuals are persecuted and killed. "He was always presenting himself as the victim," Audesse says.
Still, the reason for his suspension from Mount Auburn was so outlandish that she was convinced someone was putting her on. He left his patient in the middle of surgery to go cash a check at the bank?
After doing a round of interviews - Arndt told an investigator he had some "overdue bills" and needed to get to the bank before it closed at 7 p.m. - the medical board voted on August 7 to suspend his license. Audesse issued a press release.
At 7 a.m. the following day, she was sitting in her dentist's chair, getting extensive work done. At 9 a.m., she called her assistant, who was panicked. "You have to get in here now," she told Audesse. "This place is crawling with TV news crews!"
"This story went national so fast," Audesse recalls. "I did 16 straight interviews, numb and drooling."
In the public, the jokes spread - A Harvard doctor, and he never heard of direct deposit? And then the conjecture - Overdue bills? Who insists on cash these days besides drug dealers and bookies?
As for Arndt's patient, Algeri had no idea what had happened until he got a call from Mount Auburn officials the day before the news was going to break. Told that Arndt had left him during surgery to go to Harvard Square, Algeri, a 6-foot-5, 315-pound guy who sports a Bruins baseball cap, a goatee, and a ready laugh, replied, "What, for a cappuccino?" He watched the media circle around Arndt for a week before coming forward with his lawyer, Marc Breakstone, who later filed a malpractice suit.
For a doctor who had always craved attention, David Arndt suddenly had more than even he had ever wanted. The news, when it found its way to his med school friends scattered across the country, took the wind right out of them. They had a feeling Arndt would cause a stir wherever he went, maybe put his career in jeopardy by telling off a hospital chief. But this?
Nearly two years later, Alexandra Page still keeps a newspaper clipping about the interrupted surgery on the desk in her office outside San Diego. It's yellowed now, but when she refers to it during an interview, it produces fresh tears. "We all make mistakes," she says, "but this was so heinous, so volitional. I'm just aching for him, for whatever must have happened in his life that caused him to do this."
During his interview, Sigurd Berven breaks down at the same point. Same with another friend of Arndt's from med school, Saiya Remmler, who is now a psychiatrist in Lexington. "What could be more important? You know, the guy's on the table," Remmler says. "To this day, I don't know how anyone could do that, let alone one of my classmates."
But then how to explain Remmler's reaction when she first read about the incident, how she put down the newspaper, turned to her husband, and said, "It doesn't surprise me." Remmler says that Arndt was funny, charming, and "really smart. I felt lucky to have him as a classmate." But, she adds, "he was also really narcissistic, and I guess I knew there was this compulsive streak about him - addictive almost. And so deciding his needs are more important than his patient's life - that sounds narcissistic to me."
About a month after news about the check cashing broke came another bombshell. Arndt would be charged with four counts of statutory child rape and one count each of indecent assault and battery, drugging a person for sexual intercourse, contributing to the delinquency of a child, and possession of the drugs ketamine hydrochloride ("Special K") and methamphetamine. Middlesex County prosecutors allege that on September 5, Arndt was driving through Central Square in Cambridge and stopped to invite two boys, ages 15 and 14, into his car to get high. Then, they allege, after dropping off the 14-year-old, he had sex in his car with the 15-year-old. The boys waited four days before contacting police. They said that Arndt had given them his cellphone number and told them his name was David. According to court records, when police dialed the number, Arndt answered, and he later admitted to having the boys in his car but said he had no physical contact aside from brushing one of the boys on the shoulder.
Soon after came Arndt's "poverty motion," asking the court to pay his costs because, according to his lawyer, he was indigent and his parents needed to save for their retirement. (His parents disputed the lawyer's account; he is now gone, and their lawyer, Stephen Delinsky of Eckert Seamans, is representing their son.)
Then, in August 2003, almost a year to the day after he first made headlines, Arndt made a splash again. He was arrested on August 8 and charged with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute. According to the postal inspector's report and other court records, on the morning of August 7, Arndt reserved a room at the Chandler Inn in Boston's South End for that night and asked that a party by the name of Frank Castro be added to his reservation. He also asked if any packages for him or his guest had arrived. Around 8:30 p.m., Arndt checked in to Room 501 but apparently didn't stay there that night. Around 1:30 p.m. the next day, Arndt appeared at the front desk. Told that a package had arrived for Room 501 but that it was not in his name, Arndt signed for it and took possession of it. What he didn't know was that, the day before, postal inspectors in Los Angeles had found the 6-pound Express Mail package addressed to Frank Castro c/o the Chandler Inn suspicious enough to get a federal warrant. Inside the box, they found a large, pink penis-shaped pinata. Inside the pinata, they found about 2 pounds of a white crystalline substance that tested positive for methamphetamine. That discovery led to a sting operation at the Chandler Inn, which in turn led to Arndt standing in Room 501, sweating profusely, trying to explain himself to a postal inspector.
The postal inspector reported that Arndt told him he had met Frank Castro online a few months earlier. When authorities went to Arndt's apartment in the South End, a man identifying himself as Alfredo Fuentes told them he and Arndt used to be partners but were now just roommates. He said Arndt knew a Frank Castro from med school.
In fact, authorities were able to track down Frank Castro, an orthopedic surgeon. Castro and his office manager explained that he had been in surgery in Tennessee for the entire time of the incident. Informed of the parcel containing narcotics that had been addressed to him, Castro told the inspector that of the few people he knew in Boston, "only one could be desperate enough to do something like that." David Arndt. He said he and Arndt had been friends since they were lab partners during their pre-med days in San Francisco but had not been in touch in some time.
David Procopio, spokesman for the Suffolk County district attorney's office, says that while the investigation is ongoing, Castro has been cooperative and "the only person against whom charges are warranted, according to the evidence now in our possession, is David Arndt."
Because of the new charges, Arndt was found to have violated his bail on the Cambridge case and it was revoked. (Earlier in the summer, Arndt had been found at Logan Airport carrying at least $12,000 in cash and his passport. The passport was revoked, but he was allowed to travel in the United States.) He would eventually be released, after posting $50,000 cash bail. But for two months, home for the surgeon and son of privilege was a cell in the Nashua Street Jail.
One weekend after the blizzard of headlines, Stephen and Jenifer Lipson went out to brunch and bumped into Ken and Anne Arndt. (Ken, by this time, had left his post at Beth Israel for a private practice in Chestnut Hill.) "We sat at our separate table, formally said hello to one another," Lipson recalls. "But clearly nobody wanted to talk about David. It was too sensitive."
What does Lipson think happened to his protege? "I think somehow he got involved in drugs and it ate him alive and he went over the edge," he says. "Beyond that I don't have an answer. And it's a shame."
If, as friends say, David Arndt has always viewed himself as the star of his own drama, what, in the end, drives the story line?
Is his a story of downfall by drugs?
It should be noted that neither of Arndt's criminal cases has yet gone to trial, and he has pleaded not guilty to all charges. But if the allegations turn out to be true, he would hardly be the first hard-driving doctor to get wildly off track because of a substance abuse problem. John Fromson is a Harvard psychiatrist and president of Physician Health Services, the Massachusetts Medical Society offshoot that provides support and monitoring services for doctors battling substance abuse and mental health difficulties. Confidentiality rules prevent him from discussing any one case, or even confirming a particular doctor's involvement with the program. But he has gained considerable insight from overseeing a program that has worked with about 2,000 Massachusetts doctors over the last 10 years.
This is not a great time to be a doctor. More than 40 percent of physicians surveyed in 2001 said they wouldn't go into medicine if they had to do it over again. With increased productivity demands and a tightening financial squeeze, doctors are under tremendous stress, and more of them are turning to drugs and alcohol for relief. An estimated 8 to 14 percent of physicians have a substance abuse problem. In Massachusetts, surgeons are among the most affected.
Fromson ticks off the warning signs: verbally abusive behavior, tardiness, unexcused absences, inappropriate sexual behavior. The signs of strain tend to come first in a doctor's personal life. "When things happen at the workplace," he says, "usually they have been going on for a long time." Even then, he says, the problem may not be confronted, because most doctors are self-employed and only loosely supervised, and hospital management is often hesitant to call doctors on questionable behavior for fear that they will take their patient base to a hospital across town.
All of this means a doctor's substance abuse problem can go unchecked and then trigger a downward spiral.
And if the drug of choice is crystal meth, or speed as it's also known, the narcotic at the center of Arndt's charges, the spiral can move at dizzying speeds. In his job with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Grant Colfax has done some pioneering research documenting the prevalence of speed in the gay community. "For many gay men, crystal meth has just completely destroyed them," he says. "People bottom out. It's a question of how far down you've fallen, and if you can get back up."
"If you look at David's personality, speed is the dream drug," Colfax says. "It makes you feel invulnerable."
At some point in conversations about him, just about all of Arndt's friends and colleagues use that word or others like it to describe him and his self-image. Bulletproof. Subject to his own rules. Unbreakable.
Ultimately, that's what makes the drugs explanation, on its own, unsatisfying. After all, the same description fit him even during the long periods in his life when he was clearly not using drugs. Friends were often driven to distraction by Arndt's sense of invulnerability and need for control. But they also saw how those traits could be attractive, especially for patients in need - spurring him to take on the most challenging cases, to fight the toughest battles on their behalf.
But what happens if that need to be in control becomes more important than anything else? "David wanted people to pay attention to him and notice him," says Saiya Remmler, the psychiatrist and former med school friend. "To me, it sounds like a gradual, maybe even lifelong, struggle between greatness and tragic flaws." And what might be at the center of this Greek tragedy? She and other physicians who knew Arndt but haven't seen him in years suggest narcissistic personality disorder, where an exaggerated sense of self-importance masks a chronic emptiness.
Then again, only the star of this drama knows the full story.
You do as he tells you. And he is right. The Journalist and the Murderer is a gripping piece of nonfiction. (The original New Yorker piece was published in book form in 1990.) It examines the dance between a controversial figure and a journalist trying to persuade him to share his story - one that is always something of a tango through a minefield. The relationship at the center of Janet Malcolm's book is the one between Fatal Vision author Joe McGinniss and convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. The first sentence of the book is a pretty clear preview of the analysis Malcolm will render: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." To be sure, the field of journalism is ill served by the selection of McGinniss as its emissary. This, after all, is a writer who, according to Malcolm, entered into a revenue-sharing arrangement with his subject and then peppered him for years with flattering, deceptive letters before crucifying him in the pages of his book.
The Journalist and the Murderer, David Arndt tells you, provides insight into his decision not to speak to you at length. It's hard to miss the casting choice he is suggesting for you in the role of this ethically challenged journalist. But his literary reference cuts both ways. After all, the other part to be cast is that of MacDonald, the physician convicted of murdering his wife, two daughters, and unborn son and implausibly blaming the carnage on a band of marauding drugged-out hippies.
In a way, the most thought-provoking portions of Malcolm's book do not involve her indictment of McGinniss but rather her own admissions. She concedes that it was easier to come down hard on McGinniss after he shut off communication with her early on.
Your own mind returns to the conversations you had with Arndt before he, too, stopped talking. "You have no idea what my life is like now," he says in the hall of the Cambridge court. "If you talk to anyone who knew me after residency, you know I am an excellent surgeon. I can no longer do what I do best, through a series of circumstances, some of them perhaps my own doing."
And then, as if on cue, his call for compassion is dislodged by a reassertion of control. "You must not do this story," he says. When you remind him that he can't control whether the story is written, but only how complete it is, he shakes his head. "You can control anything you want," he says.
How?
"Don't turn it in."
Anne Barnard of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Neil Swidey can be reached at swidey@globe.com.
Surgeon Left In Midst Of Operation: Dotor Departed In Scheduled Break
By Scott Allen
Boston Globe - April 22, 2005
A prominent plastic surgeon has been reprimanded and indefinitely suspended by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center after he left a patient in the middle of an operation to perform surgery down the street at another hospital. Dr. Joseph Upton, who specializes in complex hand surgeries, has voluntarily agreed to stop practicing medicine until at least May 4 while state regulators investigate whether he has double-booked operations on other occasions.
Beth Israel officials said Upton left an adult male patient during a scheduled break in a lengthy operation on March 17 and returned before the procedure was scheduled to resume. However, they said he failed to properly notify the operating room team that he was leaving and didn't arrange for another attending surgeon to take his place in case there were complications during the break.
"Though no harm to the patient occurred and the surgery was completed on schedule, the medical center leadership took this breach of policy very seriously and immediately launched its own internal investigation," said a statement issued by Dr. Michael Epstein, chief operating officer of Beth Israel Deaconess. He said Upton has not been allowed to admit new patients or visit existing ones since April 8.
Upton's operating room breach bears a surface similarity to the 2002 case of Dr. David Arndt, whose license was suspended after he left a patient on the operating table to go to the bank to cash a check.
Upton's lawyer, William J. Dailey Jr., bristled at any comparison. He said Upton left Beth Israel only to operate on a child at Children's Hospital Boston. "There was no personal gain to Dr. Upton, none whatsoever," Dailey said. "It was solely an effort to assist a child and a child's family that was in need."
Neither patient was harmed, he added.
Children's Hospital spokeswoman Michelle Davis also stood by Upton, saying, "He's been on staff here since 1977, and he's a very accomplished physician."
However, the incident was serious enough to prompt Beth Israel to report it to the Board of Registration in Medicine, which regulates doctors. The board persuaded Upton to give up his medical license until at least May 4, the date of the next scheduled board meeting, so that investigators can look at his broader practices.
"There was no allegation of harm or substandard care," acknowledged board director Nancy Achin Audesse, "but it's important to know [that] when the ethical and professional conduct of a physician is impugned and when that conduct undermines public confidence in the profession, that conduct will result in discipline."
During nearly 30 years as a surgeon, Upton has won fame for carrying out complex, sometimes groundbreaking operations. In 1983, he led a team that reattached the arm of a man injured in a car accident. In 1997, he carried out a nerve transplant on a 1-year- old girl at Children's Hospital, the youngest nerve recipient ever at the time. He also worked with tissue-engineering pioneer Dr. Joseph Vacanti to implant a lab-grown rib cage in a teenage boy born without cartilage or bones on one side.
On March 17, according to Beth Israel officials, Upton was leading a team carrying out reconstructive hand surgery that took so many hours that they planned multiple breaks of 45 to 60 minutes each, so that they could restore blood circulation to prevent tissue damage. During a break, Upton left for Children's Hospital down the street on Longwood Avenue where he had agreed to perform surgery on a child before the family left for a vacation.
At Beth Israel, Upton left medical residents, doctors still completing their training, in charge of the operating room while he was away, which Beth Israel officials said is a violation of the hospital's policy that an attending surgeon must be "immediately available" to the patient throughout an operation.
Initially, the chief of surgery orally reprimanded Upton and told him his future work would be carefully monitored. However, the department of surgery then suspended him for two weeks, starting April 8, and forwarded the complaint to the Medical Executive Committee, which oversees quality control at the hospital. On April 20, the executive committee continued Upton's suspension indefinitely.
In addition, the hospital notified the Beth Israel patient of what had happened and filed a report with the Department of Public Health, which has now launched its own investigation into whether Beth Israel put the patient at risk.
Surgeon indicted on drug charges
Associated Press - June 3, 2004
A former surgeon who was suspended after leaving a patient on the operating table while he ran to the bank was arrested Wednesday on drug charges.
David Arndt, 44, was arrested near his Boston home. The indictment charges him with possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine and conspiracy to possess and distribute methamphetamine.
Arndt was arraigned last August on state methamphetamine possession charges stemming from the same case. Suffolk County prosecutors will now dismiss their charges so the case can proceed in federal court, said David Procopio, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office.
Arndt gained local infamy in July 2002, when he left a patient on the operating table during a back operation at Cambridge's Mount Auburn Hospital while he deposited a check. His license was suspended a month later and the license expired in October 2002.
He was also indicted in October 2002 for allegedly raping and assaulting a 15-year-old boy in Cambridge. He pleaded innocent in the case, which is still pending.
The new federal indictment alleges that between April 2003 and August 2003 in Boston, New York City and other parts of Massachusetts, Arndt conspired to obtain and sell methamphetamine.
It also alleges he was caught with at least 50 grams of methamphetamine in August 2003.
Following an initial appearance in U.S. District Court Wednesday, Arndt was being held pending a detention hearing, scheduled for Friday.
By Denis Lavoie
Associated Press - June 14, 2004
BOSTON -- A
surgeon who lost his license after leaving a Waltham man on the
operating table while he went to the bank is being evaluated at
Bridgewater State Hospital after he was found huddled in a fetal
position in his jail cell.
David Arndt, an orthopedic surgeon, was due in federal court yesterday for a hearing on whether he should remain behind bars while he awaits trial on drug charges.
The hearing, though, was continued until Friday after his lawyer, Stephen Delinsky, and prosecutors told the judge that Arndt was moved last week from the Norfolk County jail in Dedham to Bridgewater.
Arndt disappeared for more than a half hour in the middle of a July 2002 back surgery on Charles Algeri of Waltham. Algeri has linked back pain and other problems since the procedure to Arndt's actions.
The lawyers would not comment after the hearing. But during the hearing they discussed Arndt's condition in hushed tones during a sidebar discussion with U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler. They could be overheard saying that a psychiatrist was called after Arndt was found in a fetal position and uncommunicative in his cell.
Bowler questioned the attorneys about whether Arndt should be moved from the state hospital in Bridgewater to a federal facility.
Bowler said that on Friday she wanted a status report on Arndt's condition.
Federal prosecutors want to keep Arndt behind bars while he awaits trial on the drug charges, claiming that he may flee because he faces a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years to life in prison.
Arndt lost his medical license after the operating room incident. According to a state investigation, Arndt acknowledged making a 35-minute trip to the bank during the surgery at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.
Three months later, Arndt was indicted for allegedly raping and assaulting a 15-year-old boy in Cambridge. He pleaded not guilty in the case, which is still pending.
In August, Arndt was arrested after he allegedly accepted a package containing 900 grams of crystal methamphetamine worth more than $100,000.
Arndt claimed to have no knowledge of what was in the package. But inspectors found that Arndt had made six phone calls to an 800 number to check on its status.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ordered Arndt moved from the Norfolk jail to a facility with "intensive psychiatric care" after reviewing a doctor's report on Arndt's condition, federal court records indicated.
The defendant had his initial appearance before this court on June 2, 2004. He was represented by retained counsel.1 The government moved to detain the defendant on the grounds that there is no condition or combination of conditions that will reasonably assure (1) the safety of any other person and the community and (2) the appearance of the defendant. 18 U.S.C. §§ 3142 (f)(1)(B), (f)(1)(C) and (f)(2)(A). The government moved for a three day continuance and a detention hearing was scheduled before this court on June 4, 2004.
albeit not the same attorney at each hearing. At the time of the issuance of this ORDER the docket reflects that three attorneys appear as counsel of record. Each of them appeared either alone or with another at the various hearings between June 2, 2004 and June 28, 2004.
2
7 The information in this section is a compilation of material gathered by Pretrial Services and submissions of the defendant to this court including the defendant’s curriculum vitae.
10
15
29
33
16 His privileges at the Mount Auburn Hospital were summarily suspended on July 11, 2002, according to Defendant’s Exhibit # B.
37
David Arndt, an orthopedic surgeon, was due in federal court yesterday for a hearing on whether he should remain behind bars while he awaits trial on drug charges.
The hearing, though, was continued until Friday after his lawyer, Stephen Delinsky, and prosecutors told the judge that Arndt was moved last week from the Norfolk County jail in Dedham to Bridgewater.
Arndt disappeared for more than a half hour in the middle of a July 2002 back surgery on Charles Algeri of Waltham. Algeri has linked back pain and other problems since the procedure to Arndt's actions.
The lawyers would not comment after the hearing. But during the hearing they discussed Arndt's condition in hushed tones during a sidebar discussion with U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler. They could be overheard saying that a psychiatrist was called after Arndt was found in a fetal position and uncommunicative in his cell.
Bowler questioned the attorneys about whether Arndt should be moved from the state hospital in Bridgewater to a federal facility.
Bowler said that on Friday she wanted a status report on Arndt's condition.
Federal prosecutors want to keep Arndt behind bars while he awaits trial on the drug charges, claiming that he may flee because he faces a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years to life in prison.
Arndt lost his medical license after the operating room incident. According to a state investigation, Arndt acknowledged making a 35-minute trip to the bank during the surgery at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge.
Three months later, Arndt was indicted for allegedly raping and assaulting a 15-year-old boy in Cambridge. He pleaded not guilty in the case, which is still pending.
In August, Arndt was arrested after he allegedly accepted a package containing 900 grams of crystal methamphetamine worth more than $100,000.
Arndt claimed to have no knowledge of what was in the package. But inspectors found that Arndt had made six phone calls to an 800 number to check on its status.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ordered Arndt moved from the Norfolk jail to a facility with "intensive psychiatric care" after reviewing a doctor's report on Arndt's condition, federal court records indicated.
_________________________________________________________________________________
United States of America V. David Carl Arndt
August 8, 2004
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
CRIMINAL ACTION NO. 04-10166-RGS
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
v.
DAVID CARL ARNDT
MEMORANDUM AND ORDER ON GOVERNMENT'S
MOTION FOR DETENTION
AUGUST 8, 2004
BOWLER, Ch.U.S.M.J.
On or about, June 2, 2004, defendant David Carl Arndt (the "defendant"), was arrested pursuant to a two count Indictment
returned in this district on May 27, 2004. In Count One the defendant is charged with conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine in violation of Title 21, United States Code, Section 846. Count Two charges the defendant with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute in violation of Title 21, United States Code, Section 841 (a)(1). In addition the defendant is subject to the forfeiture provisions of Title 21, United States Code, Section
853.
The defendant had his initial appearance before this court on June 2, 2004. He was represented by retained counsel.1 The government moved to detain the defendant on the grounds that there is no condition or combination of conditions that will reasonably assure (1) the safety of any other person and the community and (2) the appearance of the defendant. 18 U.S.C. §§ 3142 (f)(1)(B), (f)(1)(C) and (f)(2)(A). The government moved for a three day continuance and a detention hearing was scheduled before this court on June 4, 2004.
On that date this court commenced a hearing on the issue of detention. The defendant was represented by retained counsel.
The government called one witness speaking to the issue of detention. At the conclusion of the first day of testimony the hearing was continued until June 14, 2004, by agreement of counsel. On that date the matter was continued until June 18, 2004, by agreement of counsel. On June 18, 2004, counsel sought a further continuance until June 22, 2004.
This court heard further testimony on June 22 and June 28, 2004. The defendant did not call witnesses. At the conclusion 1Throughout the proceedings the defendant has been represented by retained counsel,
albeit not the same attorney at each hearing. At the time of the issuance of this ORDER the docket reflects that three attorneys appear as counsel of record. Each of them appeared either alone or with another at the various hearings between June 2, 2004 and June 28, 2004.
2
of the testimony on June 28, 2004, this court took the issue of detention under advisement.
DISCUSSION
I. A. Under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 3142(c), "[t]he
judicial officer may not impose a financial condition that
results in the pretrial detention of the person." Thus, a
defendant must be released under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. §
3142(b) or (c), or be detained pending trial under the provisions
of 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e) and after a hearing pursuant to 18 U.S.C.
§ 3142(f). See 18 U.S.C. § 3142(a).
Under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e), a defendant may be ordered detained pending trial if the judicial officer finds one of the
following three conditions to be true that: (1) by clear and convincing evidence, after a detention hearing under the provisions of § 3142(f), ". . . no condition or combination of
conditions (set forth under 18 U.S.C.§ 3142(b) or (c)) will reasonably assure the safety of any other person or the community
. . .;" (2) by a preponderance of the evidence, after a detention hearing under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 3142(f), ". . . no
condition or combination of conditions (set forth under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(b) or (c)) will reasonably assure the appearance of the
person as required . . .;" or (3) there is a serious risk the
3
defendant will flee.2 This determination is made by the court at
the conclusion of a detention hearing.
3 Section 3156 of Title 18 of the United States Code defines a crime of violence as:
(A) an offense that has as an element of the offense the use, attempted
use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another, or
(B) any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.
B. The government is entitled to move for detention in a case that:
(1) involves a crime of violence within the meaning of 18
U.S.C. § 3156(a)(4);3
(2) involves an offense punishable by death or life
imprisonment;
(3) involves an offense prescribed by the Controlled
Substances Act or the Controlled Substances Import and Export Act
for which the maximum authorized punishment is imprisonment for
2 The distinction between the former and the latter are made clear by the very language of 18
U.S.C. § 3142(f). In the last paragraph of that section, Congress has stated there must be clear
and convincing evidence to authorize pretrial detention when the question is whether any
condition or combination of conditions "will reasonably assure the safety of any other person and
the community . . .." (Latter emphasis added.) By not requiring that same standard vis a vis an
assessment of risk of flight, it is clear that a lesser standard--i.e., preponderance of the evidence--
applied. That is precisely the holding in the Second Circuit. See e.g., United States v. Jackson,
823 F.D. 4, 5 (D.C.Cir. 1987); United States v. Berrios-Berrios, 791 F.2d 246, 250 (2d Cir.
1986), cert. dismissed, 107 S.Ct. 562 (1986); see also United States v. Patriarca, 948 F.2d 789,
792 (1st Cir. 1991).
3 Section 3156 of Title 18 of the United States Code defines a crime of violence as:
(A) an offense that has as an element of the offense the use, attempted
use, or threatened use of physical force against the person or property of another, or
(B) any other offense that is a felony and that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.
18 U.S.C. § 3156(a)(4).
4
ten years or more;4 or
(4) involves any felony alleged to have been committed
5
(4) involves any felony alleged to have been committed
after the defendant has been convicted of two or more crimes of
violence, or of a crime, the punishment for which is death or
life imprisonment, or a ten year [or more] offense under the
Controlled Substances Act or the Controlled Substances Import and
Export Act.
Additionally, the government or the court sua sponte may
move for, or set, a detention hearing where there is a serious
risk of flight, or a serious risk of obstruction of justice or
threats to potential witnesses. See 18 U.S.C. § 3142(f).
C. In determining whether there are conditions of release
which will reasonably assure the appearance of the person and the
safety of any other person and the community, this court must
take into account:
(1) the nature and circumstances of the offense
charged, including whether the offense is a crime
of violence or involves a narcotic drug;
(2) the weight of the evidence against the
accused;
(3) the history and characteristics of the person,
including--
4 The maximum penalty is that provided by the statute defining and/or providing the
punishment for the substantive offense--not the sentence, or even the maximum sentence, which
might otherwise be imposed under the federal Sentencing Guidelines. See United States v.
Moss, 887 F.2d 333, 336-7 (1st Cir. 1989).
5
(A) his character, physical and mental
condition, family ties, employment, financial
resources, length of residence in the
community, community ties, past conduct,
history relating to drug or alcohol abuse,
criminal history, and record concerning
appearance at court proceedings; and
(B) whether, at the time of the current
offense or arrest, he was on probation, on
parole, or other release pending trial,
sentencing, appeal, or completion of sentence
for an offense under Federal, State or local
law; and
(4) the nature and seriousness of the danger to
any other person or the community that would be
posed by the person's release.
18 U.S.C. § 3142(g).
D. The burden of persuasion remains with the government to
establish "that no condition or combination of conditions will
reasonably assure the appearance of the person as required and
the safety of any other person and the community." The burden
then rests on the defendant to come forward with evidence
indicating that these general findings are not applicable to him
for whatever reason advanced. The government must satisfy its
position with respect to risk of flight by a preponderance of the
evidence and with respect to dangerousness by clear and
convincing evidence. See supra footnote 3. This court must then
weigh all relevant factors [set forth under § 3142(g)] and
determine whether "any condition or combination of conditions
will reasonably assure the appearance of the [defendant] as
6
required and the safety of any other person and the community."
The decision is an individualized one based on all relevant
factors. United States v. Patriarca, 948 F.2d 789, 794 (1st
Cir. 1991); see United States v. Jessup, 757 F.2d 378, 387-88
(1st Cir. 1985).
Moreover, one may be considered a danger to the community
even in the absence of a finding by clear and convincing evidence
that the accused will engage in physical violence. Conversely,
as noted by the Committee on the Judiciary (Report of the
Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate), on S. 215.
98th Congress, Report No. 98-147 (May 25, 1983):
The concept of defendant's dangerousness is described throughout this chapter by the term "safety of
any other person or the community."
The reference to safety of any other person is intended to cover the situation in which the safety of a
particular identifiable individual, perhaps a victim or witness, is of concern, while the language referring
to the safety of the community refers to the danger that the defendant might engage in criminal activity to the
detriment of the community. The Committee intends that the concern about safety be given a broader construction
than merely danger of harm involving physical violence.... The Committee also emphasizes that the risk that a defendant will continue to engage in
drug trafficking constitutes a danger to the "safety of any other person or the community."
Id. (Emphasis added; footnotes omitted); see United States v.
7
Patriarca, 948 F.2d 789, 792, n.2 (1st Cir. 1991) (danger to
community does not refer only to risk of physical violence); see
also United States v. Tortora, 922 F.2d 880, 884 (1st Cir. 1990)
(stating danger in context of 18 U.S.C. § 3142(g) not meant to
refer only to physical violence); United States v. Hawkins, 617
F.2d 59 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 962 (1980)
(trafficking in controlled substances).5
5 A defendant may be ordered detained as a danger to the safety of another or to the community, however, only if the judicial officer determines that a detention hearing is appropriate under the provisions of moved under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(f)(l), and the judicial officer has determined that a hearing is appropriate under that latter section. See United States v. Ploof, 851 F.2d 7 (1st Cir. 1988).
6 The presumption reflects Congressional findings that persons who deal in drugs often have the necessary resources and foreign ties to escape to other countries. United States v. Palmer- Contreras, 835 F.2d 15, 17 (1st Cir. 1987) (per curiam). Consequently, imposing "a large bond is often ineffective in deterring flight." United States v. Perez-Franco, 839 F.2d 867, 869-70 (1st
8
The issue critical to determining whether to detain a
defendant is therefore, whether, with respect to the defendant,
based on the guidelines set forth supra in part C of this Order,
any condition or combination of conditions of release exist that
will reasonably assure the safety of any person and the community
and the presence of the defendant. 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e).
E. "Where, as here, a defendant is charged with a
controlled substance offense punishable by a maximum term of 10
years or more, the government is aided by § 3142(e)'s rebuttable
flight presumption."6 United States v. Palmer-Contreras, 835
5 A defendant may be ordered detained as a danger to the safety of another or to the community, however, only if the judicial officer determines that a detention hearing is appropriate under the provisions of moved under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(f)(l), and the judicial officer has determined that a hearing is appropriate under that latter section. See United States v. Ploof, 851 F.2d 7 (1st Cir. 1988).
6 The presumption reflects Congressional findings that persons who deal in drugs often have the necessary resources and foreign ties to escape to other countries. United States v. Palmer- Contreras, 835 F.2d 15, 17 (1st Cir. 1987) (per curiam). Consequently, imposing "a large bond is often ineffective in deterring flight." United States v. Perez-Franco, 839 F.2d 867, 869-70 (1st
8
F.2d 15, 17 (1st Cir. 1987) (per curiam). The presumption is not
limited to risk of flight. Rather, the presumption has two
components. One component is that the person poses a risk of
flight and the second component is that the person "represents a
danger to the community." United States v. Moss, 887 F.2d 333,
335 n.3 (1st Cir. 1989) (per curiam).
Thus, under section 3142(e) the judicial officer must
consider the rebuttable presumption that no condition or
combination of conditions will reasonably assure the appearance
of the person as required and the safety of the community if the
judicial officer finds that there is probable cause to believe
that the person has committed an offense for which a maximum term
of imprisonment of ten years or more is prescribed by the
Controlled Substances Act or the Controlled Substances Import and
Export Act or an offense under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c), the use of a
firearm to commit a felony. 18 U.S.C. § 3142(e).
The presumption raised as a result of finding probable cause
that a defendant committed the relevant narcotics offense is
always entitled to evidentiary weight, the amount of which, if at
all, depends on the nature of the production by the defendant and
the other factors set forth under § 3142(g). The defendant,
however, "bears only the burden of production." United States v.
Perez-Franco, 839 F.2d 867, 870 (1st Cir. 1988). As explained by
Cir. 1988).
9
the United States Court of Appeals with regard to the statutory
presumption of section 3142(e):
Section 3142(e), however, only imposes a burden of
production on a defendant. The burden of persuasion
remains with the government. Nevertheless, even after
a defendant has introduced some evidence to rebut the
flight presumption, the presumption does not disappear,
but retains evidentiary weight--the amount depending on
how closely defendant's case resembles the congressional
paradigm, Jessup, 757 F.2d at 387--to be considered along
with other factors.
United States v. Palmer-Contreras, 835 F.2d at 17-18; see also
United States v. Perez-Franco, 839 F.2d at 869-70.
Finally, it is important to note that the presumption is
triggered by the statutory penalty prescribed irrespective of the
actual or likely sentence imposed upon the particular defendant.
See United States v. Moss, 887 F.2d 333, 337 (1st Cir. 1989) (per
curiam). The fact that a defendant may receive a sentence of
less than ten years does not make the presumption inapplicable.
Id. at 337. Rather, this court may consider such a factor with
regard to the weight this court gives to the presumption. Id. at
337.
II. The defendant, David Carl Arndt, is 43 years of age.7 He
was born on October 10, 1960 in New Haven, CT. The defendant
grew up in Newton, MA, where his father, a practicing
7 The information in this section is a compilation of material gathered by Pretrial Services and submissions of the defendant to this court including the defendant’s curriculum vitae.
10
dermatologist, and his mother, a psychologist, continue to
reside. The defendant has a sister residing in Washington, DC.
The defendant is single and has one child, a 21 year old
son, from a previous relationship with Suzanne Greenwald. The
defendant has no contact with his son, who resides in Santa Fe,
NM.
The defendant attended the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst and earned a bachelor’s degree in English and psychology
and a master’s degree in psychology from San Francisco State
University in California, where he also studied premedical
sciences.
In 1992 the defendant graduated from Harvard Medical School.
He completed a residency in orthopedic surgery as part of the
Harvard Combined Orthopedic Surgery Program and served as the
chief resident in orthopedic surgery at the Beth Israel Hospital
in Boston. After finishing his residency he completed a
fellowship in spine surgery at Tulane University School of
Medicine in New Orleans, LA.
Upon the completion of his professional training in 1998 the
defendant commenced practicing orthopedic surgery, specializing
in spine surgery. He was affiliated with Associates in
Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, Inc. in Wellesley and Harvard
Vanguard Medical Associates in Boston. The defendant remained in
practice until August of 2002, when his license to practice
11
medicine was suspended by the Massachusetts Board of Registration
in Medicine after “a highly-publicized incident involving a
surgery at Mount Auburn Hospital”8 in Cambridge in which it is
alleged that the defendant left his anesthetized patient on the
operating table in the midst of a spine surgery to attend to a
personal banking matter outside the hospital.
12
The defendant’s parents told Pretrial Services that they
have been supporting the defendant financially for the last year
and that since August of 2003 to the time of his arrest the
defendant has been doing carpentry work around their home.
From 1988 to 1990 the defendant lived in Jamaica Plain with
Steven Goldfinger (“Goldfinger”). The defendant told Pretrial
Services that he has resided at 26 Rutland Square in Boston’s
South End since 1990. The defendant’s “partner,” Alfredo Fuentes
(“Fuentes”), also resides at this address.
Pretrial Services advised this court that in 1999 Fuentes, a
citizen of Venezuela, pled guilty in the Eastern District of
Louisiana to making false statements in an application for a
United States passport (a felony). He was sentenced to five
years probation. The supervision was transferred to this
district when Fuentes moved to Massachusetts and was terminated
on January 24, 2004. Fuentes is a legal permanent resident of
8 This language is taken from footnote one of the defendant’s opposition to the government’s
motion for pretrial detention.
12
the United States.
According to the Pretrial Services report, the defendant’s
only financial asset is a bank account with a balance of $3,000.
He pays monthly rent of $2,400 for the Rutland Square residence.
He filed for bankruptcy (no year given) in relation to financial
problems he encountered with Goldfinger. However, the case was
dismissed prior to the defendant being adjudicated bankrupt.
By his own admission the defendant smoked methamphetamine
from June of 2002 to August of 2003, using as much as one half
gram per day. He told Pretrial Services that he has only used
illegal drugs once since his release from jail in 2003. At the
June 4, 2004 hearing this court ordered the defendant to provide
a urine sample to Pretrial Services for drug testing. The
defendant was unable to comply.
The defendant also reports a history of mental health
counseling for a period of two years for treatment of an
adjustment disorder.9 In addition the defendant notes that he
took Zoloft (an antidepressant) during his orthopedic residency
to aid him in dealing with the death of friends from AIDS.
The defendant has a prior criminal record.
In 1998 the defendant pled guilty to a federal fraud charge
(misdemeanor involving identity documents). The charge arose in
the Eastern District of Louisiana and the case was transferred to
9 No date is given for the period of this treatment.
13
this district for supervision. The defendant was sentenced to a
term of three years probation which was terminated on January 26,
2002. It should be noted that the charge against the defendant
was related to the charges against Fuentes described above.
In October of 2002 the defendant was charged in Middlesex
Superior Court (the “Middlesex case”)10 with contributing to
delinquency, possession of a Class B controlled substance,
possession of a Class A controlled substance, using a drug for
sexual intercourse, indecent assault and battery on a person
attained age 14 and four counts of rape of a child. Initially
the defendant was released on $1,000 cash bail with the customary
warning that if charged with a crime during the period of his
release, his bail could be revoked pursuant to M.G.L. c. 276 §
58. In addition the defendant was ordered not to have any
unsupervised contact with children. In October of 2003 the bail
was increased to $20,000 cash, which was posted by the
defendant’s parents. The case remains open.
In August of 2003 the defendant was charged in the Boston
Municipal Court with possession with intent to distribute a Class
B controlled substance. This charge arose from the same set of
circumstances giving rise to the above-captioned Indictment. The
Commonwealth’s motion to revoke the defendant’s bail in the
Middlesex case, on the basis that the defendant committed a new
10 Middlesex Superior Court No. 2002-1569-001-009.
14
offense, was allowed on September 4, 2003, by the Honorable
Thomas Horgan (“Judge Horgan”) of the Boston Municipal Court.
Judge Horgan imposed an additional bail of $500,000 surety or
cash bail of $50,000.
The defendant petitioned for review of bail before a Single
Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court pursuant to
M.G.L. c. 211 § 3 and on August 27, 2003 Justice Martha B. Sosman
denied the petition. The defendant sought further review in the
Superior Court pursuant to M.G.L. c. 276 § 57. The motion was
denied on September 18, 2003. On the same day the defendant was
indicted on the same charge in Suffolk Superior Court (the
“Suffolk case”).11 On October 9, 2003, the defendant was
arraigned on the Suffolk case. At that time he was released on
$50,000 cash bail posted by his parents. The case remains open.
III. The relevant evidence at the detention hearing showed the following.
The government called United States Postal Inspector Michael
J. McCarran ("McCarran") of the United States Postal Inspection
Service. He testified that he has been so employed for the past
18 years. He is assigned to the major crimes team in Boston,
where he focuses on prohibited mailings which involve contraband,
including narcotics, being sent through the United States mails.
11 Suffolk Superior case # CR 2003-10951.15
McCarran testified that during the course of his career he has
participated in over 250 narcotics investigations, the majority
of which involved “controlled deliveries.”
McCarran testified that on August 7, 2003, he was contacted
by a United States postal inspector in Los Angeles, CA. The
postal inspector had intercepted a package addressed to Frank
Castro, c/o the Chandler Inn, 26 Chandler Street in Boston. The
package was opened and was found to contain approximately 900
grams of a white powder which field tested positive for
methamphetamine.
In further testimony McCarran stated that the cardboard
package, which weighed about five pounds, was forwarded to Boston
and arrived on August 8, 2003. McCarran noted that the package
had an Express Mail label which was handwritten. The return
address listed the sender as Hector Medina, 1605 Martel Avenue, #
7, Los Angeles, CA. McCarran stated that address was a valid
address but added that the local mail carrier was not familiar
with an individual by the name of Hector Medina at that address.
McCarran identified three photographs of the contents of the
package and a report, which were admitted as Government Exhibit #
1.
McCarran described the first photograph as showing a large
pink phallic shaped intact pinata, a “sex toy” and a jar of
“elbow grease.” The second photograph shows the mailing label on
16
the package and the pinata with a label that says “Bachelorette’s
Last Night Out.” The pinata has been torn open. The third
photograph shows the plastic bags containing the methamphetamine,
which McCarran testified were hidden inside the pinata.
McCarran identified to the report of the National Forensic
Laboratory of the United States Postal Inspection Service which
is part of Government Exhibit # 1. McCarran noted that the total
weight of the methamphetamine found inside the pinata was 900
grams, approximately two pounds, and the purity was 94 percent.
McCarran added that the methamphetamine is a highly addictive
stimulant produced in clandestine laboratories in the western
part of the United States. It is also known as “Ice, Tina, Glass
and Crystal Meth” and usually is smoked in a pipe.
In further testimony McCarran stated that surveillance
officers went to the Chandler Inn in Boston on August 8, 2003 and
contacted the management. It was established that an inquiry had
been made about the package by the occupant of Room 501, which
had been rented by the defendant on the previous day at around
11:00 a.m. When making the reservation the defendant asked that
the name Frank Castro (“Castro”) be added to the guest list for
the room. The defendant also inquired whether or not a package
had arrived for him or for Mr. Castro.
McCarran testified that on August 8, 2003, at approximately
10:15 a.m., while dressed like a mailman, he approached the front
17
desk of the Chandler Inn with the package. The hotel manager
called Room 501 and there was no response. An undercover agent
(“UC”) was placed at the hotel as a front desk clerk and McCarran
left the package with him. Upon leaving the hotel McCarran
called United States Postal Service personnel and instructed them
to “scan” the package in as “delivered.” McCarran explained that
by doing this a customer using Express Mail would be able to
track the status of the package and determine whether or not it
had been delivered.
According to McCarran, at approximately 1:30 p.m. the
defendant arrived at the Chandler Inn and was given the room key
to Room 501 by the real desk clerk. At the time he was given the
key he was told there was a package for him. The defendant went
to his room without discussing or accepting the package. About
five minutes later the defendant returned and asked the desk
clerk if he had mentioned something about a package. The
defendant then signed for and received the package and headed for
the elevator. McCarran and the UC then approached the defendant
and identified themselves as law enforcement agents. McCarran
identified the defendant in open court as the person who accepted
the package.
McCarran told the defendant, who appeared very nervous, that
they needed to discuss the package outside the public view of the
lobby area. They adjourned to the defendant’s room. McCarran
18
was accompanied by other law enforcement agents. According to
McCarran, the defendant admitted making the reservation for the
room but denied ever making any inquiries about the Express Mail
package, but said that the package was for Castro. He described
Castro as a friend he met on an internet website called
manhunt.com. The defendant stated that he had met Castro in
person but that he did not have his telephone number or any way
of contacting him.
In further testimony McCarran stated that the defendant said
that Castro contacted him the week before and stated that he had
business in Boston. They agreed that the defendant would reserve
a room for Castro at the Chandler Inn. McCarran noted that the
defendant was not under arrest during the course of the
interview, which lasted for about three hours. McCarran noted
that at one point during the interview the defendant took a
telephone call from his attorney on his cellular telephone.
McCarran noted that Castro never appeared at the Chandler Inn.
McCarran testified that he determined that the defendant was
not telling the truth about Castro or the package. McCarran
stated that he obtained toll records for the defendant’s cellular
telephone which indicated that on six occasions prior to picking
up the package the defendant called the “800" package tracking
number that the United States Postal Service maintains to enable
individuals to track packages.
19
In an attempt to ascertain Castro’s identify McCarran
obtained a federal search warrant for the defendant’s computer,
which was located at the defendant’s Boston residence. McCarran
testified that an analysis of the computer did not reveal any
information relating to a Frank Castro on manhunt.com or any E-
mail between the defendant and Castro.
In further testimony McCarran said that law enforcement
authorities subsequently determined that years ago the defendant
went to school with an individual by the name of Frank Castro.
That individual is currently working as a physician in Knoxville,
TN. He was contacted and stated that he had no intention of
being in the Boston area on August 8, 2003. In addition he
provided documents from his office indicating that he had seven
surgeries scheduled on August 8, 2003 and that he was on-call on
the two following days.
McCarran noted that in the course of executing the search
warrant for the defendant’s computer several items were found in
a hard briefcase which was thought to be a computer case. The
items included 25 grams of marijuana, eight plastic bags that
tested positive for methamphetamine hydrochloride, several pipes
and paraphernalia relating to drug use. McCarran identified a
photograph of the contents of the computer case. The photograph
was admitted as Government Exhibit # 2.
In the course of executing the search warrant McCarran noted
20
that he found another computer bag. A postal receipt for an
Express Mail package that was mailed from the Cambridge Post
Office on August 5, 2003, was found in the computer bag along
with a piece of paper with a California address written on it.
McCarran stated that the receipt was significant because he had
asked the defendant during the course of the Chandler Inn
interview whether he had mailed any packages to California. The
defendant denied that he had sent any packages.
McCarran testified that the Express Mail label was of
significance, based on his training and experience, because when
drugs are shipped to this part of the country from another part
of the country then “payment has to go out the other way.”
McCarran added that he also found a customer receipt for an
Express Mail package “on the desk just to the right of the
computer.” The label showed that a package had been mailed to
Los Angeles on August 5th.
The following week McCarran contacted the Kendall Square
Post Office in Cambridge and obtained surveillance films for
August 5, 2003. McCarran testified that he observed the
defendant mailing a package on the videotape. McCarran testified
that he spoke with a cooperating witness (“CW”), whom he referred
to as CW-2, who stated that the defendant said the reason the
package was intercepted in Los Angeles was because it had a hand
written label and it weighed over two pounds. The defendant also
21
told CW-2 that Frank Castro was a fictitious name.
In resumed testimony on June 23, 2004, McCarran clarified
his previous testimony regarding the two receipts that were found
during the execution of the search warrant for the defendant’s
computer. He noted that the first receipt, for a package sent
from the Kendall Square Post Office at 11:16 a.m. on August 5,
2003, was found in the computer bag. The second receipt, found
in the defendant’s partially open desk drawer, was a customer
receipt for a package sent from Feral Lupien, 433 Grant Street,
Newton, MA to Brant Shank, 2531 Sawtell Boulevard, Los Angeles.
McCarran noted that Grant Street in Newton does exist but the
numbers do not go as high as 433.
McCarran testified that in the course of his investigation
he also reviewed tape recordings of telephone conversations the
defendant had while he was in custody at the Nashua Street jail
in Boston between August 13, 2003 and September 15, 2003. During
one conversation the defendant stated that he took a loss of
“forty or fifty” because of the package. In another conversation
he also told Fuentes that he had someone take drugs out of his
apartment so they would not be found.
In further testimony McCarran testified that he spoke with
other CWs during the course of the investigation. McCarran
stated that CW-1, who was indicted outside of Massachusetts for
distributing large quantities of methamphetamine, said that
22
between April of 2003 and August of 2003 the defendant traveled
to New York City on a weekly basis to purchase a pound of
methamphetamine. McCarran noted that during the course of their
conversation it was CW-1 who first raised the name of the
defendant.
McCarran added that CW-1 was personally aware that the
defendant traveled to New York City on at least five or six
occasions to purchase a pound of methamphetamine at a cost of
$25,000. CW-1 noted that the defendant traveled to New York by
plane, train or bus and that he usually paid for the
methamphetamine in bills packed in stacks of $2,000.
McCarran was shown a sheaf of documents which was admitted
as Government Exhibit # 3. He described the documents as travel
records reflecting the defendant’s travel between Boston and New
York City between May 10, 2003 and August 1, 2003. The records
reflect travel by bus, train and plane. McCarran noted that the
defendant also traveled to Los Angeles in July of 2003.
McCarran testified that on June 19, 2003, the defendant was
searched at Logan International Airport in Boston after he
aroused the suspicion of a Transportation Security Administration
screener. McCarran noted that the defendant purchased a one way
ticket with cash.
According to a report of the incident, which was admitted as
Government Exhibit # 4, the defendant “artfully concealed on his
23
person in his jacket and throughout his carry-on bag $19,000 in
U.S. currency.” The report states that the defendant had the
currency “stuffed around his waist under his shirt, in his jacket
and also throughout his carry-on bag.” When asked how much
currency he was carrying the defendant first stated $9,000 and
then changed the figure to $10,000. Later it was determined that
he was carrying approximately $19,000. The defendant was also
carrying a passport. The defendant was allowed to continue his
travel when the inspection was completed.
In further testimony McCarran stated that CW-2 went to the
defendant’s Boston residence in July of 2003 and purchased an
“eight ball” (an eighth of an ounce) of methamphetamine from the
defendant. Later on the same day he purchased a second eight
ball of methamphetamine. CW-2 stated that at the time of the
visit he observed a kilogram of methamphetamine. During the
course of their dealings the defendant told CW-2 the rules for
drug dealing: dress in business attire; do not come unannounced
and do not use crystal methamphetamine before coming over.
McCarran added that over a several week period CW-2
purchased at least seven ounces of crystal methamphetamine from
the defendant at a cost of $2,400 an ounce. The CW-2 reported
that the drug was of a high quality and that the defendant’s
roommate, Fuentes, was present when he went to the defendant’s
residence. McCarran noted that the CW-2's final purchase was for
24
two ounces. CW-2 said that the defendant then shut him off
because he was getting “too big.”
McCarran stated that once the defendant was arrested in
August of 2003 CW-2 picked up the defendant’s drug business. CW-
2 stated that when the defendant was released from custody he
gave the defendant $500 and an eight ball of crystal
methamphetamine. Later he sold the defendant a half ounce of
crystal methamphetamine for $1,600 which the defendant resold for
$1,800. CW-2 stated that the defendant was practicing “back
alley” medicine.
McCarran testified that he interviewed another individual
identified as CW-3, who said that he smoked crystal
methamphetamine with the defendant on more than ten occasions
between December of 2002 and the time of the defendant’s August
2003 arrest. CW-3 stated that he also made six purchases of
crystal methamphetamine from the defendant.
In further testimony McCarran stated he interviewed another
individual identified as CW-4, who was arrested in October of
2003 for trafficking in crystal methamphetamine. CW-4 stated
that between late 2002 and August 2003 he purchased one ounce
quantities of crystal methamphetamine from the defendant. CW-4
was aware that the defendant was traveling to New York every
other week. On one occasion CW-4 was in the apartment of CW-1's
partner when the defendant arrived to purchase crystal
25
methamphetamine.
McCarran testified that during the time the defendant was
practicing medicine there was an arrest of an individual by the
name of Charles Ghera (“Ghera”) at the Swiss Hotel in Boston on
January 10, 2002. During the course of Ghera’s arrest law
enforcement authorities recovered crystal methamphetamine,
ketamine, prescriptions, drug ledgers and $110,000 in US
currency.
McCarran was shown a set of documents which was admitted as
Government Exhibit # 5. McCarran identified the documents as
photocopies of some of Ghera’s notes. McCarran testified that he
reviewed the notes. He pointed out that the first page includes
the defendant’s name, the address of the Mt. Auburn Hospital in
Cambridge and the defendant’s Drug Enforcement Administration
(“DEA”) number. The notation “Dave Arndt owes!” appears at the
top of the second page. The third page is a weekly planner for
the week March 24, 2002, which lists a number of prescription
medications by brand name. The list includes Ambien, Xanax,
Valium, Percocet, Oxycontin 80 mg, Ritalin and Viagra. The
language “*All NAME BRAND -NO- GENERICS” appears next to the
list. Government Exhibit # 5 includes a number of blank pages
from a prescription pad bearing the defendant’s name and the
address of the Mt. Auburn Hospital.
In further testimony McCarran stated that he subpoenaed the
26
records for prescriptions written by the defendant under his DEA
number between October of 2001 and May of 2002. McCarran
discovered that Ghera filled 22 prescriptions written by the
defendant during this time period. McCarran noted that all of
the prescriptions stated “No Substitutions.” McCarran opined
that this is because generic drugs are not easily sold “on the
street.” McCarran added that around March 26, 2002, Ghera filled
a variety of prescriptions for the same drugs listed in
Government Exhibit # 5. Copies of the prescription records
written for Ghera were admitted as Government Exhibit # 6.
McCarran testified that as part of the investigation he
subpoenaed the medical records of the institutions where the
defendant practiced medicine in an attempt to locate medical
records relating to Ghera. He was unable to find any
documentation that Ghera was ever a patient of the defendant.
In added testimony McCarran stated that CW-2 said he went to
the defendant’s residence and purchased two 40 mg. Oxycontin
tablets for $40 each. CW-2 stated that the tablets were stored
in a container which had in excess of 100 tablets. CW-2 also
stated that the defendant was writing prescriptions for his
methamphetamine customers, which they would fill and bring back
to him in return for crystal methamphetamine.
McCarran noted that CW-4 stated that the defendant told him
that the package sent to Chandler Inn was his. The defendant
27
told CW-4 that the Chandler Inn was a safe place because he had
contacts there.
In further testimony McCarran stated that after CW-4 was
arrested he had a conversation with the defendant in which he
told the defendant that he believed that someone had “ratted” on
him. According to CW-4, the defendant stated that if someone
ratted on him he would have no problem “disemboweling” the person
with a “quick swipe of the scalpel.”
On cross examination it was established that McCarran
interviewed CW-3 and CW-4 and that he was present for part of the
interview of CW-2. McCarran noted that he read interview reports
gathered by DEA agents. He added that the CWs have signed
proffers. McCarran noted that CW-1 was indicted outside of
Massachusetts for trafficking in methamphetamine. McCarran, who
did not know the amount of methamphetamine involved, stated that
he was provided with a copy of CW-1's interview. He added that
CW-1's last contact with the defendant was in the summer of 2003.
Defense counsel established that CW-3 stated that he smoked
crystal methamphetamine with the defendant on ten occasions and
that he made six purchases of the drug from the defendant.
McCarran noted that CW-3, who told the defendant that he was
going before the Grand Jury, was never threatened by the
defendant.
In further cross examination McCarran stated that based on
28
conversations he had it “appears that the defendant is addicted
to crystal meth.” However, McCarran noted that people did not
describe the defendant as an addict. McCarran added that during
the course of monitored telephone calls the defendant had while
incarcerated in the Nashua Street jail the defendant said he was
addicted.
Defense counsel established that the defendant was arrested
by the Massachusetts State Police on August 8, 2003, after the
search of his apartment. He was released on bail after
approximately 60 days in custody.
In resumed cross examination on June 28, 2004,12 McCarran
stated that since his last testimony he had met with the
Assistant United States Attorney handling the case and identified
certain documents and reviewed certain redacted reports. During
cross examination defense counsel offered various documents
relating to McCarran’s testimony on direct examination.
McCarran identified a document, which was admitted as
Defendant’s Exhibit # A, as a copy of the search warrant
inventory for the August 8, 2003 search at the defendant’s
Rutland Square residence. Among the items listed on the
inventory are a computer, a computer bag with photo ID, an
Express Mail receipt and sheet of paper, a second Express Mail
12 In the interim between the hearings government counsel provided defense counsel with
various reports.
29
receipt, a computer disk case with marijuana, pills and drug
paraphernalia and a plastic bag with 13 packets of pure ephedrene
(sic).
Defense counsel offered two documents, which were admitted as
Defendant’s Exhibit # B. The first document is a computer
printout from the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine
(the “Board”) indicating that the defendant received a “Summary
Suspension” on August 7, 2002.
The second document, which bears the same date, is a news
release from the Board detailing the basis for the Board’s
action. The document states that the Board found that “Dr. Arndt
poses an immediate threat to the public health, safety and
welfare.” It continues, “In its Statement of Allegations, the
Board charged that Dr. Arndt abandoned his anesthetized patient
in the Mount Auburn Hospital operating room to go to a bank in
Harvard Square during the surgery.” The Board’s action prohibits
the defendant from practicing medicine in Massachusetts until a
further order of the Board.
In further cross examination McCarran identified a copy of a
redacted Federal Bureau of Investigation report (“FBI 302"). The
document, which was admitted as Defendant’s Exhibit # C, outlines
a proffer agreement interview of CW-1 conducted on March 26,
2004, according to McCarran.
According to the FBI 302, CW-1 first met the defendant in
30
Provincetown in 2001. CW-1 states, “[redacted] sold 1/4 gram
quantities of methamphetamine to Arndt.” CW-1 adds that from
April of 2003 until the defendant’s arrest in July or August of
2003 [redacted] sold approximately one pound of methamphetamine
to the defendant every one or two weeks for a total of five or
six sales. CW-1 goes on to say that the sales took place in New
York and the defendant paid $1,600 per ounce and usually
purchased a pound for $25,500 in cash.
Defense counsel showed McCarran a document which was
admitted as Defendant’s Exhibit # D. McCarran described the
document as a redacted DEA report of investigation setting forth
a proffer interview by CW-2. The document reflects that it was
prepared on May 20, 2004.
According to the proffer, CW-2 was given the defendant’s
screen name on manhunt.com. CW-2 then connected with the
defendant, who he knew to be a drug dealer, through online chat.
They met in person in July of 2003 at the defendant’s home and
the defendant told CW-2 that he was a drug dealer and only sold
crystal methamphetamine. The defendant showed CW-2 a large rock
of crystal methamphetamine and then broke off a piece which he
gave to CW-2. During the meeting the defendant agreed to sell
CW-2 an eight ball of crystal methamphetamine for $400. The
defendant told CW-2 the procedures described previously for
conducting drug business. CW-2 made additional purchases over
31
the following days.
CW-2 stated that the defendant told him that he was treating
people who would get shot and could not or did not want to go to
the hospital. However, defense counsel established that CW-2's
statement that the defendant was practicing “back alley medicine”
was not corroborated.
Defense counsel showed McCarran a document which was
admitted as Defendant’s Exhibit # E. McCarran identified the
document as a FBI 302 dated June 10, 2004, which sets forth the
proffer of CW-4. The document basically tracks McCarran’s
testimony regarding CW-4 but sets it forth in greater detail.
At the conclusion of the testimony the government offered
three additional exhibits without objection. The first set of
documents, which was admitted as Government Exhibit # 7, includes
the Commonwealth’s Statement of the Case, filed in the Middlesex
case13 on October 9, 2002 and supporting police reports. The
pleading details the facts which are the basis for the pending
child rape and related charges.
The pleading alleges that the defendant lured two boys, ages
14 and 15, into his car by telling them about a new drug “that
gets you horny and feels cool.” He later told them that the drug
was crystal meth and provided them with a pipe to smoke the
crystal meth. The defendant then dropped off one of the boys who
13 This case is referred to in the criminal history portion of Section II of this ORDER.
32
said he had to go home. The defendant then performed various
sexual acts on the other boy, who described himself as being “out
of it” from the drug. The police reports support the allegations
in the Commonwealth’s Statement of the Case.
Government Exhibit # 8 includes a number of pleadings from
the Middlesex case. The pleadings include a motion, based on the
defendant’s indigence, for funds for trial preparation
(investigation) in the amount of $15,000 and a motion to engage a
psychiatrist. The motion for funds was allowed to the extent of
$1,500 on April 4, 2003 and the papers do not reflect any action
taken on the motion for a psychiatrist.
Government Exhibit # 9 is a report from the Provincetown, MA
Police Department dated August 31, 1998, relating to multiple 911
calls at 4:27 a.m. from the area of 145 Commercial Street.14
According to the report, upon arriving in the area the police
were directed to the residence of Roger Volzer (“Volzer”), who
stated that he was sitting on a couch inside his residence with a
male friend, later identified as Fuentes.
Volzer told the police that when he got up to blow out the
candles a male subject ripped the window screen, entered through
the window and grabbed him, striking the right side of his head
with his fist. Volzer managed to run out of the house and called
14 This court notes that the defendant was not convicted of this offense. The charges were
eventually dismissed. However, this court is considering the circumstances of the event in terms
of the defendant’s proclivity for impulsive, if not violent behavior.
33
for someone to call the police. Volzer stated that the assailant
ran after him but was stopped by Fuentes. Fuentes and the
assailant then left the property.
Volzer stated that he knew the assailant’s first name to be
David, where he lived and that he was the “ex-lover” of Fuentes.
The police placed Volzer in the cruiser and were directed to the
house where Volzer believed the assailant to live. Officers
approached the house and were met by the defendant who stated,
“You must be looking for me.” The defendant added, “I did
something very dumb . . . I went down to that guys (sic) house.”
The report notes that the defendant was taken into custody
and charged with burglary while armed, assault on an occupant,
assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, to wit, a
chair and malicious destruction of property.
At the conclusion of the detention hearing defense counsel
provided this court with a multi-part submission in support of
the defendant’s argument for release. The filing includes
numerous state court documents and materials from Physician
Health Services (“PHS”), a subsidiary of the Massachusetts
Medical Society “designed to provide identification, support and
monitoring services to physicians in Massachusetts who are
experiencing or are at risk for health related concerns.”
The materials include a letter dated June 22, 2004, to
34
defense counsel15 from PHS which states that the defendant went
to PHS (no date given) “for an assessment to determine whether he
is experiencing the type of health related problem that would
benefit from the support and monitoring services offered by PHS.”
The letter goes on to note that it is the assessment of PHS that
the defendant “would benefit from a PHS chemical dependency
contract with a behavioral health addendum to monitor his
compliance with a health related treatment plan.”
IV. The return of the Indictment in the United States District
Court for the District of Massachusetts in this case establishes
the existence of probable cause that the defendant committed the
crimes for which he is charged in the Indictment.
The United States has moved for detention pursuant to 18
U.S.C. §§ 3142(f)(1)(B), (f)(1)(C) and (f)(2)(A). The government
must prove by clear and convincing evidence that if released the
defendant would pose a serious danger to any person or the
community. In contradistinction, the government must demonstrate
only by a preponderance of evidence that the defendant, if
released, constitutes a serious risk of flight or failure to
appear. The two different standards are used because of the
clear language expressed in the last paragraph of 18 U.S.C. §
3142(f) which states "that no condition or combination of
15 The letter indicates that it was prepared at the request of defense counsel.
35
conditions will reasonably assure the safety of any other person
and the community shall be supported by clear and convincing
evidence." Congress, by not attaching that language to the risk
of flight clause, infers that a lower standard of proof is all
that is necessary to establish the government's case.
A. Danger to the Community
This court first addresses the likelihood that the
defendant, if released, would be a danger to another person or
the community.
The government's case against the defendant is strong. The
defendant accepted an Express Mail package containing
approximately of one pound of methamphetamine. He appears to
have carefully orchestrated the arrival of the package, by
sending it to a hotel addressed to the name of an old schoolmate
who has no current connection to Boston, to minimize possible
detection of his own involvement. This type of planning is
typical of an experienced drug dealer and not a casual drug user.
McCarran’s testimony that CWs knew that the defendant
traveled to New York on at least five or six occasions to
purchase pound quantities of methamphetamine for $24,000 or
$25,000 while he was on release in on the Middlesex case is very
disturbing. Again this is not the conduct or a user, but the
conduct of an experienced drug dealer. It would appear that the
36
has defendant applied his considerable intellectual acumen to
conducting criminal activity.
Most significantly, the circumstances giving rise to the
present charges occurred when the defendant was already on bail
facing very serious charges in the Middlesex case under a
specific condition of release that he not commit another crime.
It is clear to this court that in the past the defendant has been
unable to abide by conditions of release.
Defense counsel proffers that the defendant is in need of
drug treatment and suggests the outpatient treatment program
offered by PHS as an alternative to detention. It would appear
that to this court that the defendant has had ample opportunity
to seek treatment.
According to the Pretrial Services report, the defendant was
using drugs from June of 2002 through August of 2003. This court
notes that the defendant’s license to practice medicine was not
suspended until August 7, 2002.16 Thus it would appear that the
defendant was practicing medicine at a time when he was using
drugs. Having had his medical license suspended he might of
sought treatment in August of 2002, when it appeared his hard
earned professional career was falling apart. Within a few
months he was charged with a violent sex crime on a juvenile.
16 His privileges at the Mount Auburn Hospital were summarily suspended on July 11, 2002, according to Defendant’s Exhibit # B.
37
From Government Exhibit # 7, the Commonwealth’s Statement of the
Case, it appears that methamphetamine was a factor in this crime,
the facts of which are among the most reprehensible that this
court has ever seen. But after being placed on bail the
defendant did not enter treatment but instead became involved not
only in using methamphetamine but in dealing in methamphetamine
on a large scale.
Finally after being arrested in August of 2003 on drug
charges and being incarcerated for almost two months, the
defendant had another chance to enter into drug treatment. But
he did not. The defendant’s present request to participate in
the PHS program which provides support and monitoring, not secure
inpatient treatment, for impaired physicians is in too little too
late.
In August of 2002 the Board of Registration in Medicine
found the defendant posed “an immediate threat to the public
health, safety and welfare” to the public seeking medical care.
From that point forward the defendant’s life has spiraled down,
first being charged with a violent sex crime involving a
juvenile, then with a major drug crime and a period of
incarceration in the state system. This court believes that the
defendant is unable to abide by conditions of release, as has
been shown by his past conduct, and therefore continues to
present a danger to the community.
38
The defendant did not proffer any credible evidence to
detract from the government’s assertion that he has committed a
serious drug crime involving a narcotic drug and that he is a
danger to the community or any person. This court finds by clear
and convincing evidence that there is no condition or combination
of conditions that will assure the safety of any person or the
community if the defendant is released.
B. Risk of Flight
Next, this court turns to risk of flight or failure to
appear.
Although the defendant has ties to the community and has
appeared for court as required in the past, this court has some
doubt about whether he will appear as required in light of the
present circumstances.
The defendant faces a lengthy term of incarceration if
convicted. This in itself provides an incentive to flee. The
defendant is a highly educated individual who appears to have
traveled frequently in the past. The testimony at the detention
was replete with references to the defendant traveling by plane,
train and bus in recent months at a time when he was on bail,
unemployed and representing to the court that he was indigent.
It must also be noted that the defendant’s partner is a
Venezuelan national. It is possible that the prospect of a long
39
period of incarceration might prompt the defendant and his
partner to flee to Venezuela, where the defendant might be beyond
the reach of extradition.
It is of particular significance to this court that in
February of 2003, defendant’s counsel in the Middlesex case filed
a motion for the Commonwealth to furnish funds for trial
preparation (Middlesex Docket Entry # 13) on the basis that “the
defendant finds himself before this Honorable Court, without
funds for investigation and other matters, to prepare for trial.”
Yet just over four months later when traveling through Logan
Airport on his way to New York City on June 19, 2003, while on
bail and unemployed, the defendant was found to be carrying
$19,000 in cash carefully concealed on his person and in his
carry-on bag. This court has heard nothing to explain this
unusual behavior.
In addition the statements of the CWs indicate that the
defendant was handling large sums of money and crystal
methamphetamine during this period at the very time when he was
already on bail. This suggests that the defendant may have
access to large sums of money which would provide the means to
flee. This was considered by Justice Sosman in her August 27,
2003 denial of the defendant’s state bail petition. She stated,
While the defendant proffers ostensibly
innocent explanations for what would
otherwise look like a serious flight
risk, the circumstances strongly
40
suggest a substantial risk of flight,
and, where the defendant apparently
had access to considerable sums of money
(either from alleged drug dealing or,
as he contends, by way of loans from
friends), a significant dollar amount
of bail is appropriate to address that
risk.
Finally, this court addresses the defendant’s personal
characteristics. By his own admission during a monitored
telephone call at the Nashua Street jail the defendant admitted
to being addicted to crystal methamphetamine, a highly addictive
stimulant, according to McCarran. In the past the defendant has
a history of irresponsible behavior such as the Provincetown home
invasion and abandoning his patient in the operating room,
irrespective of the alleged criminal behavior. Whether fueled by
crystal methamphetamine or other reasons, the defendant’s conduct
is unexplainable, particularly in light of his education and
training. This court does not believe that the defendant can be
relied upon to appear as required.
Based on the totality of the circumstances this court finds
by a preponderance of the evidence that there is no condition or
combination of conditions that will assure the appearance of the
defendant as required.
V. Conclusion
The government has satisfied this court by clear and
41
convincing evidence that no condition or combination of
conditions of release (set forth under 18 U.S.C. § 3142(b) or
(c)) will reasonably assure the safety of any other person or the
community if the defendant is released. In addition, this court
has found, at least by a preponderance of the evidence, that
there is no condition or combination of conditions that will
assure the appearance of the defendant as required.
Having evaluated the factors set forth in 18 U.S.C. §
3142(g), this court orders the defendant detained subject to the
following conditions:
(1) The defendant be, and hereby is, committed to
the custody of the Attorney General for
confinement in a corrections facility, separate,
to the extent practicable, from persons awaiting
or serving sentences or being held in custody
pending appeal;
(2) The defendant be afforded reasonable opportunity
for private consultation with his counsel; and
(3) On Order of a court of the United States or on
request of an attorney for the Government, the person
in charge of the corrections facility in which the
defendant is confined shall deliver the defendant to an
authorized Deputy U.S. Marshal for the purpose of any
appearance in connection with a court proceeding.
/s/
MARIANNE B. BOWLER
Chief United States Magistrate Judge
42
Publisher Information
Note* This page is not part of the opinion as entered by the court. The docket information provided on this page is for the benefit of publishers of these opinions.
Note* This page is not part of the opinion as entered by the court. The docket information provided on this page is for the benefit of publishers of these opinions.
Peter Francis Carr, II
Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC 18th Floor
One International Place
Boston, MA 02110
617-342-6800
617-342-6899 (fax) peter.carr@escm.com Assigned: 06/16/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Stephen R. Delinsky
Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC 18th Floor
One International Place
Boston, MA 02110
617-342-6825
617-342-6899 (fax) srd@escm.com
Assigned: 06/02/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Richard M. Egbert
Law Office of Richard M. Egbert 99 Summer Street
Boston, MA 02110 617-737-8222
617-737-8223 (fax) regbert@egbertlaw.com Assigned: 06/23/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Cynthia W. Lie
Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC 18th Floor
One International Place
Boston, MA 02110
617-342-6800
617-342-6899 (fax) peter.carr@escm.com Assigned: 06/16/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Stephen R. Delinsky
Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, LLC 18th Floor
One International Place
Boston, MA 02110
617-342-6825
617-342-6899 (fax) srd@escm.com
Assigned: 06/02/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Richard M. Egbert
Law Office of Richard M. Egbert 99 Summer Street
Boston, MA 02110 617-737-8222
617-737-8223 (fax) regbert@egbertlaw.com Assigned: 06/23/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Cynthia W. Lie
representing
David Carl Arndt (1)
(Defendant)
1:04-cr-10166-RGS USA v. Arndt
Date filed: 05/27/2004
Attorneys
Attorneys
representing
David Carl Arndt (1)
(Defendant)
representing
representing
representing
David Carl Arndt (1)
(Defendant)
USA
USA
United States Attorney's Office
John Joseph Moakley Federal Courthouse 1 Courthouse Way
Suite 9200
Boston, MA 02210
617-748-3183
cynthia.lie@usdoj.gov
Assigned: 05/27/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY
ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
John A. Wortmann, Jr.
United States Attorney's Office 1 Courthouse Way
Boston, MA 02110 617-748-3100
617-748-3965 (fax) John.Wortmann@USDOJ.gov Assigned: 05/27/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
John Joseph Moakley Federal Courthouse 1 Courthouse Way
Suite 9200
Boston, MA 02210
617-748-3183
cynthia.lie@usdoj.gov
Assigned: 05/27/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY
ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
John A. Wortmann, Jr.
United States Attorney's Office 1 Courthouse Way
Boston, MA 02110 617-748-3100
617-748-3965 (fax) John.Wortmann@USDOJ.gov Assigned: 05/27/2004
LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
(Plaintiff)
representing USA
(Plaintiff)
____________________________________________________________________________________
Bail denied for alleged meth-dealing troubled doc
By J. M. Lawrence
Boston Globe - August 10, 2004
ABSTRACT
[David Arndt], 43, faces a minimum 10 years in prison on charges of receiving a pink penis-shaped pinata filled with $100,000 worth of the highly addictive stimulant a year ago at a South End hotel.
After his dermatologist dad and psychologist mother bailed him out from state charges last year, Arndt still went on five meth-buying trips to New York, paying $25,500 cash per pound, government witnesses claim.
Arndt still faces charges he plied a minor with crystal meth and performed sex acts on the boy in October 2002.
_________________________________________________________________________________
What Went Wrong?By Neil Swidey
Boston Globe - March 21, 2004
The son of a prominent Boston doctor, David Arndt was on his way to becoming a leading surgeon in his own right when a bizarre blunder interrupted his climb: He left his patient on the operating table so he could cash his paycheck. A series of arrests followed, exposing a life of arrogance, betrayal, and wasted promise, leaving only one question left to answer:The kid was born into medicine. He was on track to becoming one of Boston's next great spine surgeons, taking his place alongside his father among the city's medical elite. But on this day in January, the 43-year-old sits on the dark bench in the dimly lit gallery of Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, watching the parade of career criminals take their familiar positions, wearing expressions of defiance or boredom. Look in his eyes, however, behind the boxy glasses, and you can see flashes of bewilderment. How did I get here? He watches as a paunchy guy charged with conspiring to kill a cop asks the court officer if he can give the large, weeping woman in the front row "a kiss and my lottery tickets" before being led away. And then the clerk calls out his number: "Case number 38 - David Arndt."
As the prosecutor and the defense lawyer take their positions before the judge, Arndt advances to his designated spot in front of a tattered computer printout that reads "DEFENDANT," stooping his 6-foot-2 frame a little so his right hand can reach the railing. He is wearing a brown pin-striped suit. A taupe trench coat hangs over his left arm.
His appearance has rebounded from the unshaven, sunken-eyed mess that was on display in his mug shot last summer, though his physique is still a ways from the chiseled, rippled showpiece it was before everything fell apart. The pretrial hearing is over in just a few minutes, and he pulls his trench coat close to his chest and exits the courtroom.
You follow him into the hallway and call to him, "Dr. Arndt."The words stop him in his tracks. Dr. Arndt. For the better part of a decade, that wasn't just his name, it was his identity. The domineering surgeon cutting his path - loved by some, loathed by others. But respected. That identity has been confiscated along with everything else he valued so much - standing, status, power. Now he's just another David standing in a criminal courtroom wondering what his future holds.
He turns to look when he hears the words. But he recognizes you, throws up his hands to block his ears, shakes his head, and walks away. You suspect he'll come back. When you'd met a week earlier, in another court, in another county, he'd walked away then as well, at his lawyer's instruction, only to return and demand that you hold off on writing about him. "To do otherwise," he told you in his sonorous voice, "would be to engage in Murdoch-style journalism." You found it surprising that this man, given what he so infamously did in his operating room, not to mention what he's accused of doing in the weeks and months that followed, would choose to deliver a lecture about professional standards.
On this day in Cambridge he returns again, and the lecture is more expansive and comes with a reading list. "Are you familiar with Janet Malcolm's piece in The New Yorker entitled 'The Journalist and the Murderer'?" he asks. "It was published in two parts. Do you know her work?"
You shake your head no.
"You should," he says.
You ask him how he came across the article.
"I read," he says, narrowing his eyes. "Didn't you take any journalism courses?"
That's when, for the first time, you begin to understand the experience many of his former colleagues have described to you. Now you're the lowly scrub nurse. Or even the seasoned superior whose competence is being so pointedly challenged by Dr. David Arndt. And, just as they have explained it, he does it in a way that suggests he has no choice but to do it, and that he is confident, in the end, you will appreciate being made aware of just how far you've fallen short of his expectations.
There's an intensity to David Arndt that never seems to slacken, a way in which he seems both hyper-aware of his very public collapse and oblivious to it. Overnight, the high-octane, Harvard-trained Arndt became the doctor who left his patient on the operating table so he could go to the bank to cash a check. In an instant, that summer of 2002, the news went national. But the profound professional embarrassment would turn out to be only the beginning. Within two months, Arndt would be charged with statutory child rape, indecent assault, and drug possession. He would file a "poverty motion," the surgeon in one of medicine's most lucrative specialties asking the court to pay his costs. And then, in a separate case nearly a year later, he would face one more charge, this one for possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute.
"His downfall is almost operatic in its tragedy," says Grant Colfax, a Harvard-trained doctor who was once one of Arndt's closest friends.
As Arndt prepares to stand two separate criminal trials, Colfax is like many of the people who knew him well and are now left scratching their heads. Their emotions oscillate between two poles: There's the lingering disbelief that such a brilliant and compassionate doctor - some say the most brilliant and most compassionate they had ever known - could seem to self-destruct in such a spectacularly public way. Then, perhaps more troubling, there's that voice inside them, which had been muffled deep for so long, the one that kept telling them it was only a matter of time before David Arndt's self-absorption and sense of invincibility finally got the best of him.
David Carl Arndt was born on October 10, 1960, in New Haven. Kenneth Arndt was attending Yale medical school and living in student housing with his wife, Anne. Many of the other med students weren't even married yet, never mind parents. The couple's baby became an immediate attraction for Ken's classmates. "From the time he was extremely small, David was a very bright guy," says Jack Barchas, one of Ken's good friends at Yale and now chairman of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. "And he just radiated happiness. We'd go over there for brunch - lox and bagels - and here was this little kid, always interacting."
When David was almost 2, the Arndts packed up for Boston, so Ken could do his residency in dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. They had another child, a daughter. Ken would begin climbing the ranks of Boston medicine, joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School and eventually becoming chief of dermatology at Beth Israel Hospital. Years later, Anne, a psychologist, would also join the Harvard Med faculty. Friends describe the couple as charming, warm, stylish, and smart.
Growing up in Newton, David stood out. Extremely bright, no doubt about that. Tall, too. Kathy Sias was his neighbor and one of his best friends. She ate dinner with his family, accompanied them on ski trips to their place in New Hampshire. Longhaired David was intense and intellectual but fun to be around. What did they do together? "A lot of drugs," she says, chuckling. "Just about everybody in our clique did during those days."
She and other friends say David, who attended Weeks Junior High School in Newton and the private Cambridge School of Weston, was always pushing limits. (He kept a boa constrictor as a pet, says Sias.) They also say Anne and Ken seemed hipper and easier for teens to talk to than other parents in the neighborhood. But Sias says that as she spent more time with the family, she changed her mind. "They were as unclued-in to teenagers as most parents, but they thought they were more clued in," she says. "His father was remote. His mother thought she knew everything because she was a psychologist. 'Oh, it's just a phase,' she would say about anything going on with David."
(Through their attorney, Stephen R. Delinsky, Ken and Anne Arndt declined to comment for this story, and David declined to talk beyond his brief conversations outside of the courtroom. "Dr. Arndt's parents respect, love and admire him very much and are deeply concerned that your proposed article about David will seriously compromise his ability to achieve justice," Delinsky wrote in a letter to the Globe. The couple "are confident that when all the facts are presented in court, David will be found not guilty in both cases.")
Though David would eventually become comfortable in his homosexuality, it's not surprising that his teenage years were more difficult. "Looking back, I think he was aware of it, but I don't think he wanted to be," Sias says. "If he had admitted that he was gay, he would have probably lost a big part of his circle of friends." He dated girls, including Sias. "For about a week and a half," she says. "We went back to being best friends."
After logging time at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1978 to 1979, Arndt left the state for San Francisco. He immediately soaked up the ethos of the city - part tie-dyed Haight-Ashbury hippie, part Tales of the City free spirit. The son of Harvard faculty members enrolled in a "university without walls" college called Antioch West. The downtown school awarded students course credit for their life experience. It no longer exists. He quickly earned a bachelor's degree and became a mental health counselor, working with the homeless who, in the parlance of San Francisco, were housed in "homeless hotels." Arndt's living quarters weren't much better.
On April 7, 1982, Arndt married a woman from India named Shobha Hundraj Nagrani. They would file for divorce four years later, and it became official in December 1987. Many of his friends say they knew little about the circumstances surrounding the marriage. What they did know about Arndt during this period was that he was into writing, literature, the arts scene. He was passionate, smart, insightful, alive.
And arrogant.
"One of a kind," says Harvey Peskin, who was a professor in San Francisco State University's clinical psychology graduate program when Arndt enrolled in 1983. What set him apart was the way he put everyone around him, especially the professor, on notice. "Professors tend to believe that students have to work to earn their respect," Peskin says. "David felt that the professor was the one who had to earn the right to have his respect."
As the yearlong class wore on, Peskin, who had initially been irritated by Arndt's chutzpah, found himself wanting to pass his brilliant student's test. David Arndt has that effect on people. "I don't think his behavior changed much," Peskin says, "but I think I changed."
But Arndt would begin changing in other ways. One day in 1983, he walked into a San Francisco clinic where Stephen M. Goldfinger, a psychiatrist who oversaw mental health services for the homeless, was presiding over a case conference. Afterward, they talked, and soon they were dating and then living together. Goldfinger was 32, Arndt 23.
Arndt earned his master's degree and turned in his tie-dye for extensive travel throughout Asia, gourmet cooking, and an intensified focus on his career. He began contemplating medical school and took some supplemental pre-med classes.
It was around this time that Jack Barchas got a call from Ken Arndt. Barchas was then the director of a prestigious research laboratory at Stanford. His old Yale med school pal told him that David was living in California and for the first time was thinking about pursuing medicine. "Ken, it's probably easier for me to talk to him about it than you," Barchas said. "Have him come see me."
As it turned out, Barchas's lab had just been given a very early and crude MRI machine, which the researchers were about to experiment with using rats. Arndt volunteered to help. In no time, he had all but taken over the project. "He was like a Navy SEAL," Barchas recalls. "Just willing to do it and not waiting to be told." Arndt suggested to Barchas that they write an academic paper about their findings. When it was published, the name of David Arndt was listed first, followed by a bunch of respected researchers with actual titles after their names.
Years later, when Barchas was serving with Ken Arndt on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and he would ask about David, Ken would say, "It's all coming together for him."
In 1988, David Arndt came home. He made his way to the hallowed ground of Harvard Medical School, where his father, one of the nation's top dermatologists, was a heavyweight. If relations between him and his parents had been strained during some of his time in San Francisco, they appeared to be back on track. But David didn't advertise his connections. Occasionally, a classmate would notice the author's name on their dermatology textbook. "Kenneth A. Arndt - any relation to you?"
"Yeah, that's my father," David would reply casually.
And no one who saw David in class - with his burning intelligence and remarkable self-possession - would question whether he had the goods to get into Harvard on his own. Soon after Arndt joined the medical school's class of 1992, Steve Goldfinger joined the Harvard faculty. They shared a gracious Victorian in Jamaica Plain that was well appointed with the artwork they had collected together on their travels - Balinese puppets, Burmese wall hangings, Borneo masks. They frequently had Arndt's med school friends over for dinner or cocktail parties. What those friends saw was a couple that seemed to enjoy life and each other's company. They had a couple of dogs and a garden that Goldfinger faithfully tended to.
This is not the average med student experience. "Most of us came as unformed characters, having spent all of our time studying to get to Harvard," says Timothy Ferris, a classmate of Arndt's who is now a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. "We came as receptors of knowledge, not producers. David immediately stood out as someone who appeared to have a fully formed character. He could do the work. He was confident. Most medical students were still so afraid that they spent all their time studying. David was organizing parties. He had a life. He had a car. He had a nice house. While the rest of us were putting our personal lives on hold for four to eight years, David had balance. He was where we all hoped to be. The fact that he was gay only added to that. The most mysterious part of us - our sexuality - and here is a guy who has it all figured out."
Not that there weren't moments that gave his friends pause.
Grant Colfax appreciated Arndt's tremendous warmth and easy ability to talk intelligently about literature, politics, life. Like most of Arndt's friends, he found something magnetic about him. "But he had some clear character flaws," Colfax says. "To my dearest friend, he was outwardly rude and uninterested. He couldn't even exude the bare social graces. She asked me, 'How can you be friends with such a jerk?' I saw what she was saying, but he had always been really kind to me and fun to be around."
A few years into med school, Arndt accompanied Colfax to a gym near campus. "David was totally dismissive of the whole thing," Colfax recalls. "Then, overnight, he had to be the best." And so David Arndt, who up until this point had stood out only by what he said, also began to stand out by how he looked.
His nondescript physique was soon gone. He became even more toned as his weight training intensified during his general surgery internship at Beth Israel Hospital. On a warm spring day in 1993, Alexandra Page, a med school friend and fellow intern, had brunch with Arndt and Goldfinger. Afterward, Arndt showed her the new gym he had just switched to. "We went inside," she remembers, "and it was just flush with attractive young men."
It's only looking back now that Page can recognize that visit as a sign of trouble ahead. Goldfinger, she says, "was a wonderful guy, incredibly bright and interesting, but he wasn't an Adonis."
The relationship with Goldfinger would last through Arndt's first year of residency. But friends detected a change in Arndt's priorities, starting with his surprising choice of residency. He had always talked about neurosurgery. But when he didn't get into the Harvard neurosurgery residency program, he decided against pursuing the field elsewhere and switched gears. He secured a spot in orthopedic surgery at Harvard. In medical circles, neurosurgery has the reputation - fair or not - of attracting the intellectuals and orthopedics, the jocks. Arndt's interest in fixing other people's bones and muscles dovetailed with his growing concern with developing his own.
The breakup with Goldfinger came in the summer of 1994. They had been together for almost 11 years. Their lives were interwoven. Arndt had found someone new and wanted out. He moved into an apartment in the South End. Goldfinger had an exhaustively detailed legal agreement drawn up providing for the division of their art collection, arrangements for the care of their dogs, and a financial settlement. For more than a decade, Goldfinger would argue, he had paid for nearly all of Arndt's living, travel, and entertainment expenses (but not his tuition). The expectation had been that Arndt would absorb more of their shared costs after he entered private practice. So the most controversial provision in the agreement was this: Beginning in 1998, Arndt would be required to pay Goldfinger 9 percent of his income over the next 15 years, not to exceed $500,000. Arndt signed the agreement.
Given the punishing schedules that doctors in training are forced to endure, it's not uncommon for personal relationships to become casualties. But what Arndt's friends did find curious - alarming even - was the way he handled the breakup.
"Here David is, a very good friend of mine. I was not as close to Steve. But clearly David was the one responsible for the breakup. And David had absolutely no insight into it," says Grant Colfax. "It was all about his problems. It was shocking to me."
He and other friends began to pull back from their relationship with Arndt.
Then there was the whiplash of seeing the guys Arndt dated right after Goldfinger. "He ran around with all these Barbie doll boys," says Colfax, who is also gay and is now the director of HIV prevention studies with the San Francisco Department of Public Health. "Is that any different from a straight man who gets divorced in middle age and runs around with trophy wives? No, but it was something that was disturbing to me."
It was as though his friends were seeing a David Arndt, version 2.0 - a better-looking package but one that lacked the charm of the original release. "He once told me, 'I'm like Dorian Gray. I just get better looking as I get older,' " Colfax recalls. "It takes a certain personality to just state that. And I thought it was an interesting literary reference, considering what the novel was about."
The central character in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray manages to defy age and remain youthfully handsome. But he loses his inner compass. In the end, Dorian Gray pays dearly for his vanity.
David Arndt sounds a little too intense, a little too arrogant, ask yourself this: Aren't those exactly the qualities you want in a surgeon? Because this is what his arrogance looked like for most of his time in the operating room: An intolerance for error. An eagerness to take on the toughest cases. A fearlessness about confronting anyone - be it an orderly or a chief of surgery - who he thought was underperforming. Even as an intern, he would routinely challenge the attending physicians. "Interns are supposed to always back down, but not David," recalls Alexandra Page. "The rest of us were like, 'You go, man!' "
As an orthopedic surgical resident, Arndt would finish a grueling shift at Mass. General and then, instead of going out for a beer with his co-workers, would head back to Brigham and Women's to check on a patient he had treated during his last rotation.
Sigurd Berven, one of Arndt's fellow residents, recalls a memorable case: A teenager was rushed to the emergency room with multiple fractures to his spine and pelvis. He had jumped from the roof of a tall building. Arndt operated on him, but that was only the beginning of his care. "David was the only person who figured out why he jumped," says Berven, now a faculty member and spine surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco. Turns out the boy had just been outed at school.
This, says Berven, was typical Arndt care, no matter who the patient was. Sure, he complained a lot. "But the physicians who get angry, who are difficult to get along with, are almost invariably the physicians who really care," Berven says. He compares Arndt to Eriq La Salle's Dr. Benton character on ER and wonders if his friend's intense compassion ultimately became an unmanageable source of stress. In the face of all the defects and demands of medicine, "there's no precedent for somebody surviving in the field who cared as much as David cared."
But here's another way to view Arndt's commitment, his determination to stay involved in patients' care even after they had ceased to be his patients. "He didn't necessarily know where to draw the line," says Stephen Lipson, who was chief of orthopedics at Beth Israel during Arndt's residency. Maybe that surplus of compassion and of self-centeredness came from the same place. "He wanted to be in charge," Lipson says.
Lipson had known Ken Arndt since their residency days at Mass. General, and thought the world of him. Now, here they were, both chiefs at Beth Israel, both watching their own sons follow in their footsteps. (Lipson's son was several years behind David at Harvard Medical School.) "Ken and I had a real kinship," Lipson says.
Lipson found David to be a superior surgeon in the OR and intellectually stimulating outside of it. So he took him under his wing. While David would soar to great heights, it would be prove to be a bumpy flight.
"David wanted nothing but exceptional results," says Lipson, a soft-spoken 57-year-old who now works at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates. But he says Arndt's interpersonal skills didn't always measure up, whether he was twisting around language to confuse people or tearing into them. "If a nurse was doing something and he didn't like the way it was being done - a dressing change, medications, or whatever - he might bark at them: No, you shouldn't do this! It's wrong! Do it this way! He wanted to run the show. Some nurses would go away crying." Lipson would take him aside, tell him to cool it. "But he would just commit the same flaw another time," Lipson says. "He could not turn himself off from being himself."
Lipson was particularly troubled by one area of Arndt's behavior that arose as his residency progressed. Some male orderlies and nurses were complaining that Arndt had made what they felt were inappropriate comments to them, he says. "I had to warn him not to pursue sexual interactions with other male staff," Lipson recalls. "Otherwise it was going to be a problem, and he could be chastised and reported to the administration."
But still, but still: David Arndt was an extremely gifted surgeon. Lipson found him fun to teach - he would do research on his own, push relentlessly for higher performance from everyone, especially himself. Although some of his patients were put off by his manner, most loved him - they could tell he genuinely cared about what happened to them.
And around this time, friends say, Arndt began talking about needing to get his personal life back in order so he could be a good role model - for his son. Arndt told friends that the boy had been born during his early days in San Francisco but that it was only after the boy was in his teens and wrote to Arndt that the connection was revived. Arndt kept a picture of him, proudly updated his friends on the teen's achievements in school. One time when Arndt was visiting California, Grant Colfax got a chance to meet the boy and his two female parents.
Things were coming together at work as well. As the capstone to Arndt's residency, Lipson advocated for him to be named chief resident at Beth Israel in 1997. Given his father's longstanding connections there, "it felt like home for David."
Lipson still envisioned Arndt becoming one of Boston's next top spine surgeons, if he could just keep himself in check. He helped arrange for Arndt to do his fellowship in spine surgery (the branch of orthopedics that is closest to neurosurgery) at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. When Arndt returned to Boston and began working at Harvard Vanguard and at a private group practice, Lipson sent him a steady supply of referrals - a crucial lifeline for a young doctor starting out in an over-doctored place like Boston.
Lipson and his wife, Jenifer, had always enjoyed socializing with Ken and Anne Arndt at hospital functions. "They're a nice Jewish couple," Lipson says, "and so are we." Still, his wife sensed trouble in his continued advocacy for David and cautioned him to keep his distance. Lipson would hear none of it. "I wanted to have to do with him," he says. "But my wife said, 'He's out of control.' Which, in the end, I think was true."
You want warning signs? They were there. In fact, the year 1998 was packed with them, though many of the people who worked with David Arndt wouldn't find out about them until much later.
When Arndt returned from New Orleans, Stephen Lipson asked his protege how it went. Arndt told him it went great, neglecting to mention the federal law he had broken while he was there. On May 29, Alfredo Fuentes submitted a passport application under a false name, and Arndt filed a supporting affidavit. Fuentes had been Arndt's domestic partner for several years, and he had moved with Arndt from Massachusetts to New Orleans. But Fuentes was a Venezuelan who was in the States illegally. The fraudulent passport application, Arndt would say later, was their attempt to head off deportation.
Three months later, in the early-morning hours, Fuentes was sitting on a bedroom couch talking to a man named Roger Volzer in Volzer's Provincetown home. After Volzer got up to blow out some candles, Arndt, who had been staring at the men through a window, used his surgeon's hands to rip out a screen and climb into the house, according to the Provincetown police report. Volzer would tell police that Arndt punched him in the head, pushed him out of the bedroom, and then threw a chair at him. Arndt was charged with assault and battery, burglary, and malicious destruction of property.
Volzer eventually decided not to press charges in exchange for Arndt agreeing to pay him $30,000 and to attend weekly anger-management counseling. Christopher Snow, Volzer's attorney, says Arndt's supporters lobbied his client, telling him a conviction could derail a promising medical career.
But if Arndt dodged a bullet, he hardly acted grateful during their meetings, says Snow. "In the 'if looks could kill' category, he was a murderer. He acted if the proceedings were an incredible invasion on his otherwise important life. He had absolute contempt for the fact that someone might have the audacity to hold him accountable for his bizarre and destructive behavior."
In the end, Snow has said, Arndt paid only $18,700 and failed to follow through on counseling.
In the fall of 1998, Arndt pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor passport violation in federal court in Louisiana. He was sentenced to three years' probation and fined $3,000. But because he had renewed his medical license a few months earlier, he would not have to report that conviction to Massachusetts authorities until his next renewal period two years later.
The fines and legal fees, meanwhile, were adding up. His breakup agreement with Goldfinger, the one that required Arndt to pay 9 percent of his income to his former partner, was slated to go into effect in 1998. So just when Arndt had finished up his lengthy medical training and was about to start making some real money - the 2002 median salary for spine surgeons was more than $545,000, according to the Medical Group Management Association - the financial vise was beginning to tighten.
Arndt argued in court filings that the Goldfinger agreement should be invalidated because he had signed it under duress. The case slogged through the courts and arbitration until a Superior Court judge upheld it in 2000. Goldfinger would never collect a dime.
Even with so many distractions, Arndt seemed able to wall off his personal problems from his professional work.
James A. Karlson, chief of orthopedics at Mount Auburn Hospital, had known Arndt since residency and practiced with him both at Harvard Vanguard and in their four-surgeon group practice. Arndt had privileges at most of Boston's top hospitals but began focusing his attention on Mount Auburn when the veteran spine surgeon there started to cut back. Karlson says there were a few low-level concerns about Arndt, such as tardiness, but no indication of his mounting personal problems. "He had certain problems that we didn't pick up on," Karlson says. "Should we have? 'Could we have?' is a better question."
The care of Raymond LaVallee-Davidson offered a few clues. In the summer of 2001, Arndt operated on his back at New England Baptist Hospital. LaVallee-Davidson says Arndt told him the surgery would take about eight hours. It took 18, and even after that, Arndt told him he had been unable to finish the job. Because LaVallee-Davidson suffered serious complications, it wasn't until December that follow-up surgery was scheduled at Mount Auburn. Just after 6 o'clock on the morning of surgery, he was being prepped by hospital staff and about to be anesthetized. "I had asked them to hold off, because I had a few questions I wanted to ask Dr. Arndt before I went under," the 44-year-old recalls. Four and a half hours later, hospital staff told him they had been unable to locate Arndt, and so LaVallee-Davidson got dressed and made the four-hour drive back to his home in Skowhegan, Maine. Four days later, he says, he got a call from Arndt saying he had overslept. LaVallee-Davidson, who says that initially he found Arndt to be "probably one of the most compassionate people I have ever met," is now among Arndt's former patients suing him for malpractice.
Early on the morning of July 10, 2002, Charles Algeri, a former Waltham cabdriver with a history of back problems, arrived at Mount Auburn Hospital and was prepped for fusion surgery on his lumbar spine. Algeri says Arndt arrived late and unshaven, with dark circles under his eyes. "He said his car had been towed because he had parked in a bus stop," Algeri says.
Like most of the cases Arndt took on, the surgery for Algeri would be a complex, all-day affair. According to state investigative reports and interviews with some of the people involved, this is what happened: The first incision was made around 11 a.m. In the OR during the afternoon, Arndt twice asked the circulating nurse to call his office and ask if "Bob" had arrived. By the second call, the receptionist informed the nurse that "Bob" was Arndt's code name for his paycheck and told her to tell Arndt the check would be delivered to him there.
Just before 6 p.m., Leo Troy, one of Arndt's fellow orthopedic surgeons from their private practice, was passing by the front desk near the operating room when a secretary asked him if he could take the check to Arndt in the OR. Troy had a few minutes before he was scheduled to operate on another patient, so he had planned to look in on Arndt anyway. He went into the OR, handed Arndt the check, and then observed the surgery for a couple of minutes. Then, Arndt asked him if he would watch his patient for "about five minutes." At the time, Arndt was about seven hours into the surgery. Algeri was under anesthesia and had an open incision in his back. It's not unusual for surgeons doing long procedures like this one to step out to use the bathroom. Although he is not a spine surgeon, Troy says he had assisted Arndt before and was "qualifed to close up the patient in an emergency." Arndt then turned to a salesman from a medical device supplier - sales reps often sit in on complex surgeries in case there are questions about the equipment - and said, "Let's go."
A few minutes later, a nurse walked into the OR and asked where Arndt was. Told he had stepped out for a few minutes, she said, "I bet he went to the bank." She had apparently overheard Arndt talking about it earlier. Troy and the rest of the OR staff were incredulous. They tried paging Arndt. Hospital administrators were notified. The decision was made to wait for Arndt to return and, if he didn't come in a timely manner, to try to find a spine surgeon from another hospital. Troy, who calls Arndt an excellent surgeon, says he never had any doubt that he would return.
And he did. Thirty-five minutes later. He admitted he had gone to the bank, and the OR staff said he seemed surprised that they would be upset with him. He finished the surgery about two hours later. Mount Auburn suspended Arndt's privileges the next day, and after an internal review process, the suspension was reported to the state medical licensing board.
"This has got to be a joke," Nancy Achin Audesse said after the report hit her desk.
It was July 25, 2002. Audesse is the executive director of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. By the summer of 2002, she was more than familiar with the name David Arndt. The board's year-plus investigation into Arndt's conviction on the passport violation was wrapping up. (He would get a formal reprimand.) He told the board he had no choice but to lie - if he didn't, he said, his partner would have been deported to Venezuela, where he said wealthy homosexuals are persecuted and killed. "He was always presenting himself as the victim," Audesse says.
Still, the reason for his suspension from Mount Auburn was so outlandish that she was convinced someone was putting her on. He left his patient in the middle of surgery to go cash a check at the bank?
After doing a round of interviews - Arndt told an investigator he had some "overdue bills" and needed to get to the bank before it closed at 7 p.m. - the medical board voted on August 7 to suspend his license. Audesse issued a press release.
At 7 a.m. the following day, she was sitting in her dentist's chair, getting extensive work done. At 9 a.m., she called her assistant, who was panicked. "You have to get in here now," she told Audesse. "This place is crawling with TV news crews!"
"This story went national so fast," Audesse recalls. "I did 16 straight interviews, numb and drooling."
In the public, the jokes spread - A Harvard doctor, and he never heard of direct deposit? And then the conjecture - Overdue bills? Who insists on cash these days besides drug dealers and bookies?
As for Arndt's patient, Algeri had no idea what had happened until he got a call from Mount Auburn officials the day before the news was going to break. Told that Arndt had left him during surgery to go to Harvard Square, Algeri, a 6-foot-5, 315-pound guy who sports a Bruins baseball cap, a goatee, and a ready laugh, replied, "What, for a cappuccino?" He watched the media circle around Arndt for a week before coming forward with his lawyer, Marc Breakstone, who later filed a malpractice suit.
For a doctor who had always craved attention, David Arndt suddenly had more than even he had ever wanted. The news, when it found its way to his med school friends scattered across the country, took the wind right out of them. They had a feeling Arndt would cause a stir wherever he went, maybe put his career in jeopardy by telling off a hospital chief. But this?
Nearly two years later, Alexandra Page still keeps a newspaper clipping about the interrupted surgery on the desk in her office outside San Diego. It's yellowed now, but when she refers to it during an interview, it produces fresh tears. "We all make mistakes," she says, "but this was so heinous, so volitional. I'm just aching for him, for whatever must have happened in his life that caused him to do this."
During his interview, Sigurd Berven breaks down at the same point. Same with another friend of Arndt's from med school, Saiya Remmler, who is now a psychiatrist in Lexington. "What could be more important? You know, the guy's on the table," Remmler says. "To this day, I don't know how anyone could do that, let alone one of my classmates."
But then how to explain Remmler's reaction when she first read about the incident, how she put down the newspaper, turned to her husband, and said, "It doesn't surprise me." Remmler says that Arndt was funny, charming, and "really smart. I felt lucky to have him as a classmate." But, she adds, "he was also really narcissistic, and I guess I knew there was this compulsive streak about him - addictive almost. And so deciding his needs are more important than his patient's life - that sounds narcissistic to me."
About a month after news about the check cashing broke came another bombshell. Arndt would be charged with four counts of statutory child rape and one count each of indecent assault and battery, drugging a person for sexual intercourse, contributing to the delinquency of a child, and possession of the drugs ketamine hydrochloride ("Special K") and methamphetamine. Middlesex County prosecutors allege that on September 5, Arndt was driving through Central Square in Cambridge and stopped to invite two boys, ages 15 and 14, into his car to get high. Then, they allege, after dropping off the 14-year-old, he had sex in his car with the 15-year-old. The boys waited four days before contacting police. They said that Arndt had given them his cellphone number and told them his name was David. According to court records, when police dialed the number, Arndt answered, and he later admitted to having the boys in his car but said he had no physical contact aside from brushing one of the boys on the shoulder.
Soon after came Arndt's "poverty motion," asking the court to pay his costs because, according to his lawyer, he was indigent and his parents needed to save for their retirement. (His parents disputed the lawyer's account; he is now gone, and their lawyer, Stephen Delinsky of Eckert Seamans, is representing their son.)
Then, in August 2003, almost a year to the day after he first made headlines, Arndt made a splash again. He was arrested on August 8 and charged with possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute. According to the postal inspector's report and other court records, on the morning of August 7, Arndt reserved a room at the Chandler Inn in Boston's South End for that night and asked that a party by the name of Frank Castro be added to his reservation. He also asked if any packages for him or his guest had arrived. Around 8:30 p.m., Arndt checked in to Room 501 but apparently didn't stay there that night. Around 1:30 p.m. the next day, Arndt appeared at the front desk. Told that a package had arrived for Room 501 but that it was not in his name, Arndt signed for it and took possession of it. What he didn't know was that, the day before, postal inspectors in Los Angeles had found the 6-pound Express Mail package addressed to Frank Castro c/o the Chandler Inn suspicious enough to get a federal warrant. Inside the box, they found a large, pink penis-shaped pinata. Inside the pinata, they found about 2 pounds of a white crystalline substance that tested positive for methamphetamine. That discovery led to a sting operation at the Chandler Inn, which in turn led to Arndt standing in Room 501, sweating profusely, trying to explain himself to a postal inspector.
The postal inspector reported that Arndt told him he had met Frank Castro online a few months earlier. When authorities went to Arndt's apartment in the South End, a man identifying himself as Alfredo Fuentes told them he and Arndt used to be partners but were now just roommates. He said Arndt knew a Frank Castro from med school.
In fact, authorities were able to track down Frank Castro, an orthopedic surgeon. Castro and his office manager explained that he had been in surgery in Tennessee for the entire time of the incident. Informed of the parcel containing narcotics that had been addressed to him, Castro told the inspector that of the few people he knew in Boston, "only one could be desperate enough to do something like that." David Arndt. He said he and Arndt had been friends since they were lab partners during their pre-med days in San Francisco but had not been in touch in some time.
David Procopio, spokesman for the Suffolk County district attorney's office, says that while the investigation is ongoing, Castro has been cooperative and "the only person against whom charges are warranted, according to the evidence now in our possession, is David Arndt."
Because of the new charges, Arndt was found to have violated his bail on the Cambridge case and it was revoked. (Earlier in the summer, Arndt had been found at Logan Airport carrying at least $12,000 in cash and his passport. The passport was revoked, but he was allowed to travel in the United States.) He would eventually be released, after posting $50,000 cash bail. But for two months, home for the surgeon and son of privilege was a cell in the Nashua Street Jail.
One weekend after the blizzard of headlines, Stephen and Jenifer Lipson went out to brunch and bumped into Ken and Anne Arndt. (Ken, by this time, had left his post at Beth Israel for a private practice in Chestnut Hill.) "We sat at our separate table, formally said hello to one another," Lipson recalls. "But clearly nobody wanted to talk about David. It was too sensitive."
What does Lipson think happened to his protege? "I think somehow he got involved in drugs and it ate him alive and he went over the edge," he says. "Beyond that I don't have an answer. And it's a shame."
If, as friends say, David Arndt has always viewed himself as the star of his own drama, what, in the end, drives the story line?
Is his a story of downfall by drugs?
It should be noted that neither of Arndt's criminal cases has yet gone to trial, and he has pleaded not guilty to all charges. But if the allegations turn out to be true, he would hardly be the first hard-driving doctor to get wildly off track because of a substance abuse problem. John Fromson is a Harvard psychiatrist and president of Physician Health Services, the Massachusetts Medical Society offshoot that provides support and monitoring services for doctors battling substance abuse and mental health difficulties. Confidentiality rules prevent him from discussing any one case, or even confirming a particular doctor's involvement with the program. But he has gained considerable insight from overseeing a program that has worked with about 2,000 Massachusetts doctors over the last 10 years.
This is not a great time to be a doctor. More than 40 percent of physicians surveyed in 2001 said they wouldn't go into medicine if they had to do it over again. With increased productivity demands and a tightening financial squeeze, doctors are under tremendous stress, and more of them are turning to drugs and alcohol for relief. An estimated 8 to 14 percent of physicians have a substance abuse problem. In Massachusetts, surgeons are among the most affected.
Fromson ticks off the warning signs: verbally abusive behavior, tardiness, unexcused absences, inappropriate sexual behavior. The signs of strain tend to come first in a doctor's personal life. "When things happen at the workplace," he says, "usually they have been going on for a long time." Even then, he says, the problem may not be confronted, because most doctors are self-employed and only loosely supervised, and hospital management is often hesitant to call doctors on questionable behavior for fear that they will take their patient base to a hospital across town.
All of this means a doctor's substance abuse problem can go unchecked and then trigger a downward spiral.
And if the drug of choice is crystal meth, or speed as it's also known, the narcotic at the center of Arndt's charges, the spiral can move at dizzying speeds. In his job with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, Grant Colfax has done some pioneering research documenting the prevalence of speed in the gay community. "For many gay men, crystal meth has just completely destroyed them," he says. "People bottom out. It's a question of how far down you've fallen, and if you can get back up."
"If you look at David's personality, speed is the dream drug," Colfax says. "It makes you feel invulnerable."
At some point in conversations about him, just about all of Arndt's friends and colleagues use that word or others like it to describe him and his self-image. Bulletproof. Subject to his own rules. Unbreakable.
Ultimately, that's what makes the drugs explanation, on its own, unsatisfying. After all, the same description fit him even during the long periods in his life when he was clearly not using drugs. Friends were often driven to distraction by Arndt's sense of invulnerability and need for control. But they also saw how those traits could be attractive, especially for patients in need - spurring him to take on the most challenging cases, to fight the toughest battles on their behalf.
But what happens if that need to be in control becomes more important than anything else? "David wanted people to pay attention to him and notice him," says Saiya Remmler, the psychiatrist and former med school friend. "To me, it sounds like a gradual, maybe even lifelong, struggle between greatness and tragic flaws." And what might be at the center of this Greek tragedy? She and other physicians who knew Arndt but haven't seen him in years suggest narcissistic personality disorder, where an exaggerated sense of self-importance masks a chronic emptiness.
Then again, only the star of this drama knows the full story.
You do as he tells you. And he is right. The Journalist and the Murderer is a gripping piece of nonfiction. (The original New Yorker piece was published in book form in 1990.) It examines the dance between a controversial figure and a journalist trying to persuade him to share his story - one that is always something of a tango through a minefield. The relationship at the center of Janet Malcolm's book is the one between Fatal Vision author Joe McGinniss and convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. The first sentence of the book is a pretty clear preview of the analysis Malcolm will render: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." To be sure, the field of journalism is ill served by the selection of McGinniss as its emissary. This, after all, is a writer who, according to Malcolm, entered into a revenue-sharing arrangement with his subject and then peppered him for years with flattering, deceptive letters before crucifying him in the pages of his book.
The Journalist and the Murderer, David Arndt tells you, provides insight into his decision not to speak to you at length. It's hard to miss the casting choice he is suggesting for you in the role of this ethically challenged journalist. But his literary reference cuts both ways. After all, the other part to be cast is that of MacDonald, the physician convicted of murdering his wife, two daughters, and unborn son and implausibly blaming the carnage on a band of marauding drugged-out hippies.
In a way, the most thought-provoking portions of Malcolm's book do not involve her indictment of McGinniss but rather her own admissions. She concedes that it was easier to come down hard on McGinniss after he shut off communication with her early on.
Your own mind returns to the conversations you had with Arndt before he, too, stopped talking. "You have no idea what my life is like now," he says in the hall of the Cambridge court. "If you talk to anyone who knew me after residency, you know I am an excellent surgeon. I can no longer do what I do best, through a series of circumstances, some of them perhaps my own doing."
And then, as if on cue, his call for compassion is dislodged by a reassertion of control. "You must not do this story," he says. When you remind him that he can't control whether the story is written, but only how complete it is, he shakes his head. "You can control anything you want," he says.
How?
"Don't turn it in."
Anne Barnard of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Neil Swidey can be reached at swidey@globe.com.
____________________________________________________________________________________
By Scott Allen
Boston Globe - April 22, 2005
A prominent plastic surgeon has been reprimanded and indefinitely suspended by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center after he left a patient in the middle of an operation to perform surgery down the street at another hospital. Dr. Joseph Upton, who specializes in complex hand surgeries, has voluntarily agreed to stop practicing medicine until at least May 4 while state regulators investigate whether he has double-booked operations on other occasions.
Beth Israel officials said Upton left an adult male patient during a scheduled break in a lengthy operation on March 17 and returned before the procedure was scheduled to resume. However, they said he failed to properly notify the operating room team that he was leaving and didn't arrange for another attending surgeon to take his place in case there were complications during the break.
"Though no harm to the patient occurred and the surgery was completed on schedule, the medical center leadership took this breach of policy very seriously and immediately launched its own internal investigation," said a statement issued by Dr. Michael Epstein, chief operating officer of Beth Israel Deaconess. He said Upton has not been allowed to admit new patients or visit existing ones since April 8.
Upton's operating room breach bears a surface similarity to the 2002 case of Dr. David Arndt, whose license was suspended after he left a patient on the operating table to go to the bank to cash a check.
Upton's lawyer, William J. Dailey Jr., bristled at any comparison. He said Upton left Beth Israel only to operate on a child at Children's Hospital Boston. "There was no personal gain to Dr. Upton, none whatsoever," Dailey said. "It was solely an effort to assist a child and a child's family that was in need."
Neither patient was harmed, he added.
Children's Hospital spokeswoman Michelle Davis also stood by Upton, saying, "He's been on staff here since 1977, and he's a very accomplished physician."
However, the incident was serious enough to prompt Beth Israel to report it to the Board of Registration in Medicine, which regulates doctors. The board persuaded Upton to give up his medical license until at least May 4, the date of the next scheduled board meeting, so that investigators can look at his broader practices.
"There was no allegation of harm or substandard care," acknowledged board director Nancy Achin Audesse, "but it's important to know [that] when the ethical and professional conduct of a physician is impugned and when that conduct undermines public confidence in the profession, that conduct will result in discipline."
During nearly 30 years as a surgeon, Upton has won fame for carrying out complex, sometimes groundbreaking operations. In 1983, he led a team that reattached the arm of a man injured in a car accident. In 1997, he carried out a nerve transplant on a 1-year- old girl at Children's Hospital, the youngest nerve recipient ever at the time. He also worked with tissue-engineering pioneer Dr. Joseph Vacanti to implant a lab-grown rib cage in a teenage boy born without cartilage or bones on one side.
On March 17, according to Beth Israel officials, Upton was leading a team carrying out reconstructive hand surgery that took so many hours that they planned multiple breaks of 45 to 60 minutes each, so that they could restore blood circulation to prevent tissue damage. During a break, Upton left for Children's Hospital down the street on Longwood Avenue where he had agreed to perform surgery on a child before the family left for a vacation.
At Beth Israel, Upton left medical residents, doctors still completing their training, in charge of the operating room while he was away, which Beth Israel officials said is a violation of the hospital's policy that an attending surgeon must be "immediately available" to the patient throughout an operation.
Initially, the chief of surgery orally reprimanded Upton and told him his future work would be carefully monitored. However, the department of surgery then suspended him for two weeks, starting April 8, and forwarded the complaint to the Medical Executive Committee, which oversees quality control at the hospital. On April 20, the executive committee continued Upton's suspension indefinitely.
In addition, the hospital notified the Beth Israel patient of what had happened and filed a report with the Department of Public Health, which has now launched its own investigation into whether Beth Israel put the patient at risk.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Surgeon indicted on drug charges
Associated Press - June 3, 2004
A former surgeon who was suspended after leaving a patient on the operating table while he ran to the bank was arrested Wednesday on drug charges.
David Arndt, 44, was arrested near his Boston home. The indictment charges him with possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine and conspiracy to possess and distribute methamphetamine.
Arndt was arraigned last August on state methamphetamine possession charges stemming from the same case. Suffolk County prosecutors will now dismiss their charges so the case can proceed in federal court, said David Procopio, a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office.
Arndt gained local infamy in July 2002, when he left a patient on the operating table during a back operation at Cambridge's Mount Auburn Hospital while he deposited a check. His license was suspended a month later and the license expired in October 2002.
He was also indicted in October 2002 for allegedly raping and assaulting a 15-year-old boy in Cambridge. He pleaded innocent in the case, which is still pending.
The new federal indictment alleges that between April 2003 and August 2003 in Boston, New York City and other parts of Massachusetts, Arndt conspired to obtain and sell methamphetamine.
It also alleges he was caught with at least 50 grams of methamphetamine in August 2003.
Following an initial appearance in U.S. District Court Wednesday, Arndt was being held pending a detention hearing, scheduled for Friday.
____________________________________________________________________________________
United States Department of Justice
Michael J. Sullivan, U.S. Attorney
Michael J. Sullivan, U.S. Attorney
District of Massachusetts
United States Attorney's Office
United States Attorney's Office
John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse
1 Courthouse Way, Suite 9200, Boston, MA 02210
Press Office: (617) 748-3139
June 29, 2005
PRESS RELEASE
FORMER CAMBRIDGE SURGEON CONVICTED ON FEDERAL DRUG CHARGES
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/boston062905b.htmlBoston, MA... A former Cambridge surgeon pleaded guilty today in federal court to methamphetamine and oxycodone distribution charges.
United States Attorney Michael J. Sullivan; Peter Zegarac, Inspector in Charge of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service; June Stansbury, Special Agent in Charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in New England; and Kenneth W. Kaiser, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New England, announced today that DAVID CARL ARNDT, age 44, of 26 Rutland Square, Boston, pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns to a nine-count Superseding Indictment charging ARNDT with conspiracy to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine; one count of possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute, and seven counts of distribution of oxycodone. ARNDT, formerly a surgeon, had his license to practice medicine suspended in August 2002; the license expired in October of 2002.At today's plea hearing, the prosecutor told the Court that, had the case proceeded to trial, the evidence would have proven that from at least April 2003 to August 2003, ARNDT conspired with others to distribute, and possess with intent to distribute, 500 grams or more of methamphetamine. Additionally ARNDT distributed oxycodone on at least seven different occasions during the time period of October 10, 2001 to May 17, 2002.
ARNDT was arrested on June 2, 2004, in connection with these charges and has been in federal custody since that time. Judge Stearns scheduled sentencing for October 20, 2005 at 2:30 pm. ARNDT faces a minimum mandatory sentence of 10 years in prison and a maximum of life, to be followed by 5 years to life of supervised release and a $4 million fine on both the conspiracy and the possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine charges. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, to be followed by 3 years of supervised release and a $1 million fine on each of the seven counts of distribution of oxycodone charges.
ARNDT's co-defendant, Donald Bing McGilvray, age 51, of Brighton, Massachusetts, pleaded guilty before Judge Stearns on April 6, 2005 to one count of possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine. He is scheduled to be sentenced on September 7, 2005.
The case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Massachusetts State Police and the Boston Police Department. It is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Cynthia Lie in Sullivan's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force Unit.
Press Contact: Samantha Martin, (617) 748-3139
____________________________________________________________________________________
List of Disciplinary and Other Public Board Actions
Commonwealth of Massachusetts - September 21, 2005
http://www.massmedboard.org/public/discipline.shtm
Name and Address Date of Action(s) Type of Action(s)
David Carl Arndt 09/21/2005 1. Revocation of Inchoate Right to Renew
26 Rutland Square, Apt. 3
Boston, MA 02118
Commonwealth of Massachusetts - September 21, 2005
http://www.massmedboard.org/public/discipline.shtm
Name and Address Date of Action(s) Type of Action(s)
David Carl Arndt 09/21/2005 1. Revocation of Inchoate Right to Renew
26 Rutland Square, Apt. 3
Boston, MA 02118
____________________________________________________________________________________
Ex-Doctor Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges
New York Times - June 30, 2005
Former orthopedic surgeon David C. Arndt, who lost his medical license after leaving a patient on the operating table while he went to cash a check, pleaded guilty yesterday in US District Court in Boston to drug-trafficking charges. Arndt, 44, who has been jailed without bail since his arrest last June, pleaded guilty to selling methamphetamine, commonly known as speed, and oxycodone. His lawyer, Stephen R. Delinsky of Boston, said Arndt told the judge that spending the last year in jail probably saved his life because he was addicted to methamphetamine and is now drug free. US District Judge Richard G. Stearns is scheduled to sentence Arndt on Oct. 20.
Errand-running doc admits errors of druggie days
By Laurel J. Sweet
Boston Herald - June 30, 2005
ABSTRACT
[Richard G. Stearns], at times engaging in a mutually enlightening give-and- take with the Harvard graduate on the finer points of law and medicine, found [David Arndt] to be "exceptionally intelligent" and "remorseful."
The heretofore silent surgeon's cascading candor is "a testament to a new beginning," Arndt's defense attorney, Stephen Delinsky, told the Herald.
Arndt still faces trial in Middlesex Superior Court on state charges he drugged and raped a teenage boy. But Delinsky said Arndt one day hopes to fulfill his dream of providing health care on an American Indian reservation.
Surgeon barred from renewing license
Associated Press - September 21, 2005
BOSTON An orthopedic surgeon who was disciplined for leaving a patient on an operating table while he went to the bank has been barred from renewing his medical license.
David Arndt's license was suspended in 2002 after he left a patient on the operating table for more than a half hour during back surgery.
Arndt also is awaiting sentencing on federal drug charges. He allegedly accepted a package containing 900 grams of crystal methamphetamine worth more than 100-thousand dollars.
Today, the state Board of Registration in Medicine revoked his right to seek a renewal of his license.
New York Times - June 30, 2005
Former orthopedic surgeon David C. Arndt, who lost his medical license after leaving a patient on the operating table while he went to cash a check, pleaded guilty yesterday in US District Court in Boston to drug-trafficking charges. Arndt, 44, who has been jailed without bail since his arrest last June, pleaded guilty to selling methamphetamine, commonly known as speed, and oxycodone. His lawyer, Stephen R. Delinsky of Boston, said Arndt told the judge that spending the last year in jail probably saved his life because he was addicted to methamphetamine and is now drug free. US District Judge Richard G. Stearns is scheduled to sentence Arndt on Oct. 20.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Errand-running doc admits errors of druggie days
By Laurel J. Sweet
Boston Herald - June 30, 2005
ABSTRACT
[Richard G. Stearns], at times engaging in a mutually enlightening give-and- take with the Harvard graduate on the finer points of law and medicine, found [David Arndt] to be "exceptionally intelligent" and "remorseful."
The heretofore silent surgeon's cascading candor is "a testament to a new beginning," Arndt's defense attorney, Stephen Delinsky, told the Herald.
Arndt still faces trial in Middlesex Superior Court on state charges he drugged and raped a teenage boy. But Delinsky said Arndt one day hopes to fulfill his dream of providing health care on an American Indian reservation.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Surgeon barred from renewing license
Associated Press - September 21, 2005
BOSTON An orthopedic surgeon who was disciplined for leaving a patient on an operating table while he went to the bank has been barred from renewing his medical license.
David Arndt's license was suspended in 2002 after he left a patient on the operating table for more than a half hour during back surgery.
Arndt also is awaiting sentencing on federal drug charges. He allegedly accepted a package containing 900 grams of crystal methamphetamine worth more than 100-thousand dollars.
Today, the state Board of Registration in Medicine revoked his right to seek a renewal of his license.
____________________________________________________________________________________
Surgeon Who Left Patient Loses License
New York Times - September 22, 2005
Dr. David C. Arndt, the surgeon who left a patient on the operating table to go cash a check in 2002, lost the authority to perform surgery for at least five years after state regulators yesterday revoked his right to renew his expired medical license. Arndt, in jail awaiting sentencing on unrelated federal drug charges, has not practiced since the 2002 patient abandonment at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. But, until yesterday, the Board of Registration in Medicine had only suspended his medical license. Arndt, a 1992 graduate of Harvard Medical School who has been jailed since 2004, pleaded guilty to illegally selling methamphetamine and oxycodone last June.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Doctor Who Left Patient On Operating Table Gets License Pulled
NBC News (Channel 10) - September 22, 2005
The Massachusetts doctor, who left a patient on the operating table so he could go to the bank, can no longer practice medicine in the Commonwealth.
David Arndt has been barred from renewing his license. The license was suspended in 2002, after going to the bank during a surgical operation.
Arndt is also awaiting sentencing on federal drug charges.
NBC News (Channel 10) - September 22, 2005
The Massachusetts doctor, who left a patient on the operating table so he could go to the bank, can no longer practice medicine in the Commonwealth.
David Arndt has been barred from renewing his license. The license was suspended in 2002, after going to the bank during a surgical operation.
Arndt is also awaiting sentencing on federal drug charges.
_________________________________________________________________________________
$1.25M Settlement Said Reached in Arndt Case
By Neil Swidey
Boston Globe - January 6, 2004
Former spine surgeon David Arndt and his insurance company agreed to pay $1.25 million to the patient Arndt infamously walked out on during back surgery in 2002 so the doctor could go to the bank to cash a check, the patient's lawyer said yesterday.
The incident at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, which drew international media coverage, triggered the summary suspension of Arndt's medical license. In the months that followed, the once- promising, Harvard-trained surgeon experienced a very public collapse in which he faced child rape charges in Middlesex County and drug charges in federal court.
The patient he left anesthetized on the operating table, 48-year- old Charles Algeri of Waltham, said Arndt botched the surgery so severely that he has been in excruciating pain ever since. He said he underwent two additional surgeries at New England Baptist Hospital to correct the damage.
Algeri, a former cabdriver, said he accepted the settlement rather than spend several years litigating the case because he wanted to move on with his life. His portion of the settlement, he said, has helped him purchase a house and provide for his daughter, who recently graduated from college. "But I would rather be walking normal and working than get any money," he said.
The settlement was quietly agreed to several months ago, but was not disclosed until the Globe made inquiries about it yesterday.
Edward D. McCarthy, a Cambridge attorney who represented Arndt and his malpractice insurer, Controlled Risk Insurance Co., (SEE ATTACHED CORRECTION) paid the settlement. He said other medical malpractice cases are pending against Arndt.
Marc Breakstone, a Boston-based lawyer representing Algeri, said that Mount Auburn Hospital also was party to the settlement, and, as such, was released from the threat of litigation from Algeri over this incident. But McCarthy stressed, "Dr. Arndt was the only defendant in the case."
Mount Auburn Hospital officials, through a spokesman, refused to comment.
On July 10, 2002, Arndt left Algeri on the operating table for about 35 minutes. He later told an investigator that he had some overdue bills and he needed to get to the bank before 7p.m.
Not long after that incident, Arndt was charged with, among other things, statutory child rape, indecent assault and battery, and drugging a person for sexual intercourse. Middlesex prosecutors said Arndt had picked up 14-year-old and 15-year-old boys in Central Square, got high with them, and had sex with one of them.
A tentative trial date of April 25, 2005, has been set, according to the Middlesex district attorney's office.
Meanwhile, Arndt is being held without bail on federal drug charges, which include conspiracy to distribute more than 500 grams of crystal methamphetamine.
In court papers, federal prosecutors produced testimony from unnamed witnesses who made several allegations, including that Arndt was an experienced drug dealer; that he was practicing "back-alley medicine," treating shooting victims who could not or would not go to the hospital; that he misused his position as a physician to write prescriptions and sell OxyContin from a private stash; and that he boasted he would have no problem "disemboweling" anyone who "ratted" on him, with just a "quick swipe of the scalpel."
In a motion filed this past summer seeking Arndt's release, his attorneys said Arndt sought substance-abuse treatment and counseling. "Dr. Arndt's decision to take responsibility for his drug problem shows positive personal judgment inconsistent with conduct typically expected of a hardened drug dealer as the government seeks to portray," they wrote.
A federal judge denied the motion seeking Arndt's release.
[PUBLISHED CORRECTION - DATE: Friday, January 7, 2005: Correction: Because of an editing error, a story about a malpractice settlement involving former surgeon David Arndt in yesterday's City and Region section incorrectly identified the party that paid the settlement. It was his insurer, Controlled Risk Insurance Co.)
_________________________________________________________________________________
Judge delays disgraced doc's sentencing on drug charges
By Laurel Sweet
Boston Herald - December 20, 2006
A federal judge yesterday stayed the sentencing of a troubled orthopedic surgeon until Feb. 5 while he decides whether David Carl Arndt's alleged lifelong struggle with drugs and depression is deserving of sympathy.
Likening the bizarre fall from grace of the former gay hustler turned dope-dealing Harvard-educated doc to the FOX TV show "House," U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns said Arndt's life is "beyond one's imagination as plausible."
Arndt, 46, a longtime South Ender who made international headlines in 2002 when he abandoned a patient on an operating table at Mount Auburn Hospital to run a bank errand. . .
_________________________________________________________________________________
USA v. Arndt
US Printing Office - February 12, 2007
Case 1:04-cr-10166-RGS Document 80 Filed 02/12/07 Page 1 of 3
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS
CRIMINAL NO. 04-10166- RGS
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
v.
DAVID C. ARNDT MEMORANDUM AND ORDER ON IMPOSITION
v.
DAVID C. ARNDT MEMORANDUM AND ORDER ON IMPOSITION
OF FINAL SENTENCE
February 12, 2007
STEARNS, D.J.
At the conclusion of defendant David Arndt’s December 19, 2006 sentencing hearing, the court imposed the minimum ten-year sentence mandated by 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(A)(viii). The court, however, suspended execution of the sentence to permit the parties to brief the issue of whether under United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005), the court had discretion to find the defendant “safety valve” eligible under 18 U.S.C. § 3533, despite the fact that his criminal history point score totaled three.1 I come, not without some reluctance, to the conclusion that the court lacks such authority.2
1There are five safety-valve criteria. It is undisputed that Arndt meets the first four criteria. However, under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(f), a defendant is not eligible for safety valve consideration if his criminal history score exceeds one criminal history point. Arndt scored three points, one for a prior immigration-related offense, and two additional points as the instant offense was committed while Arndt was on probation as a result of the prior offense. At the time Arndt entered the plea agreement with the government, the parties anticipated that he would be safety valve eligible and that a sentence below the mandatory ten-year minimum would be appropriate. It was only after the Presentence Report was prepared did it become apparent that Arndt did not qualify for the safety valve. The court offered Arndt the opportunity to withdraw his guilty plea, but he declined to do so.
2The court does not minimize the seriousness of Arndt’s offense. However, both the original plea agreement reached between Arndt and the government and the court at the
Case 1:04-cr-10166-RGS Document 80 Filed 02/12/07
Defendant, in his memorandum, relies on guidelines jurisprudence permitting a
court to find that a defendant’s Criminal History Category has been overstated either
because of the nature of the scorable offenses or specific attributes of the defendant
warranting a downward departure. See e.g. United States v. Person, 377 F. Supp. 2d 308,
310 (D. Mass. 2005) (diminished capacity). As the government points out in response, the
defendant’s argument confuses the court’s authority to depart horizontally on the
sentencing grid to a lower criminal history category – a power that it possesses – with the
authority to reduce the total number of criminal history points – a power which it does not.3
In United States v. Stevens, 300 F. Supp. 2d 203, 205 (D. Maine 2004), Judge Woodcock points out that every Circuit Court of Appeals that has considered the subject has so concluded. See United States v. Boddie, 318 F.3d 491, 494-496 (3d Cir. 2003); United States v. Penn, 282 F.3d 879, 882 (6th Cir. 2002); United States v. Webb, 218 F.3d 877, 881 (8th Cir. 2000); United States v. Owensby, 188 F.3d 1244, 1246 (10th Cir. 1999); United States v. Robinson, 158 F.3d 1291, 1294 (D.C. Cir. 1998); United States v. Orozco, 121 F.3d 628, 630 (11th Cir. 1997); United States v. Resto, 74 F.3d 22, 28 (2d Cir. 1996); United States v. Valencia-Andrade, 72 F.3d 770, 774 (9th Cir. 1995).
In the face of this consistent and overwhelming line of cases, the court has no option but to order that the stay of execution of Arndt’s sentence be dissolved and that the judgment as dictated at the December 19, 2006 hearing be entered. The Clerk will advise
time the plea was taken contemplated a lesser sentence than ten years.
3See United States v. Langmade, 236 F.3d 931, 932 (8th Cir. 2001) (per curiam) (a reduction of a defendant’s Criminal History Category under U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3 does not delete criminal history points for purposes of the safety valve).
In United States v. Stevens, 300 F. Supp. 2d 203, 205 (D. Maine 2004), Judge Woodcock points out that every Circuit Court of Appeals that has considered the subject has so concluded. See United States v. Boddie, 318 F.3d 491, 494-496 (3d Cir. 2003); United States v. Penn, 282 F.3d 879, 882 (6th Cir. 2002); United States v. Webb, 218 F.3d 877, 881 (8th Cir. 2000); United States v. Owensby, 188 F.3d 1244, 1246 (10th Cir. 1999); United States v. Robinson, 158 F.3d 1291, 1294 (D.C. Cir. 1998); United States v. Orozco, 121 F.3d 628, 630 (11th Cir. 1997); United States v. Resto, 74 F.3d 22, 28 (2d Cir. 1996); United States v. Valencia-Andrade, 72 F.3d 770, 774 (9th Cir. 1995).
In the face of this consistent and overwhelming line of cases, the court has no option but to order that the stay of execution of Arndt’s sentence be dissolved and that the judgment as dictated at the December 19, 2006 hearing be entered. The Clerk will advise
time the plea was taken contemplated a lesser sentence than ten years.
3See United States v. Langmade, 236 F.3d 931, 932 (8th Cir. 2001) (per curiam) (a reduction of a defendant’s Criminal History Category under U.S.S.G. § 4A1.3 does not delete criminal history points for purposes of the safety valve).
Case 1:04-cr-10166-RGS Document 80 Filed 02/12/07 Page 3 of 3
defendant of his right of appeal in writing within the body of the judgment.
SO ORDERED.
/s/ Richard G. Stearns
_______________________________
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
SO ORDERED.
/s/ Richard G. Stearns
_______________________________
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
____________________________________________________________________________________
By Neil Swidey
February 28, 2010 (originally appeared March 21, 2004)
 |
| REMORSE David Arndt with close friend Dr. Betsy Watson, when she visited him in prison last year. "He wants to be a contributor to society," she says. |
Today, home for the 49-year-old Arndt is a federal prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey. Yet, he says, “I’m a better and happier person.”
At
the time I was researching my 2004 story on Arndt, he had already
fallen pretty far. Yet in our interactions he sought to assert the kind
of control he was used to in the OR, dressing me down as though I were
his scrub nurse and giving me reading assignments as though I were his
intern.
Today, Arndt comes
across as a changed man. He begins our nearly 90-minute phone interview
by apologizing for how he had treated me back in 2004. I tell him that’s
not necessary, but he persists. Where arrogance was once his defining
characteristic, he now seems fueled by an equally high-octane mixture of
reflection and contrition.
He
talks most easily about the raging addiction to methamphetamine, a drug
he had used for some time but which eventually consumed his life. When a
colleague had insisted he go for substance-abuse counseling, Arndt
admits now, he smoked meth in the car before heading up to his
appointment. When he walked out on patient Charles Algeri during surgery
at Mount Auburn Hospital, his life was, in his word, “insane.” Yet he
believed he was still in control. He says his drug addiction had put him
into such financial straits that when he abandoned Algeri for the bank,
“for some reason it made sense for me to do that.”
Even
after he began funding his meth habit by dealing drugs, even after
federal marshals arrested him outside his home, he says, “If you had
asked me, ‘Do you have a drug problem?’ I would have told you,
‘Absolutely not.’ ” It would take more than a year in jail, he says, and
the intercession of one man, before he began to confront the reality of
the mess he had made.
Fort Dix is the sixth facility
where Arndt has done time for his 10-year sentence. He may yet be
transferred once more before his release, which, because of good
behavior, is now scheduled for 2012. He likes his quarters in the
low-security Fort Dix, where he shares a large room with 11 other
inmates in a former Army barracks. But he says his most lasting
interaction behind bars came relatively early on, at the Norfolk County
Correctional Center in Dedham, when he met prison chaplain Rabbi Sol
Goodman. As his withdrawal from methamphetamine began to lift, Arndt,
who had grown up a nonreligious Jew, found himself thirsty for knowledge
about ancient Jewish traditions. “It occurred to me that I’d made a
shambles of my life,” he says. “It might make sense to try following
someone else’s rules.”
Arndt
acknowledges that inmates finding religion has become almost a cliche of
prison life. But he insists his awakening is for real. And Goodman, who
has learned to detect fakery and sincerity in inmates, says he found
only the latter in Arndt. A Reform rabbi who has done a lot of
interfaith work, Goodman saw Arndt gravitate both spiritually and
intellectually and on his own accord toward Orthodox Judaism. Arndt is
now an ultra-Orthodox Jew who keeps kosher, wears a beard, keeps his
head covered, works to follow hundreds of commandments governing all
aspects of life, and spends the bulk of the day in prayer or studying
ancient Jewish texts. For someone who admits to having had “unbridled
arrogance and a malignant sense of narcissism,” the rigidity of prison
life combined with ultra-Orthodox Judaism appears to have been
transformative. “You learn,” he says, “that it’s OK not to have to be in
charge or be right or be the center of everything all the time.”
On an average day, he’ll get up at 3 a.m. and read religious texts and medical literature until morning prayer service at 7. More reading until lunch, then he’ll go for an hourlong run. The afternoon is spent reading, napping, and praying. After dinner there is evening prayer. He’s usually in bed by 9. He writes letters and uses his monthly telephone allotment of 300 minutes to try to repair the damage he inflicted on family and friends. He’s in regular contact with his sister and his son. He says his parents have been incredibly supportive. “They deserved a better son than they got.”
On an average day, he’ll get up at 3 a.m. and read religious texts and medical literature until morning prayer service at 7. More reading until lunch, then he’ll go for an hourlong run. The afternoon is spent reading, napping, and praying. After dinner there is evening prayer. He’s usually in bed by 9. He writes letters and uses his monthly telephone allotment of 300 minutes to try to repair the damage he inflicted on family and friends. He’s in regular contact with his sister and his son. He says his parents have been incredibly supportive. “They deserved a better son than they got.”
But will his transformation last after he gets out of prison?
Recalling
that Arndt had stopped using other types of drugs at earlier points in
his life only to start up again, I ask him what gives him the confidence
to think his recovery will endure this time. “How am I sure? I’m not
sure,” he says. “The one thing I do know is that if I use again, I’ll
die.”
As to whether he wants
to practice medicine again, he answers my question with one of his own:
“Would any sane society like me to practice medicine again?” Arndt is
allowed to petition for the reinstatement of his medical license five
years after it was revoked. But in its 2005 revocation, the state
medical board said it “could foresee no instance in which it would be in
the public interest to reinstate [Arndt’s] license.” Even if he can’t
be a doctor, Arndt says, “I’d like to be able to help people. I have a
lot of payback to do.”
Arndt
says it pains him to think about Charles Algeri, the patient he left on
the operating table. “I can’t even imagine how abandoned and how
distressed he was. Maybe I just don’t want to let myself imagine it.”
Algeri doesn’t have that luxury.
When I reach him at his Waltham home and ask him about Arndt, the
53-year-old former cab driver tells me, “Every day I remember him.”
After
his 35-minute bank run, Arndt had returned to complete the surgery on
Algeri. But it was so badly botched that Algeri would have to undergo
two more by another surgeon the following year. He’s still not right.
Algeri’s right leg had been his good one, but since Arndt operated on
him, he’s had no feeling from the knee down. In 2004, Arndt’s insurer
paid Algeri $1.25 million, half up front, and half in an annuity. The
first half went to legal fees and the purchase of his house. He now gets
a monthly check for around $3,000. Last year, he began working
part-time as a bus driver, but he says the excruciating pain in his back
and legs makes it impossible for him to be on his feet for long.
When
I tell him about Arndt’s new demeanor and contrition, Algeri is
skeptical. A former addict and inmate himself, Algeri has been clean for
nearly 20 years. “You get remorseful in prison,” he says, “but then the
minute you get out, it’s all a memory.”
I
ask him what he would tell Arndt today. “He’d be apologizing,” Algeri
says. “And I’d say, ‘Fine. You feel better now? Because I don’t.’ ”
_________________________________________________________________________________
David C. Arndt Released From Prison
Federal Bureau of Prisions - June 25, 2012
FAIR USE NOTICE
Federal Bureau of Prisions - June 25, 2012
_________________________________________________________________________________
Some of the information on The Awareness Center's web pages may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc.
We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml . If you wish to use copyrighted material from this update for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
_________________________________________________________________________________
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead
_________________________________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment