Chapter 11 #3
“Miami helped us out a lot. And NYPD gave us some background too. This guy’s got a long history.
There’s going to be a lot of media attention on this.
” He picked up the printout so he could go over it chronologically.
“He started out as Angelo Alvarez, in Hell’s Kitchen in New York.
Cuban father who drove a garbage truck for the city.
He was killed in an accident when Angelo was thirteen, and the mother had disappeared at some point before that.
Angelo wound up in foster care when the father was killed.
He had trouble with his placements, stealing from his foster families and in school.
He wound up in juvenile hall, in and out of trouble after that, mostly petty theft and causing trouble at juvie, but apparently a bright kid, emancipated at sixteen, never finished high school.
He was living on the Lower East Side, delivering food for a Chinese restaurant, got busted for possession, was sent back to juvie, and moved to Miami when he got out.
He was about eighteen. I don’t know where he got the money, maybe selling drugs, but he went to beauty school in Miami when he was eighteen or nineteen, and spent ten years as a hairdresser in Miami.
He got busted for selling drugs to his clients, was sentenced to a year in jail, served about six months, and went back to hairdressing.
He went to work for some high-end spa where he did hair, and apparently got into beauty and facials, and my guess would be that somewhere around then he started messing with more than facials, maybe Botox shots.
He changed his name to Alexander Addison the Fourth, and moved to Palm Beach and worked for a spa there.
He switched from hair to skincare. He moved to L.A.
about four years ago, and that’s when he became Dr. Addison, and apparently he was giving medical beauty treatments for three years in a house in Beverly Hills.
He picked up some wealthy clients, who gave him financial backing, quite a lot of it in fact, and he got enough money together to open the place he’s running now that he calls Bellissima, which he opened seven months ago, in June.
He’s been practicing medicine without a license for at least four years that we know of, and making a hell of a lot of money at it.
No one’s ever brought complaints against him until these five women, so something must have gone wrong.
He has eleven million dollars in the bank, ten of which came from Korea in November.
His bank is working with us to investigate the source.
We’ve had some other scams come out of there, and my guess and the bank’s is that his investors there are laundering money by investing in legitimate businesses in the States.
They probably didn’t know that he’s running a fraudulent business himself, practicing medicine without a license and no training.
He’s spending a hell of a lot of money these days.
He just spent two million over Christmas to charter a yacht in the Caribbean, and he just leased a jet for another million.
My second guess is that he’s using the Koreans’ money for that and they don’t know it.
It’s probably the slickest operation I’ve seen for a guy practicing medicine with no medical training whatsoever.
Sometimes you get nurses doing that, or guys who served as paramedics in the military.
The only training he’s had is as a hairdresser twenty-five years ago, and he didn’t go to school past tenth grade.
Between the fancy name, his good looks, the pretense that he went to Harvard, he’s been pulling it off on a major scale for at least five years, and maybe longer in Palm Beach.
He managed to get at least ten million dollars out of investors in Korea recently and maybe five out of other investors in L.A.
You’ve got to hand it to him. Now he has seriously damaged five women’s faces and nearly killed them.
But until now, he’s gotten away with it. The guy must be a genius.”
“Or a brilliant sociopath,” Jason said, stunned by the information the lieutenant had shared with him. “What happens now?”
“It’s a complicated process,” Kelly responded.
“First we get a warrant for his arrest, so we stop him from harming anyone else. The charges will be mostly fraud and practicing medicine without a license, great bodily harm of the five women who contacted you, and criminal negligence. We’ll check out the money laundering aspect.
We’ll shut down his operation and seize everything in the house, and all the medical substances in his office will go to our lab for testing to see what he’s been shooting into his ‘patients.’ They’re all felony charges.
If he pleads guilty, we’ll see where it goes, but he’ll serve time, mostly because of the five women.
And once it goes public in the press, other victims may come forward.
If he doesn’t plead guilty, we go to trial, and the D.A.
will have a field day. Any way you look at it, Mr. Addison is going to serve a lot of time. You hit the jackpot on this one.”
“What about his employees? Will they be charged too?”
“As a rule, no. Guys like this don’t share their secrets. They play it very close to the vest. If his employees were knowing accomplices, then yes, they’ll be charged too.”
“Apparently every supply closet has a combination lock, and only he knows the combination,” Jason told him.
“That makes sense, if he’s using drugs he shouldn’t, that aren’t federally approved, or not for human use, which happens too.
Usually these guys hire real nurses, who may or may not have suspected that what he was doing wasn’t legal.
He has half a dozen employees. I think several of them are nurses.
He has a girlfriend. We’ll talk to her, but she probably doesn’t know anything.
She’s probably just window dressing.” Jason stopped him then and held up a hand.
“Just for full disclosure here. I live with the sister of his girlfriend. I don’t think she has the remotest idea he’s not a doctor. She’s twenty years old, and she was hired as a model for his ads. If you’d like me to stay out of the investigation, I will. I’m not close to her.”
“You’ve already proven yourself here. Does your partner know anything about him, that you’re aware of?”
“Her sister doesn’t tell her anything and has total faith in the guy. My partner and I have had bad feelings about him, but we never knew anything, it was just a feeling. He seems to be pretty arrogant.”
“He got away with it for a long time. Some of these guys get away with it for twenty years, and then someone dies, the whole thing gets exposed, and all hell breaks loose. That will probably happen here when his fancy celebrity clients read about him. They’re all going to be panicked over whatever he was doing to them.
This won’t go quietly into the night. He has too many important patients, and his patients and investors are going to be pissed.
I don’t imagine his Korean friends will be too happy either.
Any money he has now, or property, may be distributed among the victims, so the Koreans will lose their ten million, if he hasn’t already spent it by then anyway. ”
“He’s currently negotiating with some investors, but I don’t think there’s been any conclusion of that deal.” Jason supplied what Billie had told him.
“Ambitious guy,” Kelly commented. “If he’d kept it small and below the radar, he might never have gotten caught.
You’ve saved lives by shining a spotlight on it.
It’s going to take time to interrogate as many people as we can, patients, his employees, his girlfriend, his medical suppliers.
If it goes to trial, there will be a lot of testimony, from a lot of important people and celebrities.
It will be a media circus, you can be sure of that. ”
Listening to the lieutenant, Jason almost felt sorry for Mickie.
She was about to get caught in a maelstrom of accusations and the interrogations to find out what she knew would be intense.
It was going to be a lot to go through. Jason couldn’t help wondering if they would keep her clothes to sell for the benefit of the victims. It was a possibility, since Alex paid for them.
But as much as he disliked her, Jason suspected that she was innocent, and had been as duped as everyone else, but at least she’d had fun in the process.
Mickie and Alex had even gone to a movie premiere the night before, Billie had told him, and they’d been on the red carpet and in the press.
“Will he get out on bail pending trial?” Jason asked the lieutenant.
“I’m sure he will. Someone will pay it for him most likely.
If he’s found guilty, they could take everything he’s got as restitution for the victims. His lawyer will try to make a deal if he pleads guilty.
” Jason wondered where Mickie would live in the meantime, if Alex’s accounts were frozen.
He might have set up a bank account for her, which would be frozen too.
When the meeting was over, he thanked the lieutenant and went back to his office.
He didn’t want to call Billie at work and tell her what had happened.
There was too much evidence to tell her about.
The lieutenant said that they’d probably get the warrant in the next two days, then there would be the arraignment the day after, and someone could bail Alex right after the arraignment.
Jason knew that Billie would be shocked, and Mickie even more so, and she’d have to leave the house, maybe empty-handed if they didn’t let her take her clothes.
It shocked him to know that by the weekend Alex would be in jail, and then he would be out after the arraignment.
The press storm was going to be enormous and Jason would be part of it, since he’d broken the story.
Jason met with Joe McCarthy that afternoon and filled him in, and Joe was in awe of the story.
A high school dropout hairdresser had been practicing medicine on some of the most important people in L.A.
for the last four years, and investors had put millions of dollars into his practice and toward his success.
It was an incredible story. Jason wondered what would happen with the Korean investors.
Their money would be seized as part of the profits of Alex’s crimes.
Jason couldn’t imagine that anyone would stand by him.
He wondered what Mickie’s reaction would be and what she would do once the money was gone.
The answer seemed obvious to him. He wondered if she would draw closer to Billie again, but he wasn’t sure.
He trusted Billie completely, and he told her the result of the police investigation that night.
She wasn’t going to warn Alex or her sister.
Mickie had made her position clear. But he thought Billie deserved to know the truth.
She was shocked when he told her. It was a shocking story of perfidy and lies, and the incredible boldness of Addison treating patients and administering treatments he had no training to do.
It was sociopathy to a very high degree.
He was sure that psychiatric evaluation would be an important part of the testimony.
It would be insane of Alex to go to trial.
His story would make a fascinating movie.
Billie could hardly believe it either. She had been skeptical about him all along, but no one had thought it would be anything of this magnitude.
“In a way, they were perfect for each other,” she said sadly.
“Mickie stops at nothing to get what she wants, and she’s always had a very loose relationship with the truth.
She lied about me constantly when we were kids, and everyone believed her.
She’s very convincing. I wonder if she’ll stick by him now. ”
“Honor among thieves,” Jason said, still stunned by everything Dan Kelly had told him.
He was eager to know that Alex had been arrested and finally stopped.
The game had to end here, and quickly, before others were injured.
He thought of the brochure then, with the before and after photographs of Mickie that Billie had told him about.
It was further proof of the fraud he had committed, telling people that Mickie was in her thirties when she was only nineteen and that her youthful look was the result of his treatments.
Alex was a true sociopath, perhaps no longer even able to distinguish between truth and lies.
Jason hoped the judge would sign the warrant soon so the end of the story could begin to unravel, and he hoped that Billie wouldn’t suffer too much for her sister, because it was sure that her sister wouldn’t suffer for her.
And Billie deserved justice now too. She had suffered at her sister’s hands for too long.
And this was the grand finale. He wondered where Mickie would go now and what she would do.
Coming back to real life and a normal existence wouldn’t be easy by any means.