He was a top-flight eye surgeon who pioneered a sight-saving implant and traveled the world operating on high-powered patients — but now the law is closing in on a Manhattan doctor who investigators say led a dark double life fueled by ego and greed.
Ophthalmologist Miles Galin, 68, spiraled down from the top of his profession to end up a scam artist who could spend his retirement in prison.
“He’s like a real-life Thomas Crown. He’d rather steal $500 from you than make a million doing eye surgery because it’s more fun to steal from you,” said a man who believes he was swindled by Galin.
Galin — who lost his license in 1997 — heads to Manhattan Supreme Court Wednesday, where a trial date will be set on 99 counts of practicing medicine without a license, plus fraud and larceny charges.
And that’s just the beginning.
He’s been sentenced to 33 months in prison for trying to fleece a coin dealer out of $500,000 in gold Krugerrands, using his much-younger girlfriend as a go-between.
He’s under indictment in New Jersey for felony Medicare and mail fraud.
The IRS has filed $3 million in liens on his Southbury, Conn., home, and the city says his former medical practice owes more than $500,000 in back taxes.
“The problem with this thing is Galin can’t get a break,” said his lawyer, Robert Goldman.
Others say Galin has gotten nothing but breaks.
“For years Galin has been thumbing his nose at the authorities and endangering the public. We are working diligently to see all that comes to an end,” New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said.
A New York City native, Galin launched what promised to be a sterling career after graduating from New York University Medical School in 1951.
He worked and taught in some of the city’s best hospitals, patented the first of his 14 inventions, a lens implant, in 1979 and built an international reputation as a forward-thinker with a quick mind — and an outsized ego.
“He was, and still is, one of the real innovators in ophthalmology,” said Dr. Robert Dotson, a board member of the American Board of Eye Surgery, who interned with Galin in 1981.
Galin fought fiercely for lens implants to restore sight in cataract patients, a now-common treatment that was considered too dangerous in the 1960s.
By the mid-’70s, Galin was hobnobbing with Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, operating on the Shah of Iran’s socialite sister and other family members, and working in France, Russia and England, acquaintances said.
His enviable life started to fall apart a few years later.
In the winter of 1978-79, Galin, using a shell company called Rascator Maritime, participated in a scheme to divert a ship and swipe cargo belonging to Dow Chemical, court papers say.
Dow sued, Galin lost — and the judge branded him a pirate.
“What makes this case unusual … is that the leader of the pirates is not a swashbuckling Long John Silver, but a grasping, avaricious New York ophthalmologist,” U.S. District Judge Kevin Duffy wrote in 1985.
Galin, who owned three seats on the Chicago commodities board, started trading stocks — and, authorities say, defrauding insurance companies — earning so much money his small securities company bought two luxury penthouses worth nearly $2 million in a Murray Hill building.
The married father of four also owns homes in Southbury, Conn. — burdened with $3 million in IRS liens dating to 1987 — and the Florida Keys, according to records.
Galin’s misdeeds began to catch up with him in 1997, when the state revoked his license for negligence and fraud, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles indicted him in a bizarre scheme to buy $500,000 worth of Krugerrands with bogus checks.
Galin and a known forger, who is now dead, mailed phony checks to a dealer in 1994, according to court documents. Galin’s beautiful 38-year-old girlfriend picked up the gold in California.
The doctor was sentenced to 33 months in prison in February 1999, but he is out on bail while he appeals the case.
Goldman said Galin and Tracy Weatherby, described in court documents as Galin’s “paramour,” were duped by the forger.
He said Weatherby, who records show lives in of one of Galin’s 57th-floor penthouses, was bullied by the FBI to implicate Galin on the stand. Weatherby was granted immunity in the case.
Meanwhile, Galin brazenly continued to see patients at his East 37th Street office, the New York attorney general’s office said.
He was indicted in April 1998 on 23 counts of practicing without a license — and again last July on another 76 counts when he kept seeing patients even after the first indictment, investigators said.
“I don’t know what to call it. It’s total insanity. He’s supposedly very good but something snapped,” one investigator said.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for northern New Jersey also chimed in with a five-count 1998 indictment accusing Galin of defrauding insurance companies with phony billing.
Sources said the investigation, which should have seen a trial by now, is ongoing — but Goldman said the FBI has had the records for four years and has been unable to nail down a case.
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