Psychiatrist Charged; He Pleads Insanity : Crime: Dr. Michael Gilbert has spent years testifying for the defense in criminal cases. Now he needs a few expert witnesses himself.

A prominent forensic psychiatrist who for three decades has been a court witness testifying about defendants’ mental health now intends to try to prove that he himself is criminally insane.

Dr. Michael Gilbert, 75, is accused of trying to bribe a police officer. He allegedly told the officer he wanted to find a hit man to kill the father of a child he believed was being abused, then told an undercover officer he wanted the man framed on drug charges.

At least three defense experts are ready to testify that Gilbert is insane, arguing that years of working around the criminally insane left him saddened and vulnerable.

But prosecutor Robert Waters thinks Gilbert is faking it and has his own experts ready to testify.

Pretrial motions were argued earlier this month.

Gilbert, an Air Force veteran who worked as a brainwashing expert in South Korea, reportedly became Miami’s first municipal court psychiatrist in 1957.

He has been involved in the trials of such high-profile defendants as former jewel thief Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy and teen-ager Ronny Zamora, whom Gilbert diagnosed as living in a “fantasy TV world” when he killed an elderly woman. The “television intoxication” defense put forward for Zamora was unsuccessful.

Gilbert was known for his imposing intelligence and his accelerated pace at work and play.

“He’s so far ahead of the world that I thought I was on another planet,” said Michael Haft, a lawyer who often hired Gilbert as a witness at a $150 an hour. “He’s crazy like a fox. His intelligence borders on insanity.”

Last Aug. 24, Gilbert called Dale Bowlin, a Metro-Dade police officer he had once treated for headaches after Bowlin was injured in a golf accident, and asked to see him.

Bowlin testified that Gilbert told him at the meeting that the 3-year-old nephew of his girlfriend was being abused by the boy’s father. He allegedly asked Bowlin to “put him onto a hit man who could kill” the child’s father.

Gilbert told Bowlin someone from the Democratic Party had spied on him and his girlfriend, secretly taping their conversation with a recorder disguised as a wristwatch, the officer said.

Bowlin said Gilbert told him that if he could help in the plot against the boy’s father, “I would have enough golf balls for the rest of my life.”

“I responded by telling the doctor that he had lost his mind and he was talking like a lunatic,” Bowlin said in a pretrial statement. “I advised him that he went much too far and should consider checking himself into a mental hospital.”

Bowlin informed his superiors. They decided to investigate with undercover detective Ken Rosario, who wore a microphone when he went to Gilbert’s office Aug. 27 and said he was available to “take care of special favors.”

Rosario said Gilbert told him he wanted the father of his nephew framed on drug charges, and that Gilbert met him the next day and handed him $2,000.

Minutes later, police arrested Gilbert.

The father of the child has denied Gilbert’s allegations of child abuse.

A month after his arrest, Gilbert checked himself into Larkin Hospital in South Miami for treatment.

Dr. Bernard Tumarkin, a University of Miami professor who treated Gilbert, said he had “a psychotic break” and was suffering from “unrealistic, loose thinking. He must have been, in his own words, really sort of crazy to have done what he did.”