See No Evil

by Ron Felber

  “Elliot, do you have anything to add?” Hinterlieter asked.

  “Only that I’m bothered by lack of collaterals in this fellow,” Elliot shot back, surprising himself with the sharpness of the response. “But, one way or the other, there can be no debate about what to do. Mr. Scopo has the most compelling reason for bypass surgery—a major blockage in his left main artery. Statistically, his chances for survival without the operation are almost nil.”

  No one disagreed. Afterward as Elliot was leaving the darkened conference room, he found Dr. Dak trailing behind him into the corridor.

  “Elliot, may we speak for a moment?” the gnomish seventy-eight-year-old rumbled with his Romanian accent. “There’s a man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who’s been asking to see you. His name is Special Agent Hogan. Do you know him?”

  Elliot shook his head in the negative, a tingling feeling of dread making its way up from his scrotum to the nape of his neck.

  “He says he works with U.S. Attorney Giuliani. I’m sure it has to do with this Scopo fellow, but he wouldn’t say just what it was he wanted to talk about. Is there anything I should be aware of, Elliot. Is there anything you would like to tell me before you meet with Hogan?”

  “Not that I can think of, Simon. So far as I can see, the diagnosis is very straightforward, almost routine.”

  “As you know, Dr. Litner, no case is ‘routine.’ I suspect Scopo’s is no exception,” Dr. Dak uttered as he ambled down the corridor. “Hogan is waiting in your office. Good luck to you.”

  Once Elliot returned to his office, Special Agent Peter Hogan, a strapping, red-haired man in his late thirties, was waiting outside along with two other agents, both shorter and dark haired. Hogan stepped forward and introduced himself as his two subordinates faded to the sidelines.

  Inside, Elliot offered Hogan a seat, watching from the corner of his eye as the agent studied his diplomas from Syracuse University and Downstate Medical Center, his sharp blue eyes shifting then to family photos of Hanna, the twins, and himself.

  “Nice family you have there, Doctor.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Hogan, but to be honest, I’m busy as hell. Is there something special you wanted to see me about?”

  “Yes, there is. I’m here today to observe the operation you’re going to perform on Ralph Scopo. I’m pretty sure you know who he is and why his good health is so important to Mr. Giuliani and, really, every American citizen.”

  “Every American citizen? That’s a lot of people. What, maybe two hundred fifty million or so?”

  “The men his testimony is going to help convict are the leaders of the five Mafia families that run organized crime in New York. They extort, they steal, and they murder, Dr. Litner. Now, I’m not here to tell you about your work as a doctor, but only to ask one small indulgence on your part and that is that you wear a wire during your preop visit. You know, with Scopo under sedation, he’s liable to say things, important things, maybe names, that could be essential to our case.”

  “Is this Mr. Giuliani’s idea?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. I’m making this request on behalf of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  Elliot stood up behind his desk just then, feeling the heat rise within him, as he considered Giuliani’s concept of justice, thinking all the while of his family and its harrowing escape from totalitarian Russia. Here was a sick man, dying for all he knew, lying on an operating table undergoing critical surgery, and these ghouls, brains invaded by ambition as rampant as runaway cancer, wanted him, Scopo’s physician, to participate in their mania.

  “Mr. Hogan, I won’t wear a wire into Mr. Scopo’s room or into anyone else’s. I’m a surgeon. I’m not in law enforcement and will not be used by you, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, or anyone else in any way that might undermine the confidentiality of the doctor-patient relationship. What Scopo says, if anything, while under sedation is no one’s business, not even mine. The last time I looked, this was still the United States of America, not the Soviet Union and not Nazi Germany!”

  Hogan’s pale Irish face reddened noticeably as he sucked a stream of air into his lungs and nodded. “Dr. Litner, I have to make a brief phone call. Would you just wait here for a few seconds while I do that?”

  “Not a problem,” Elliot said still angry as he glanced to his watch. It was past noon. Ralph Scopo would be prepped and wheeled into Operating Room #2 for surgery in less than three hours.

  No more than three minutes had passed when Hogan reentered the room. No question he’d been speaking with the U.S. attorney, who judging by the short time frame, had been standing by for an update.

  “Dr. Litner, we’re alone so I’ll speak frankly. I’ve just gotten off the phone with Mr. Giuliani. He asked me to tell you that in his opinion you lead an ‘interesting’ life. We know that you have acquaintances within the Gambino Family. Your name has been mentioned, and you have been referred to, on government surveillance tapes. We need Scopo alive to testify against these thugs in the most important Mafia trial of the century. We’d like you to cooperate by wearing a surveillance wire into surgery. If you refuse, that’s your right, but I was asked by Mr. Giuliani to tell you that if anything happens to Ralph Scopo, if, for any reason, he was not to make it through this operation, the full resources of his office will be devoted to a criminal investigation of you, your business dealings, and medical practice. Have I made that point clear to you, Dr. Litner?”

  29

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FRANKIE VALLI

  “It occurred to him that this must be what it’s like just before death as a man’s life flashes before him.”

  Operating Room #2 in Mount Sinai Hospital is a twenty-by-twenty-foot chamber with white tile floors and shiny steel cabinets. Like an altar, the operating table was positioned over a pedestal in the middle of the floor with glass-panel windows deep set into the room’s walls on either side. The time was 3:35 P.M. Coronary patient Ralph Scopo lay motionless on the operating table, chest bare, electrodes attached to the back of his shoulders, intravenous needles inserted into his right arm and left wrist.

  Fifty-six-years-old, grossly overweight, and three-pack-a-day smoker, Giuliani’s pride and joy had collapsed three weeks earlier, headlines in the morning papers screaming SCOPO HEART ATTACK DISRUPTS RACKETEERING TRIAL. But there was much more to it than racketeering. This case was an attempt by the FBI and New York City’s Organized Crime Task Force to bring down the Commission, the bosses of the five La Cosa Nostra families that governed New York and possibly the nation.

  In the background “The Wanderer,” a 1961 hit by Dion was playing in place of Verdi or Puccini, Elliot’s usual fare. The anesthesiologist jerked Scopo’s head back so the blunt blade of the L-shaped laryngoscope could be put in his throat and a one-half-inch endotracheal tube inserted past his vocal chords. A balloon on the tube’s lower end inflated creating an airtight seal as Clark Hinterlieter inserted a Foley catheter through Scopo’s penis into his bladder, then nodded to Elliot Litner.

  Elliot glanced to his right where outside operating room #2 the Giuliani team of three federal investigators led by Special Agent Peter Hogan awaited the operation’s outcome like vultures. Then, to his left where John Gotti’s right hand, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, and two of his underlings loomed nearby the patients’ waiting room pacing the floor with equal intensity. “The Brooks Brothers Ivy Leaguers versus the polyester suit gumbas,” he mused sardonically, the voice in his head sounding like a cross between Woody Allen and a manic Jerry Lewis. “How the hell did a nerdy, Jewish kid from the Bronx get caught up in a mess like this?” The feds want Scopo alive to prosecute and “twist” into a government witness. The goodfellas don’t want him leaving this operating room alive. Either way, it’s understood, Elliot was a dead man.

  Dion warbled in the background about Flo on the left, Mary on the right, and Janie being the girl he’ll be with tonight. When Janie asks who he loves the best, Dion tears open his shirt to sho
w Rosie on his chest.

  ’Cause I’m the wanderer,

  Yeah the wanderer,

  I go around, around, around …

  The chest was open; the heart-lung machine ready to go. It was impossible to stall any longer. It was time for Elliot Litner, a man who could have been the poster boy for moral ambiguity to choose between life or death: loyalty to La Cosa Nostra or devotion to his Hippocratic oath.

  “Fifty cc’s going in to test the line,” the technician announced.

  “On bypass,” Elliot commanded, “start cooling.”

  Almost immediately, Scopo’s heart slowed.

  Judy Harrow, his surgical nurse, held the shiny stainless-steel needle up in the air. She depressed the syringe plunger, and a stream of clear liquid potassium spurted from it.

  She handed it to Elliot.

  This was it. The moment of truth, for if ever there was a time to see to it that Scopo never awakened from his drug-induced sleep to testify, this was that time.

  Elliot took the syringe into his right hand, clamped the aorta, then injected the icy fluid directly into the vessels below the blockages in Scopo’s lower aorta.

  Ralph Scopo’s heart had stopped beating!

  The heartbeat indicator read 0. The organ had stopped. Bloodless, motionless, and rubbery, it was the ideal target.

  With a Number-15 blade, Elliot cut into the muscle to expose a pale yellow streak on the back of the heart where the major posterolateral branch of the circumflex artery ran. Then, he looked at the front of the heart.

  “The distal LAD looks pretty good. We’ll put the graft there,” he told Hinterlieter. “What’s the temperature?”

  “Twenty-five,” he replied.

  “And the flow?”

  “Three liters per minute.”

  Elliot nodded holding a surgical needle at the tip of long-handled forceps, then sewing a series of tiny stitches with near-invisible filament, first in the vein, then in the artery. Still, concentrating with all of his will, Elliot couldn’t shake the images that passed through his mind, some related to childhood, most having to do with Hanna, Samantha, and Rachel. Whatever the outcome, he knew his life would never be the same.

  “Focus, focus,” he repeated to himself like a mantra, his thoughts drifting despite those efforts, back to the events that had led him to this nightmare.

  Even as he worked, he could envision the twins frolicking in the water on the lake where they vacationed. He pictured himself and Hanna, early in their marriage, making love, totally consumed with desire for one another. He remembered their family dinners, Hanna singing songs with the kids while Mort cooked burgers on the grill. All of them laughing, savoring the joy and innocence of the children. Then it occurred to Elliot that this must be what it’s like just before death as a man’s life flashes before him. And, in a way, Elliot was dying because he knew that after today, everything he’d built and worked for would cease to exist. More, he understood that these “friends” of his were no friends at all, but monsters who sucked the marrow from society, threatening and killing everyday people, exploiting their greed and avarice, then subjugating them with mortal terror.

  With sutures joining vein to artery, Elliot turned his attention to Scopo’s distal LAD, his next and in many ways most important target. “There’s a lot of disease in this vessel. But this will turn out to be good for the internal mammary,” he observed, picking up the LIMA, which he had left clamped. “See how big it is?”

  Judy handed him the finest 7-0 sutures. Once the connection was complete, he undamped the LIMA, and on the surface of Scopo’s heart, branch after branch of tiny vessels immediately turned bright red.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Four fifty-six,” Hinterlieter replied. The heart had been deprived of blood for twenty-one minutes.

  “Right on schedule,” Elliot calculated, beginning to sew the upper ends of the saphenous vein graphs to Scopo’s aorta.

  He applied a half-moon-shaped clamp to the massive vessel, isolating a quarter-sized area where the veins would be attached, then punched two circular holes into the vessel through which blood would flow into the new conduits to the heart. Then, eyes focused like lasers, he began attachment, the most critical phase of the procedure, as images of Marie and Joey Scopo flooded his mind.

  How could he murder this woman’s husband and the young man’s father? he anguished. What kind of man would he be to allow Scopo to pay for the bad decisions he’d made during his life? He thought about what Uncle Saul might have advised and the core of the stories he’d told based upon the value and dignity of human life. No, Elliot decided as the final minutes of the bypass surgery approached, he could not be party to another man’s murder. Even if it meant one of the family’s hit men taking his own life, he would do everything in his power to keep Ralph Scopo alive.

  Judy Harrow dabbed a skein of perspiration from Elliot’s forehead as he completed his stitching, leaving only the detachment of the heart-lung machine as the final hurdle for the surgical team. He double-checked the grafts. Bulging with blood, there were no kinks or leaks. All had gone smoothly. He could feel the sense of relief in the room as spirits buoyed and “Walk Like a Man,” a Four Seasons song began playing over the speaker system.

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you had lousy taste in music?” Judy Harrow asked.

  Elliot glanced from his patient to the monitor over the table that tracked the state of Scopo’s cardiovascular system. The mean arterial pressure was fifty-eight millimeters of mercury; the left arterial pressure was four.

  “That’s a little low,” he told Hinterlieter, who added more fluid to the pump as the blood pressure began to rise. “But to answer your question,” Elliot said, attaching pacemaker wires to the right atrium and ventricle, “no. No one has ever told me that I have lousy taste in music. Terrible, yes. Lousy, not until today, but you know what, Judy? Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!”

  Then, Elliot sang along with the tape, the surgical team unaware of the incredible sense of freedom he was experiencing at that moment. No one knew what to make of it, but he did because when the chips were down, it was his judgment, his ethics that prevailed, and that was a high the likes of which he’d never experienced before. He reveled, as Frankie Valli crooned the words to his 1963 hit record.

  No- thing is worth

  Crawling on the earth

  So walk like a man

  My s-on

  Valli was absolutely right.

  Finally, Elliot picked up the Bovie and reaching inside the wall of the chest, cauterized any vessels that were still bleeding.

  “I think it’s pretty dry,” he said watching as clear plastic tubes a half-inch in diameter were placed over the front surface of the heart and in the left chest cavity to drain any bloody fluid after the incision was closed.

  And that’s when an intriguing thing happened. Dr. Hinterlieter reached across to him. “Congratulations, Doctor,” he said shaking Elliot’s hand. Then Judy Harrow offered her hand. Then Dr. Falk, the anesthesiologist, and Rick Whittaker, the technician, followed by every member of his surgical team.

  “Congratulations,” “Congratulations,” each of them said as they clasped his hand into their own. And, oddly, if this was going to be the last day of his life, Elliot had to admit that, in many ways, it was also his proudest.

  30

  THE DEATH OF MYSELF

  “Look from now on I don’t know you, do you understand that? I want you to take my name out of your Rolodex and out of your address book!”

  That night when Elliot returned to his home in Englewood, New Jersey, a 1985 Mustang convertible was parked in the driveway. He understood that this was not his insurance agent, and no doubt someone sent from one of the families, probably the Gambinos, who would be acting a lot more like an undertaker.

  Of course, it would have been easy to just keep driving, but Elliot understood the choice that he’d made and its consequences. Now it was time
to face the music. He had a family that he loved and a career that had taken him to high places within his profession. He wasn’t going to run. He’d done enough of that in his life for reasons that he might never fully be able to explain. Nevertheless, those days, for him, were over.

  He parked his ’Vette alongside the Mustang, turned the key to the lock of his front door, and entered to find Angelo Ruggiero waiting for him in a house that looked nearly vacant.

  Ruggiero, whom he’d known peripherally for a number of years dating back to his days in emergency at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, just stared at him blankly like he couldn’t believe Elliot was stupid enough to simply show up as if nothing had happened.

  “Your wife and kids have gotten the fuck out, Dottore. There was a group of us came over, which I don’t think the missus liked too much. If you ask me, she ain’t comin’ back. Probably thinks your gonna get whacked, which ain’t too fucking far from the truth.”

  Elliot stood perfectly still in the foyer. Ruggiero walked up to him. Through the archway he could see the kitchen table with a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s on it. Ruggiero cocked his arm back then slammed his open hand across the side of Elliot’s face, sending him flying back into the closed door.

  “Ya know you’re a stupid cocksucker, don’t ya? Ya know, every-fucking-body that knows your fucking name wants to see you fucking iced, or are you too dumb to know that?”

  “I kn-know,” Elliot answered, “but I also know that I’m not a murderer. I’m a doctor.”