BAD MEDICINE-Charlotte Bismuth

prescriptions for cash. Emergency room doctors, psychiatrist and desperate family members warned him that his patients were at risk of death, but he would not stop. In Bad Medicine, former prosecutor Charlotte Bismuth meticulously recounts the jaw dropping details of this criminal case that would span four years, culminating in a landmark trial. As a new assistant district attorney and single mother, Bismuth worked tirelessly with her team to bring doctor Lee

to justice. Bad Medicine is a chilling story of corruption and greed and an important look at the role individual doctors play in America's opioid epidemic. The book that we're featuring this evening is Bad Medicine, Catching New York's Deadliest Pill Pusher, with my special guest, author and former prosecutor Charlotte Bismuth. Welcome to the prog and thank you so much for this interview. Charlotte Bismuth.

front of a panel of judges. So in June of twenty ten, I had just requested and received a transfer or secundment technically to the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, which is a unique entity that takes adas from all five boroughs of New York City and has jurisdiction over all felony narcotics crimes within the five boroughs. So it allows for a much more rapid and coordinated prosecution of high level narcotics cases, some of which involve international cartels.

a diversion program. But what I recall is that I attributed to her much more agency and bad intent then I think would have been medically appropriate to do so. And you know, we supported her application for a diversion program. But it was, you know, very tempting, I think, to think to when an individual who's in diversion relapses, to think that some time in prison will correct that the situation or send some sort of a message. And I wish that I had known then what I know now.

Not to say that I would do anything perfectly now, but I think understanding is an education is really important.

Can you look into it? And I looked at the post it. It had a detective's name on it, his phone number, but it also had the name of a doctor, doctor Lee, and part of an address forty seventh Road in Queen's And I would add that part of my state of privileged innocence. And I think, you know, the one that was to be shattered most completely was I did not think of doctors as criminals or as having

the potential to be criminals with respect to their patients. Obviously, we've you know, we've heard one off horror stories about sexual abuse or things like that. But it sure to me a complaint that involved, as this one did, a doctor and his prescriptions didn't make sense, because that is what doctors do. They write prescriptions, they authorize treatments. They're licensed by the state to do so, and they have

our trust to do so. So apparently the complainant told the NYPD there's a doctor and queen selling prescriptions to kids who don't need them. So, you know, the first step, obviously, there's so many threshold questions. Is the doctor licensed, is the doctor you know, practicing within the area for which he's licensed, is the complainant credible? What age kids are we talking about, and what kind of prescriptions? And are we the right office to be answering these questions and

looking into this case? And so that's really where we began to make sure and that you know, this is really the philosophy of the Manhattan Die's Office and Special Narcotics to make sure that we didn't just jump in with the mindset of criminal prosecution, but to ensure that we, you know, it was the right thing to do so, and that we had proper jurisdiction to do so.

federal law which I had been practicing. And in this case, I wanted to make sure that I understood before I drew any conclusions about the legitimacy of the doctor's practice, what were the rules that applied to physicians. What were these medications that we were talking about where, you know, how they were classified or scheduled, and what were the

risks and benefits of these medications? And the other element of it was that, you know, I think I would have done that research in any event, because that's just how I operate, but we didn't have access to the tipster.

When I asked the NYPD to put me in touch with him, they wouldn't because and this is sort of a very interesting question that you ask, because it reveals how much you know, we have evolved at the time, a complainant in a narcotics case for the NYPD was automatically put through this sort of credibility test where they had to go out and make controlled buys for narcotics. But this tipster was not complaining about, you know, a craft dealer or a cartel operation. He was complaining about

a doctor. He was also recovering from substance use disorder. The last thing that he wanted to do was to be put back out on the street and have his credibility tested by buying drugs. So we had a long tussle with the NYPD. They were, you know, acting in good faith, but we believe that they were wrong to maintain this requirement, and ultimately we had to go around them and find the complainant directly, which meant that we

ended up running the investigation. This was not a case where as usual, the NYPD runs the investigation and then turns it over to the DA's office. We owned it from really from day one.

different state. He was licensed in both states. He was the d A registrant, which meant that he was authorized to prescribe controlled substances, and interestingly, on his website he was also an authorized upernorphine prescriber, of which there were not that many at the time. And interestingly, in order to become a upernorphine prescriber, you have to go through an extra level of training which is called and obtain another registration which is called an X registration like the

letter X, and he had done run. But what I thought was peculiar at the time was the notion that a physician could both prescribe medications that were susceptible to cause addiction and also offer treatment for addiction. And I thought, you know, I found that to be so incredibly cynical.

And of course that's where again I had so much to learn, because first of all, you know, there's a huge gap right now where physicians who prescribe these medications don't know how to taper their patients off and don't know how to address the problem of a patient with legitimate pain becoming dependent or addicted. And so those doctors, you know, it's a good thing for doctors to have that training to recognize the signs and to be able

to help their patients find an exit strategy. And at the same time, what we're seeing now with the Sackler family and Produe Pharma is the extreme cynicism of both having launched the opioid epidemic with the sale and false marketing of oxy content and trying to benefit from the pool of the massive pool of people suffering from open use disorder by marketing treatments for that disorder, the so

called Project Tango from a few years ago. So that's what I feared with doctor Lee, and little did I know that it was, you know, the plan of a large corporate pharmaceutical company.

But Joe Hall is also someone who's very humble, who's extremely hard working, and who you know, will get along well with anyone who behaves with respect and works. You know, nobody can work as hard as he does, but who

works hard? So Joe was assigned to the case. When we ran into this roadblock with the NYPD and the complainant, I don't know how he did it, but next thing I know, he asked me if I was ready to meet this young man whose name in the book is Eddie Velaura, just to protect his privacy, and he brought him in and we were able to have a series of conversation with him. And that's really where you know, that's that's a very good test of an early law

enforcement slash investigative partnership. Is an interview, but especially a joint interview, because you know, the hierarchy was very strange in a way. I was the prosecutor, but at the same time I was a, you know, much more junior player in law enforcement than Joe Hall. He was a very experienced investigator, but he also respected my, you know, my decision to sort of structure the interview, and he knew that he had to sort of let me frame

the interview with the usual cautions and disclaimers. So we very quickly developed this system. Where as we were talking, we were both very sensitive to the fact that We didn't want this young man to feel cornered by two interviewers, and we sort of developed these signals where, you know, if Joe wanted to ask a question or I wanted to jump back in, we would allow each other to

do that. And as a result, we had a series of very productive conversations with this young man that left us with such a good understanding of the type of

practice that he was complaining about. That this was a practice where, you know, prices for pills were put up on the wall in paper, where patients waited outside for hours starting early in the morning, and were called with numbered tickets rather than appointments, where people traded pills and prescriptions for cash coming out of the office, and most shockingly to this young man and also to us, where the doctor did not care about the underlying medical conditions

of his patients. Our tips are in fact, had an immune disorder, and one of the things that offunded him the most was that doctor Lee really didn't care about the diagnosis or about the specific kind of pain that he was experiencing.

of hearing about another death. And you know, and that tells you a lot, because we went very quickly from being concerned of hearing about a death to being concerned of hearing of another one, or another one, or another one. And it got to the point where, by the time doctor Lee was arrested in November twenty eleven, we knew of sixteen fatal overdoses within his patient population. Now, not all of those had happened, you know, while they were

immediately under his care. A couple had happened after the patients left his care, but they were all within a year of having left the clinic, and some of them, like Nicholas Rappold and Joseph Haig, had occurred within just a few days of their last visit. So this was beyond chilling. It was nerve wracking. It was absolutely terrifying. We felt such a weight, we were so concerned about what might happen under our watch. And then in June

twenty eleven, you know, and the nightmare became real. We learned that there had been a shooting in a pharmacy in Medford, Long Island. Four people had been shot in cold blood, the pharmacist, his young assistant, and two customers.

The next morning, when I came into the office, my boss Bridget walked in, as well as did our criminal analyst, Stephanie Mioto, and the three of us, you know, just knew that we wanted to look through our database of patient records, prescription records, and check whether any of doctor Lee's patients had ever filled a prescription at that pharmacy.

Nobody said it out loud, but we all were concerned that maybe, you know, one of them had been driven to crime, and in fact, we identified one name, actually

two names, one current patient one former patient. They were married to each other, and we ended upwarding that information to the Suffolk County Police and the next thing we know, David Laffer was arrested and pled guilty, and that was absolutely devastating because you know, he went into that pharmacy to steal hydrocodone pills, which was the medication that doctor Lee had been prescribing to him, and he stole eleven

thousand of them and he took four lives. So once that happened, we had to take a very very hard look at what we knew because you know, obviously there's a high bar to arrest someone to get a search warrant to shut down a medical clinic. Again, you're talking about a doctor who writes prescriptions, which he's allowed to do. So Joe and I and Stephanie that was the extent of the team more or less at the time, really

went into overdrive. We added a couple more investigators to the team, and we finally were able to hone in on one patient whose name was Michael Cornetta, who had died of an overdose the year before, I believe in November twenty ten, and at the age of thirty seven, and he was His method was to suck on fentanyl patches, so he would get fentanyl patches prescribed by doctor Lee, and then he would cut them open and he would

aspire the gel. It led to a number of non fatal overdoses, and unfortunately, it led finally to a fatal overdose. And the way that we were able to make a case without having access to doctor Lee's own patient records is that we received We sought out medical records from every hospital in the city that we believe Michael Cornetta might have gone to, and we finally, in one of those records saw a note from a psychiatrist who had not only treated him after an overdose, but who called

doctor Lee. Made a note in her file of that call and told doctor Lee that she was calling from the emergency room about a patient who had overdosed on fentanyl.

And that was a clincher because it showed us that doctor Lee was put on notice of the risk to his patient, and yet what happened he prescribed sentinel to him again, and that is how we were able to present evidence to the grand jury, and the grand jury voted a felony charge, while several felony charges against doctor Lee, including reckless endangerment in the third degree I'm sorry in the second degree. And so we were able to obtain a search warrant and arrest doctor Lee, and most importantly,

we were able to shut down his clinic. So that was in November twenty eleven.

yet it was there. It was written in sort of this you know, earth that's medical jargon, but essentially what it said was the more pills you want, the more you pay. We only accept cash. The more prescriptions you want, the more you pay. If you're seeing other doctors, you pay more. If you have suicidal ideation, you pay more.

And I, you know, it's hard to express what Joe and I felt when we saw that, because you know, obviously, from an investigative standpoint, you really can't wish for anything more than having your suspects, you know, spell out the nature of their exploitation and crime in writing on paper.

I've ever encountered. And Peter, Peter and I had a bit of friction in the beginning because he was sort of, you know, for the first few years of the investigation, he was sort of hovering as an occasional expert slash consultant. You know, he was something someone that we went to if we had a question about you know, ethics or strategy or legal research to uh, you know, he's really

the ultimate devil's advocate. And when we were preparing to bring the the second sort of portion of evidence before the grand jury to try to obtain a superseding indictment, so an indictment that could both capture all of doctor Lee's criminal conduct and absorb the previous indictment, my boss, Bridget Brennan, assigned Peter to be the senior trial council. While I had been practicing law for a number of years, I'd done a couple of trials, Peter had done dozens

of trials. And also key point, I had never prosecuted a homicide. And this wasn't just one homicide case. It was a double homicide, so I was delighted to have Peter come on. However, Peter and I had very very different work styles. He is more of the messy genius style. I am more of the you know, compulsively meet and

organized and sort of you know, obsessive about thoroughness. Where one of Peter's skills, which is born of his experiences, that he knows exactly what he needs to get and he doesn't worry about all the things that he might be able to get but doesn't really need. So our partnership was a little bit fraut. But ultimately what really brought us together with Joe in you know, a very very tight commitment to this case, was that we had

never seen anything like it. And you know, it doesn't say much for me just because I hadn't you know, I'd only been practicing law for.

it would take time. I can't remember which one we spoke to you first, but it is possible that we made I know that we made contact first with Margaret, but it's possible that we first spoke to members of the Haigue family because Joseph Higgs's father was also a former NYPD detective, and so I believe he was, you know, more understanding of what the process might involve and more willing to speak to you know, not that Margaret was unwilling, but I think for Joseph Haig's father, he was able

to set aside his grief because he felt that he had a sense of duty to collaborate with us, whereas Margaret really really just wasn't strong enough yet to talk about it, and we had to respect that. There finally came a moment when she was ready to talk. We sent Joe and Buddy Leasala to speak with her a couple times at her house, and then when she felt ready, I met with her, along with Joe and Buddy in the principal's office of the school where she worked, the

special education school where she worked. And you know that that interview is really burnt into my mind for a number of reasons. You know, I've been working on I'd worked on appeals, I'd worked on narcotics cases. I'd never worked on a homicide. I was so nervous at the thought of saying the wrong thing, and not just to a mother who was grieving, but saying the wrong thing such that I would, you know, jeopardize the case in some way. Also, at the time, I had two kids,

two young kids. I was in the middle of a divorce for a variety of personal reasons, I had this sort of extreme sensitivity to the idea of anybody losing their child. And you know, and so she, in my mind, she was somebody who had survived the worst. It was still very, very fresh for her. Nicholas had been dead, I think just over a year if that, and he died alone. He died alone in his car overnight. He was even issued a parking ticket while he was in

the car deceased. So there was really a sort of cruelty and loneliness to his death that was very hard for all of us to accept. And Margaret, you know, from our very first meeting, she said, he was no angel. She wasn't out there to get anyone. She just wanted to know what happened. And she just had a sense that it wasn't just an accident, you know, because at the time and again we've you know, we've evolved from this, but overdoses were simply classified as accidents, and you know,

they became statistics. Now because we had started with doctor Lee and worked our way towards Nicholas's death, we were able to look at it from a different angle. But it became really a moral imperative for us to never again assume that these overdose deaths were just accidents, you know, And of course we can't trace back all of them, and in some cases, you know, the responsibility isn't the same as it is in this case. Where you had a licensed physician who was not a drug user himself,

who was driven by greed. But it's really important, I think, to see these deaths as untimely, unnecessary, and worthy of investigation.

interviews with the individual. If we could we really know, any time that we saw something that could potentially be connected to criminal conduct, we ran it down. So we ultimately winnowed it down to twenty patients where we felt that we could prove to a jury that doctor Lee not only had sold prescriptions not in good faith, but in many of those cases had recklessly endangered the life of those patients or had conducted committed i'm sorry, insurance

fraud with respect to those patients. We also discovered, of course, that he was exploiting Medicare patients by promising to pay them back, forcing them to pay cash upfront, and then of course keeping all of the money. So the trial was an event that we dreaded, that we feared because

we knew that it would be massive. You know, I realized that I may be saying something that prosecutors don't usually say, but you know, I think anybody who says that they're not nervous about a trial is probably not telling the whole truth, because you know, there is such a high pressure, not just because and actually not because you want to win, but because you want to get

it right, and you know you will. We felt a tremendous pressure to do everything absolutely to the tea because there had never been a case like this before where doctor was being tried on charges of homicide for the overdose death of a patient. We also, you know, twenty patients that just meant it. You know, hundreds of pieces of evidence. We had seventy two witnesses lined up, many of whom didn't necessarily have a stable home or place

of employment. So it was sort of a daily We would wake up every day and wonder will our witnesses be able to come in, how will they come in, how will the day unfold? You can't necessarily present evidence to the jury in a most linear fashion because you have to respect people's schedules. It was it was a

roller coaster. It was in many ways a tremendous civics lesson because we would have physicians and uh, you know, other professionals coming in who had very very difficult, demanding jobs but who felt so strongly about doing their part and showing up. We had former patients of doctor Lee who had criminal conviction convictions on their record or who had to come in and tell the jury that they had lied to doctor Lee, and they were willing to

come in and stand up. So it was extraordinary. And you know, there were also very difficult days where cross examination would push witnesses to you know, deep levels of upset. One woman collapsed on the stand because she was so

devastated by cross examination. So it was those were four very, very long months, and what got us through was the teamwork, not just that we felt at the core level of me, Peter Joe, but the team of experts and attorneys from our office and other offices, and the witnesses who were determined no matter how hard it was to you know, and no matter whether we got it conviction because of course there's no certainty, but they wanted the truth to

be known. And that is the beauty of a trial, is that whether you win or lose, you know, the facts are out there and they are tested.

is responsible when a patient defies the doctor's orders? And you know, we had to prove in order to satisfy the burden on the charge of an illegal faiale of a prescript, we had to prove that the doctor was acting other than in good faith. And there was a very very little case precedent in New York State. To

explain what that meant. We had a couple of factors from you know, a case that was not binding on our court that indicated that, you know, there were certain behaviors like seeing large numbers of patients accepting only cash, having the sort of cookie cutter prescriptions that were the same for every patient. So we relied on those factors.

But the defense attorney mister Bellair and doctor Lee really leaned heavily into the notion of not only a physician's discretion, but a physician's reliance on the patient and trust in the patient, and their argument was really that doctor Lee had been betrayed by his patients. Now, you know, we did two things to counter that. First, we built a

very very strong case about the money. We followed the money, and we proved the jury that all of the decisions that were so called medical decisions for doctor Lee were actually about money. For instance, doctor Lee claimed that he was very sensitive to the fact that his patients should not see other doctors or obtain controlled substances from other doctors. But we prove to the jury, using doctor Lee's own

medical records, that he was actually monetizing that fact. So you asked earlier about what made these records unusual, if anything, I don't know if you have ever had a doctor who noted in the margins of your medical records the amount of money that you were paying him or her on that visit, an amount of money in cash and maybe with an right or you know, extra fifty dollars for seeing another doctor, extra fifty dollars for coming too early.

That's what we found in the records, and that's what we were able to confront doctor Lee with at trial. So you know that really countered his sort of medical defense. Now on the recklessness I'm sorry, I'm the reckless homicide, which is manslaughter. The standard there is that you have to be aware of a substantial risk and then consciously

disregard that risk. Now before we even get to proving it, there was the debate about whether that was the appropriate charge, because there's another homicide charge that we considered, which is criminally negligent homicide. The difficulty is that with criminally negligent homicide, you know, it's doctor Lee had too much knowledge. He was a not just a trained and licensed physician, but he was a very good physician. He was also an anesthesiologist.

So this is a man who walked that line between life and death, you know, every day at work, who knew how to put patients in a state of unconsciousness and bring them back, who also had this ex registration which meant that he was also aware of opioid use disorder.

So criminally negligent homicide just didn't fit the facts right, whereas reckless man's laughter for doctor Lee really captured his conduct and what In response specifically to your question about Joseph Hagen, Nicholas Raphold the clincher was that he had been put on notice not just with them, but through his treatment of other patients that there was a substantial risk that they weren't just going to take more than prescribed,

but that they might die. So the way that we proved that was that we were able to marshal the medical records from all twenty of these patients and build a timeline for the jury where they saw that for up to three years before doctor Lee even met Nickle wrap Hold, he knew that he had patients who were taking more than prescribed, who were trading the pills for

other drugs, who were overdosing fatally and non fatally. That those patients tended to be young, they tended to be male, they tended to have, you know, no diagnostic records, et cetera, et cetera. So by the time Nicholas Raphold walked into his office, doctor Lee should have known, and in fact

he did know. So the other you know, one of the key pieces of evidence was a handwritten log or a set of handwritten logs that doctor Lee's staff kept for every day of his practice, where you could see not just how many patients he saw per day, but what he charged them, and there I remember, we confronted him with one of those logs he had seen sixty one patients in a day, which was you know, rather low for him. He would go up to one hundred.

One of the first patients he saw was a patient whose father had written to him begging him to stop prescribing a couple of years earlier.

out of sixty one patient. So you have this circumstantial evidence that, you know, how much attention would he have paid to this twenty one year old man after having seeing sixty other patients in the course of just a regular, you know, a regular length workday and the patients you know, also worked. Taking the stand and saying these visits lasted only as long as it took for him to write the prescription and take the money. So it really allowed

the jury to understand what reckless is. Recklessness meant that was recklessness. Recklessness was you know, knowing the risk and disregarding it. Recklessness was seeing sixty one patients in a day and then just writing a prescription to number sixty one and sending him off even though you know, you knew that he might well take more or overdose. And I have to say, you know, even talking about it, it was devastating to work on and it was very hard for the jury as well.

all his years of experience. And you outline those five rules that he uses and used in this case to be able to get doctor Lee to admit to certain lives. As you write, rules like rule four breakdown conclusions, have the defendant deny established evidence in the case. Isolate those parts of the defense story that are implausible and untruthful. So he had an incredible strategy to be able to over the course of this this is a long testimony. He was on the stand four days, wasn't he?

number one in life, and that is always lead. So always lead means that you're always asking leading questions on

cross examination. You're not asking open ended questions. And that's something that Peter did very very strictly and skillfully for the first several hours of the cross examination and in fact most of it, which was he would build questions that moved along in very small increments and obtain doctor Lee's confirmation of those points to you know, to the point where you you could see the conclusion coming and

there was no escaping it. For instance, you know, he would ask doctor about, you know, the payments that he received and the fact that he charged. You know, it was one hundred and fifty dollars as a baseline for a visit, and then there were extra fifty dollars for this seeing extra you know, seeing other physicians wanting more pills, and you know, on such and such days you saw X number of people, so that makes sense. And then you made a you know, your wife made a bank

deposit of seven thousand dollars or so in cash. And so doctor Lee couldn't deny any one of those individual facts, but the conclusion was so much larger than just the some of those responses. And you know, Peter really did a He was obsessive in preparing the cross examination. He was obviously in a state of extreme stress. He lost i would say, twenty to thirty pounds during the trial, which only later we learned was really the pre cursor to his illness. We thought that it was just the

stress of trial, but it wasn't. And you know, he was in he was at the height of his powers, his you know, advocacy powers. He really poured absolutely everything that he had into preparing this cross examination. In fact, his office which was always sort of a you know, unnavigable cavern of piles of papers and books about magic and old shoes. Was absolutely I mean, you couldn't even get into it, you know. And he came for the cross examination with piles and piles of paper, and so

he had this sort of Colombo like style. But just like Colombo, he knew exactly where he was going and there was no escape. And I'm sorry I realized I may have digressed a little bit from your question, but it's obviously very important to me, you know, especially knowing Peter's condition now, to really on or his work and talk about it and describe, you know, how much it takes to prepare for a case like this and also execute it.

significance of each area within the courtroom. That being said, as a more junior attorney, you're less familiar with it. You're more reliant on the court officers or the court staff or your own you know, your own team to help orient you. And that's not always something that happens very smoothly. Sometimes I think we let young attorneys stumble around a bit more as almost part of a you know,

unconscious sort of hazing ritual. So as between Peter and mister Bellair, I was, even though I'd been practicing law for you know, seven years or so, at the time, I was the absolute rookie. I'm also I'm also you know, on the small side. I don't think I have the deepest or more most authoritative voice. And you know, there there were all sorts of perceptions and hierarchies at play that made it possible for Peter to, uh, you know,

be treated with the respect that he deserved. Because he had been an outstanding assistant district attorney and member of the Bar Association for many years. He was well known in the legal community. But for me to become a bit I think at times, a bit of a scapegoat, and you know, and also legitimately there I was, you know,

we're all still learning all the time. I was definitely learning a lot, and I had a sense of wanting to do everything really to a point of absolute completion and clarity that was maybe not necessary or maybe you know, more more work than the court needed to do at

the time. So I think between the you know, the age dynamics, the gender dynamics, the differences and experience levels there, you know, there there were tensions often and uh, you know, it's clear that sometimes Peter, if Peter could bring up a point, it would have more traction than if I brought it up. But Peter really taught me how to stand my ground. He was very very respectful of our We had a very clear agreement about who would do what,

and we stuck to it. And interestingly, you know, when I say a play within a play, I say that because you have the jury watching and they are outsiders, and then you have the members of the audience, and then you have possibly the defendant's family, right or the

victims' families. So the jury noticed some of these dynamics, and in fact, at the end of the trial, members of the jury told Joe Hall that they had noticed some of the dynamics between the attorneys, and members of the judges staff told me that they had felt badly for me during the trial, which I thought was, you know, sweet to say, but also bittersweet, because you know, I think I realize that it's bizarre for a lawyer to say this, as you mentioned, but you know, you sometimes

really feel like the crazy person in the room, and as it turns out, you know, it's just that things may not be done that way. But it doesn't mean that you're wrong, and it certainly doesn't mean that you're out of line.

was a very, very unusual case. And you know, I think part of our obsessional work for me and Peter and Joe and Stephanie was that we we wanted to make sure that we were double checking, triple checking everything, that we weren't missing something or misunderstanding or misrepresenting because of this possibility that at any moment the rug might get pulled from under our So, you know, when the judge found at the close of our case that there

was you know, there were sufficient sufficient reason to go forward, that was a That was a tremendous relief, But of course it only meant that you were moving on to another even more uncertain phase of the trial, which was first would there be a defense and second what would that defense consist of? We had no idea, And in fact, mister Bellair, who was a very you know, zealous advocate, as you know, he was his job to do, refused to disclose the name of his medical expert until the

moment that person took the stand. Under criminal procedure law, he should have turned over the name of the expert with his discovery when he turned over the experts report. He refused to do so and was in fact held in contempt by the judge. So, you know, we didn't know, We didn't know what would happen. Ultimately, mister Bellair did decide to present a defense, and he called doctor Lee to the stand and then, my goodness, I you know

the tension in the room. You could have you know, you could have you could have grabbed it and you know, twisted it. It was. We didn't know what he would say, and every every sentence he uttered was a surprise. We had been waiting years to understand. Why how how could he have seen, you know, Tracy Howard, as her name is in the book, come in. How could he have heard her tell him about her father's suicide, heard her tell him that she wanted to commit suicide with his pills,

and then let her walk out. And so to hear him address each of those patients, you know, we hung on every word and it was unfortunately, never there was never a moment of relief or understanding because until the very end, doctor Lee denied responsibility, claimed that he had been acting in good faith, that he had been betrayed

by his patients. And I'm not sure if you're aware, but we learned just a few weeks ago that he died in April in prison of COVID, which you know, was very upsetting because he was not sentenced to death. Justice was not served by his you know, lonely and isolated and what must have been a very frightening death. And you know, we will never we will never know

the answers to many questions. And I, Margaret Rapholed and others from the case, and I and Peter all agreed that nobody deserves to die like that.

also included three counts of reckless endangerment in the first degree. Now, everybody talks about the homicide counts and they are absolutely significant, but I have to say that for me, the three counts of reckless endangerment in the first degree were extremely significant because the standard there is depraved indifference to human life.

Anybody who is familiar with New York State law, or who has watched a few seminal episodes of law and Order will know that depraved in difference is extremely hard to prove. And the jury found sufficient evidence of depraved indifference to human life in the case that we presented, and that was a source of tremendous you know, validation, I think for the families, uh, you know, to know that their loved one had in fact deserve to be treated and viewed as a human being, that their suffering

had called for a different treatment. So those three counts were very significant, and they were upheld on appeal, which was I think the you know, the biggest surprise of all when the case went to the Court of appeals and then there were for all of the for each of the patients, the twenty patients, there were a series of charges of criminal sale for prescription of a I'm

sorry criminal sale or prescription for controlled substance. So we actually had presented evidence to the grand jury for every prescription that we believed had been made not in good faith, in exchange for cash, so not for a medical reason. We asked the jury to indicte doctor Lee on that charge and they did. And so you had this think of it as sort of the foundation of the case, where all of these charges and I believe there were more than one hundred of them that you know, that

really formed the structure of the case. And then you had sort of towers where on one side you would build from those too reckless endangerment, another side you would build homicide, and then surrounding it we had the financial crimes, which included a scheme to defraud, so that captured all of the insurance fraud conduct and the finance exploitation of the Medicare patients. And it also included or was associated

with doctor Lee's falsification of records. So he was also under investigation by the Professional Oversight Agency in New York, but he had been submitting altered records to them, and so we used that evidence to undermine his credibility as well, and to show that you know, his denials of the insurance fraud, you know that the jury should not credit those, So those were sort of tied together in our minds.

All in all, he was convicted on one hundred and ninety eight out of two hundred eleven counts.

to come. Who knew about COVID, of course, So when the manuscript was almost ready, I would go to the hospital and stay you know, anywhere from one to four hours and read the book to him. And it was, you know, it was terrifying in a way because I knew that I had to talk about I had the hope of writing a book that sort of lifted the curtain on what it's really like, how messy life really is. How do you build a team when none of you are perfect, and when you know, especially me, I'm I

didn't really know how to work within a team. So how do you do all those things? So I wanted to tell the truth. And at the same time, my relationship with Peter had really evolved at the point where not only you know, had my respect for him grown tremendously, but we were friends. We were he you know, he was my mentor, he was my inspiration in a lot

of ways. I still teased him about how messy he was, and there were things, you know, where we still wrangled each other, but we were friends, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt my friend, especially because he was not in a position to respond with his

quick wit the way that he would have before. So there was this, you know, this strange series of events where every time I went in knowing that I had pages to read that were about him, and I would be so nervous, and then you know, I would show up and one day his best friend was already there and asked me to read in front of him. The other day was his priest, you know, or his son.

One day when I was about to read an especially difficult passage, and I told myself, you know, if I can't put in a book what I would not be willing to read too, obviously to Peter, but also to his priest. And at the same time, I wanted to tell the truth so that you know, I learned a lot about writing in the sense that I learned how to you know, how to edit so that you you know,

you get to the point. And obviously I had tremendous help from my editor, Jessica DeLong and Juliet Heifitz, who who reread the book and helped me to find really the true words to sort of try to capture that, you know, that ambivalence that we have, and that the fact that a friendship can be many, many different things, and that each of us is you know, operates and in many ways that don't always make sense. Really trying to communicate the love and the affection and the respect

that I had for every member of the team. So it was an unforgettable experience. Also because being in a room with Peter, who at the time was already paralyzed, unable to speak or breathe on his own, someone whom I had seen in court, you know, marshaling very complex evidence, managing very very difficult logistics, you know, responding on his feet at the drop of a hat to the most

you know, complicated legal arguments. And to be in a room where really the only thing we could do is just sit there and keep each other company and you know, make him feel the presence of our friendship and that you know, I it's an working with him on the trial and subsequently being able to spend that time with him has had a tremendous impact on me.

Charlotte Bismus. Is there a Facebook page or website that we might take a look at, and when does this book officially going to be released?

And the book should be on sale online and in every you know, hopefully in your local bookstore that really needs our support, right.