The Runaway Doctor

Mark Weinberger, then wanted by the F.B.I., skiing in the Italian Alps, November 8, 2009. The photo was taken by his girlfriend, Monica Specogna.

When luxury-loving Dr. Mark Weinberger vanished, in 2004, he left in his wake a wife saddled with more than $6 million in debts, a father headed for bankruptcy, and hundreds of patients who say he misdiagnosed them and performed completely unnecessary sinus surgeries. Now “TheNoseDoctor” of Merrillville, Indiana, is facing prison, along with more than 350 malpractice suits, after finally being captured while hiding out in a tent in the Italian Alps. The author investigates charges that a talented young physician became a greedy, mutilating monster.

By Buzz Bissinger
Vanity Fair
January 2011

His hair is longer than it was in his former life, the life he left behind like a snake shedding its skin. A yellow bandanna wraps around his forehead, and reflective dark glasses cover his eyes, giving him the look of a ski bum trying too hard to hide middle age. Married and divorced three times, he has found serenity in his latest relationship, with an Italian woman named Monica, who runs a small grocery store. It is she who has taken the picture of him after a day in the mountains of northwestern Italy, just outside the storybook ski resort of Courmayeur.

There is a thin smile across Mark Weinberger’s face on this sunny day in 2009. The smile suggests contentment—a contentment distant from the driven, fanatical years he spent marketing himself as “TheNoseDoctor” in a small midwestern town, his local celebrity buoyed by a first-rate pedigree that includes the University of Pennsylvania, U.C.L.A. medical school, and a prestigious fellowship. There is something wry about that little smile in the mountains, something smug and self-congratulatory. Or maybe it is just that he looks so relaxed, at ease, not a care in the world.

He has done it.

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