Posted on Thu, Dec. 23, 2004

Doctor to the poor bids a bitter adieu

Stripped of license, 'Dr. Eddie' faces jail.

By Amy S. Rosenberg

Inquirer Staff Writer

VINELAND, N.J. - They're praying for Dr. Eddie at the clinic, patients
like Willie Hernandez, a 42-year-old former heroin addict whose
forearms are gouged with scars from cutting himself.

Hernandez is bringing sodas to the staff this Wednesday night, saying
it's the least he can do for all they have done for him, a
down-and-out, left-for-trash guy battling anxiety attacks, a spider
tattoo covering old needle marks.

"Who cares about the heroin addict in this world?" Hernandez says. "As
long as I've been going to Dr. Eddie, they show me care. This is the
only place that helps us. If they close us down, who's going to help
us?"

Dr. Eddie Andujar will appear this night, but only for a prayer
service. He is no longer allowed to treat the patients at the medical
clinic that bears his name: "Dr. Eddie's Free Clinic 'For The
Uninsured.' "

The room electrifies as he goes from patient to patient, kissing
cheeks, gripping shoulders, a savior clad in black "Dr. Eddie" scrubs,
a Filofax in his back pocket and a wooden cross around his neck.

But Dr. Eddie is in trouble.

After growing up as a poor Puerto Rican kid milking goats in Vineland,
speeding through a world championship kickboxing career, amassing
degrees from Haverford College and Harvard Medical School, and
devoting countless hours to treating the desperate, Andujar may be on
the verge of a flameout.

In February, he is to be sentenced in U.S. District Court in Camden on
22 counts of tax evasion and bankruptcy fraud, crimes stemming from a
failed series of franchised clinics he ran in the 1990s. He faces up
to four years in prison.

Over the pleas of many of his patients, the state Board of Medical
Examiners decided that his crimes amounted to "moral turpitude" - and,
in June, stripped him of his medical license.

Now, it is the patients who worry about their doctor. "I think it's
wrong," says Aldene Victor, 34. She turned to him to treat her high
blood pressure after another clinic turned her away because she could
not afford the fee. "People should appreciate him and not be too quick
to judge."

•

From behind the wall of his office, Andujar, 48, can hear the
commotion from the clinic where he used to see from 80 to 100 people a
day. The patients are lining up as usual this weekday afternoon, the
addicts, the HIV and hepatitis C sufferers, the poor with no
insurance.

The doctor whom Andujar recruited to replace himself quit after city
authorities shut down the second Dr. Eddie clinic, in Atlantic City.
They wanted to make sure Andujar was not practicing. Another doctor,
Ivan Krohn, has taken over some of the Vineland practice.

More than anything, what rankles Andujar is that judgment of moral
turpitude, which the medical board defined as a breach of "the private
or social duties which a man owes to his fellow men, to society in
general."

To cast him as the one who ignores his obligations to his fellow man
is, he says, "a total hypocrisy."

"I don't choose to go and buy a Mercedes," says Andujar, who now runs
a mail-order vitamin business. "I choose to go and help the poor. I
see many children who are sick and haven't gotten care. I'm dealing
with people who most doctors don't want to see. I've opened everything
I have to these people."

He says he received calls from two doctors offering to testify on his
behalf before the licensing board because "they did not want these
patients on their doorsteps."

It is rare for a doctor to be disciplined for tax evasion - less than
1 percent of disciplinary actions against U.S. doctors each year
concern taxes, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards.

Andujar acknowledges that he was negligent about filing tax returns,
but attributes that to the pressures of his bankruptcy and to sloppy
accounting procedures. He says he intended to file the returns later.

And none of it, he says, hurt his practice of medicine, which he says
proved that treating the poor could be done "appropriately and
legitimately." In 2003, he says, the practice grossed $1 million while
giving $479,000 in free care.

Investigators accused him of failing to file individual and corporate
tax returns for five years, covering more than $1 million in taxes,
and failing to disclose transactions that put $106,000 in his personal
account.

After the trial, IRS special agent Patricia J. Haynes said, "Neither
the notoriety or benevolence of any individual is a substitute for the
fulfillment of their tax obligations." Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas
DeLeonardo says of Andujar's patients, "It's unfortunate that he's put
those people in that situation, but he has. It's his own fault."

Andujar says part of his trouble stems from the fact that his practice
makes the medical establishment uneasy, both for its stubborn focus on
the uninsured and for relying on sometimes-controversial alternative
treatments for drug addiction and other conditions.

He traces his financial difficulties to what he says was the failure
of insurance companies to reimburse him for $8 million in intravenous
antibiotic therapy used to treat Lyme disease at his failed
Medi-One-Stop clinics.

To be sure, a Dr. Eddie clinic is not your typical medical office.

Behind the front desk and waiting area is a room lined with black
recliners, each with an I.V. stand. Addicts get intravenous vitamin
therapy three times a week, and drugs including Xanax for anxiety and
injections of buprenorphine for pain.

They also spend time in a back room equipped with a pool table,
exercise bikes and a TV, and attend weekly prayer sessions. They are
welcome to stay all day. "R.I.P. those who didn't have a free clinic
to go to," a patient wrote on a tombstone drawing that hangs on the
wall.

To some medical experts, Andujar's treatments range from slightly
unusual to highly unorthodox. Buprenorphine was approved recently to
treat addiction, but only in oral form. Andujar says the addicts who
get injections of it at the clinic do so under a "pain management"
program, for which it is approved. Intravenous vitamin therapy is more
"off the map" for addiction, says Mark Parrino, head of the American
Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence.

Andujar's practices have brought regulatory scrutiny in the past. He
received a two-year probationary sentence in 1999 after the state
medical board accused him of giving unnecessary treatment, which he
denied. In 2002, city, state and federal investigators were brought to
the clinic by the drug-overdose death of a homeless man who had been
living there. Andujar's license was suspended for two months, and he
was fined $50,000.

Andujar has nothing but disdain for the regulators.

"The Division of Consumer Affairs comes in like they're protecting
people - they won't stand within 20 feet of these people unless they
were ordered. I want to help these people. There is nothing wrong with
that."

Andujar hopes that a pending U.S. Supreme Court decision about
sentencing guidelines will permit his judge to be lenient. A sentence
of probation might allow him to get his license back. But he's
prepared for the worst. "My lawyers say you could go to jail, and I
say, most of the people I treat have already been in jail. The poor
are in jail from the day they are born."

•

Andujar's mother, Maria, leans on a metal filing cabinet, leading the
prayer service. Eddie, the youngest of her 10 children, was three
months old when the family moved from Puerto Rico to Vineland. His
father worked in a chicken factory. Some of his relatives still hang
around the clinic or work there. "My son, he give his blood to the
community," his mother says.

After hooking up at age 12 with martial-arts instructor Joseph Artesi,
who became a lifelong mentor, Andujar launched a career in "full
contact karate" or kickboxing that landed him on the cover of a karate
magazine and in possession of a world championship. He helped Artesi
run a summer camp, where he so impressed one boy's father that the man
helped Andujar obtain a scholarship to his alma mater, Haverford.

Andujar's wife and four daughters moved to California after his arrest
to pursue soccer training. For a while, he flew back and forth every
week, but since his conviction, he is not allowed to leave New Jersey.

Artesi doesn't quite know what to make of what has befallen his
protege. He keeps boxes of Andujar stuff - including an interview that
quotes Andujar, at 20, promising to return to Vineland to treat the
poor.

"There was something about this kid that set him apart," Artesi, 65,
says. "All I can say is, it's incongruent that this could happen. He's
not a businessman. He's a cause guy."

Now, the cause at the clinic is Dr. Eddie himself.

"All I can tell you is it hurts a lot of patients," says Lisa Viruet,
a medical assistant at the clinic. "They always ask me, 'How is Eddie
doing?' But they won't give up on him. There's a lot of people in
Vineland who won't give up on him."