There are allegations that some doctors from the New York suburbs were helping mob figures with stick ups:
Three doctors from the Westchester suburbs of New York City allegedly provided mob figures with erectile dysfunction drugs in exchange for various favors, the FBI said Thursday.
The FBI arrested the doctors — Arlen Fleisher, Stephen Klass and George Shapiro — for allegedly illegally providing large quantities of Viagra, Cialis and Levitra as well as other prescription drugs and drug samples to members of the Gambino crime family.
If convicted of illegally supplying the prescription drugs, Fleisher, Klass and Shapiro each could be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison.
Selling erectile dysfunction drugs is serious: when it comes to the sentencing the law is hard on violators. And what exactly did they allegedly get for allegedly helping the mobsters expand their horizons?
Those favors included receiving discounted prices for construction and auto repair work, done by Gambino family-controlled businesses; and use of DePalma’s table at Rao’s Italian restaurant in the Harlem section of New York City, according to the complaint.
(TMV first saw this on Professor Bainbridge’s site and included it in Around The Sphere but it was such a vital story we had to do our own version.)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.