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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
BYLINE: Bryan Burrough
She was a tiny woman, barely four feet eleven, and quiet, the kind you wouldn't notice on the subway or the crosstown bus. Her name was Maria Cruz. She was 35, but looked 10 years younger. She had come to America alone from the Philippines in 1992, leaving her family in an effort to find a better life. And she found it.
Earnest and industrious, Maria had worked her way through Manila's Maryknoll College, graduating cum laude with a degree in communications, then moved to New York, where she enrolled at Fordham University and received her M.B.A., with honors. After taking an analyst's job at Citibank, she moved with a team of fellow employees to Barclays Capital in 2001, where she was listed as a senior credit analyst. She lived alone in a small, tidy apartment on the West Side and attended Mass every day- one more immigrant success story in a city teeming with them.
What got Maria noticed was something that happened one year ago, on Palm Sunday, April 13, 2003. That day a friend glimpsed her around 11 a.m. in the crowd listening to Mass at St. Malachy's Church, on West 49th Street. After the service, Maria swung by her office, on Park Avenue, to pick up some papers she needed for a meeting the next day.
After that, she vanished.
Maria's boss, Hans Christensen, was among the first to notice she wasn't at work. He called her apartment several times, as did co-workers; no one answered. Everyone agreed it was unlike Maria to miss a day of work without explanation. On Tuesday a co-worker, unaware that Maria had moved, checked an old address; others telephoned Barclays' human-resources department to ask for her emergency contact numbers. On Wednesday, another colleague checked her apartment and found three days of Wall Street Journals piled in front of her door.
Worried, Christensen called Maria's contact number, belonging to an aunt in New Jersey. In turn, the aunt alerted her three sons, two of whom lived in Queens. They arrived at Maria's apartment that afternoon. Turned away by the building manager, they returned with a couple of police-
women and gained entry to Apartment 14A. They found dishes piled in the sink and a bunch of grapes on the kitchen counter. But Maria wasn't there. Friday morning her family began calling hospitals, on the chance that she had been in an accident. That night, with no sign of her, her uncle Jose Navarro went to the N.Y.P.D.'s Midtown North precinct and filed a missing-
persons report.
It was thrown atop a large pile of similar reports. More than 18,400 people had been reported missing in New York City in the first five months of 2003; most turned out to be runaways. With little hope police would find her, Maria's family began distributing flyers and phoning reporters; both the New York Post and Newsday ran stories. A Web page called www.mariacruzmissing.com was put together. Her sisters and brother wrote heartbreaking letters about Maria and posted them on the Internet, hoping they might jog someone's memory.
They didn't. Months passed. Finally a pair of New York City detectives discovered that Maria had been undergoing treatment for an unsightly mouth condition called "black tongue." The Friday before her disappearance, she had canceled an appointment with a Manhattan laser specialist who was treating her. When detectives discovered a credit-card purchase at Loehmann's department store dated the Sunday she vanished, they noticed the store was a block from the specialist's office. Had she rescheduled her appointment?
A check on the laser specialist, whose name was Dean Faiello, uncovered that he had a criminal record-a 1998 conviction for possessing forged prescriptions, and, more recently, a second, for practicing medicine without a license. Detectives contacted his attorney. She said she couldn't find him.
Not for several months, until that December, did an investigator speak with Faiello's longtime companion, a 43-year-old Manhattan designer named Greg Bach. Bach, it turned out, was a very angry man; Faiello had vanished, owing him about $85,000. When told Faiello was being sought for questioning in the disappearance of one of his patients, Bach remembered that someone had told him the previous spring of a conversation with a panicky Faiello. Faiello had said he rushed a patient to the hospital after she suffered convulsions following the administering of a local anesthetic.
Bach suddenly confronted the possibility that his lover, the man he had supported through all manner of nightmares, might have killed someone. Searching his memory for any indication Faiello might have hidden a body, Bach thought of a strange concrete slab Faiello had poured at the sprawling white house he had sold on Elwood Avenue in Newark. It was there, beneath the concrete Faiello had laid in the storage room at the back of the garage, that on February 18 police found Maria Cruz's decomposing body stuffed in a suitcase wrapped with garbage bags. An arrest warrant was issued, but Dean Faiello was gone.
When it broke that day in February, the news of Maria Cruz's death was classic tabloid fodder. The unassuming Filipina immigrant, the high-living gay "doctor'' in the forbidding old Newark mansion, the "concrete coffin'' in which he apparently buried her body-it was all irresistible to the New York press. The New York Post, nicknaming Faiello the "Killer Quack,'' carried the story on page one for 6 of the next 10 days. After rumors surfaced that Faiello might be hiding in Costa Rica, a Post reporter was on the ground in Central America five days before American investigators.
What makes the story more than just another tabloid sensation is the extraordinary boom in cosmetic procedures going on across the country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will undergo minor procedures this year to improve their appearance, visiting technicians and doctors who use lasers to do everything from whitening teeth to removing body hair. Yet few know much about the people who perform these procedures. The Faiello case highlights what many in the profession regard as lax regulations on exactly who can do what; even the comparatively minor procedures that were Faiello's specialty-removing body hair and tattoos-can be danger-
ous when performed by untrained hands.
New York is one of several states that don't require all laser technicians to be doctors, and the state has been less than aggressive in cracking down on people such as Faiello who cross the line from hair removal to minor surgery. The New York attorney general's office, in fact, had received several complaints about Faiello from doctors, but had refrained from charging him until it could build an ironclad case against him for impersonating a doctor, as it had in 2002. Even then, however, Faiello was able to continue practicing, setting up shop in a friend's apartment. In fact, at the time of Maria Cruz's death, he was cooperating with the attorney general's office, gathering information to prosecute real doctors for medical-insurance fraud.
The upshot? If you're thinking of undergoing any kind of laser procedure, check out the credentials of the person doing it. If you don't, you could end up in the shaky hands of a man like Dean Faiello.
On the surface, and that was where he always looked best,...
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