Posted on 12/26/2009 6:45:02 AM PST by csvset
On 21 September 2004, Michelle Weinberger woke up on the 79ft powerboat that she and her husband, Mark, owned as it rocked gently in the waters of a marina on the Greek island of Mykonos.
"I put my hand on his side of the bed, and I remember feeling it empty," she later told the US television channel NBC. Weinberger leapt from bed in alarm to find that her husband had vanished, taking with him his passport and money he had stashed secretly on board.
It was the beginning of a five-year flight from justice that ended this week even more strangely than it began, almost 6,000 feet up in the Italian Alps. Two officers of the paramilitary Carabinieri, led by a mountain guide, trudged up to the southern slopes of Mont Blanc to find one of America's most wanted fugitives living in a tent. He was surviving in temperatures as low as -18C on dried and tinned food and snow he melted on a portable stove.
Dr Mark Weinberger, a 46-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist, was tonight in a secure ward at the Molinette hospital in Turin recovering from a wound he sustained when he tried to take his own life at the Carabinieri station in Courmayeur, below Mont Blanc.
The US authorities have 40 days in which to apply for his extradition. He faces trial on 22 counts of healthcare fraud, having previously been indicted by a grand jury.
Brought up in a prosperous New York suburb, Weinberger was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the UCLA medical school. He later worked with one of Chicago's most renowned plastic surgeons before opening his own practice, the Weinberger Sinus Clinic, in Merrillville, Indiana.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Soon to be a major motion picture. Sadly.
” 79ft powerboat “ ?
Wouldn’t that be a yacht?
yaht’s right, it was probably named the Yahtzee. /s
From Mont Blanc to the pen... sorta fitting.
Sure, sounds like a yacht to me.
I would have preferred a more temperate climate and probably would have been caught sooner too!
A sailboat can also be a yacht.
JUst asked a commercial skipper that last night. He said that a yacht is any sized boat that is used strictly for pleasure.
Health care fraud....hmmmm. Guess he can bunk with Obama.
Well in the world of 150-300 foot mega yachts, no!
His name is Doctor Elmer Fudd, he has a mansion and a yacht.
I feel so ashamed. ANOTHER kookball who hales from dear old PENN; The University of Pennsylvania. Sad to say, I guess all the Ivy League schools have long since made oblique left turns and are now turning out those kinds of screwball alumni.
For several years I have been telling myself that the little crackpot Professor from Penn, with the hyphenated name, that Bill Oreilly has on his show waaaaay too often is an aberration; that Penn really hasn’t gone that far left. But now here comes this POS Penn alumnus, Weinberger, that they caught up with in Italy, and my hopes have taken yet another dive!
Quit your bitchin’. My alum include Scott Peterson and Weird Al!
Isn't that a river in China? ;>
my only alumni claim to fame is Jerry Doyle...
JUst asked a commercial skipper that last night. He said that a yacht is any sized boat that is used strictly for pleasure.
Aright I am now a proud owner of a 18 ft yacht, cool.
Never allow a good crisis to go to waste.
Betcha he’s a friend of Barry’s and Meeshell’s. Bet that if he goes to trial, he’ll be pardoned by Barry right before he vacates the White House in 2013.
Someone check to see if he has been on the guest lists of the rich and Democrats in Chicago.
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