Rich Doctor Works Cheap, Gets Rent From U.S. : Wealth: The once-poor surgeon runs his practice at a loss. Medicine is his first love; real estate is the source of his fortune.

In 1948, Dr. Laszlo N. Tauber was a penniless Jewish refugee from Europe who felt lucky to be alive and working as a surgeon in the United States.

He is still practicing medicine and still charges some of his original patients $5 for an office visit.

Today, however, he is far from penniless.

Tauber, the only practicing physician named by Forbes magazine as among the 400 richest individuals in the United States, has built a fortune in real estate estimated at $500 million.

“Medicine is still my life,” Tauber said in his modest office in the Alexandria, Va., hospital he built. “I spend 5% of my time on real estate and 95% on medicine--that’s the most important to me.”

Tauber owns more than 7 million square feet of office space. He has buildings all over the Washington area, four properties in New York City, one in Nashville and one in Houston.

He is the federal government’s biggest landlord, leasing more than 4 million square feet to U.S. agencies.

The 76-year-old physician keeps office hours and regularly performs surgery, but makes no pretense of making a living in medicine.

“I don’t make enough in medicine to pay the overhead,” he says with a smile. “That’s the way I like it.”

Tauber is a small, bespectacled man with steel-gray hair. His office in Jefferson Memorial Hospital is decorated with certificates, diplomas and autographed photos of people such as famed Houston heart surgeon Denton Cooley, a close friend.

The phone on Tauber’s neat desk rings frequently.

He discusses medicine with a fellow doctor and, moments later, gives orders affecting a multimillion-dollar office lease.

When asked about his personal history, the answers to the questions he chooses to answer are precise.

“My memory is very good,” Tauber said. “I remember everything.”

Then he sighs.

“Sometimes I remember too much. There are a lot of bad, bad memories.”

Most of those are of his early life as a Jew during the German occupation of Hungary.

Tauber was born in Budapest in 1915, months after his father was killed in World War I. He was an excellent student and a talented gymnast, and at age 14 received Hungary’s “best sport student” award.

He earned a medical degree from the University of Budapest in 1938 and was a resident in general surgery when the Nazis took over the country. He began working at what had been called the Jewish Hospital.

“It (the name) was changed to the International Red Cross Hospital,” Tauber recalled. “When the Germans on the street saw the name, they left it alone. I worked there until liberation.”

In the fall of 1944, as the Nazis began a special operation to liquidate Hungarian Jews, Tauber helped to organize a makeshift hospital in his former high school. He often performed surgery there day and night, treating the war-wounded from the Jewish ghetto.

The doctor refuses to describe that period in detail. He shakes his head and changes the subject.

In 1946, as the Soviets tightened their control over Hungary, he secured a fellowship to a neurosurgical clinic at the University of Stockholm.

His wife, a German Jew, was pregnant with their son.

Because the United States allowed virtually unlimited immigration of German Jews, Tauber said, they decided that she should go to America to have the child.

“We wanted him to be born a native American,” Tauber said.

Alfred I. Tauber was born in 1947. Later that year, Dr. Tauber joined his family in Washington, D.C.

Alfred is a professor of medicine at Boston University. Their daughter, Ingrid, is a psychologist in San Francisco. Tauber and their mother were divorced in 1964; he remarried in 1973.

After passing difficult tests to be certified as a surgeon in the United States, Tauber found work in a Washington hospital and later decided to open his own practice. It was the first step to a real estate empire.

“I was looking for an office,” he recalled. “That was when I got acquainted with the U.S. system of real estate finance.”

In Europe, Tauber said, real estate was sold for cash, but he found that U.S. banks were willing to make mortgages. He scraped together $1,500 and made a down payment on his first property, a four-apartment house in Washington.

Since then, Tauber has bought and sold hundreds of properties. His best tenant is the federal government. The Postal Service and Food and Drug Administration are among the agencies that rent space in his buildings.

But real estate remains a part-time activity.