Weinberger plea bargain confounds former patients

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

A dozen of former Merrillville nose doctor Mark Weinberger’s patients are protesting his plea deal, writing letters to a federal judge saying he should not get four years in prison.

The letters, filed in the U.S. District Court in Hammond, claim that giving four years to Weinberger, who pleaded guilty last year to 22 counts of health insurance fraud, would be letting him off easy because of the number of his victims and the fact that he fled to Europe.

“Dr. Weinberger wantonly violated the trust of his patients,” one man, Richard Wells, wrote. “He’s a thief, a liar and a crook.”

Others wrote about how they continue to suffer from unnecessary surgeries that Weinberger performed on them.

“If that wasn’t enough, he fled when he finally got caught instead of taking responsibility for his actions,” another former patient, Melanie Rogers, said.

Weinberger first gained infamy when he fled the country in 2004 after hundreds of his patients had started to file complaints against him, alleging he performed unneeded surgeries on them or sometimes never performed surgery on them although he would put them under anesthesia and bill insurance companies for the work done.

Two years later, it was those non-existent surgeries that federal prosecutors went after, charging him with the 22 counts of wrongly billing insurance companies.

The charges had to wait until police found Weinberger in December 2009 hiding out in Italy. Officials there said they found him camped out at the bottom of a mountain on Italy’s northern border with Switzerland. He was extradited to the United States and finally came to a plea agreement with federal prosecutors in October.

Part of the plea deal would force U.S. District Judge Philip Simon to sentence Weinberger to four years if Simon accepts the plea agreement. Simon has said he would wait until Weinberger’s sentencing hearing, scheduled for Feb. 24, before saying whether he accepted the agreement.

Weinberger had filed a motion to strike after the first person filed a letter protesting his proposed sentence, but Simon issued an order Friday denying Weinberger’s request. Simon said he preferred to make the letters part of the record because it helped keep the proceedings fully open to the public and kept the attorneys for both sides informed as to what people were saying.

“Proceeding this way helps to insure that the letters are given appropriate consideration, but only so much weight as they deserve in the larger context of the proceeding,”

Simon wrote, “in which I must consider the nature and circumstances of the offense for which sentence is being imposed as well as the history of the defendant.”

Contact Teresa Auch Schultz at 648-3120.