Surgeon Who Stole Rare Coins May Lose MD License

The state is considering whether to revoke or suspend the license of a heart surgeon, two years after he was convicted of stealing $1 million in rare coins in New York, a state prosecutor said Tuesday.

Dr. Juan Suros XII, who had offices in Chula Vista, has been charged with dishonesty and corruption by the Medical Board of California.

Suros, 51, was sentenced to six months in the Descanso honor camp and fined $1 million after he pleaded guilty to the theft of 70 rare coins from a prominent Manhattan coin society in November, 1990. The medical board decided to review Suros’ license on the basis of that felony conviction.

“Doctors are involved with dealing with other people’s money and resources, and, if they can’t be trusted, they may misuse those resources,” said Barry Ladendorf, a deputy attorney general. “In a technical sense, he may be a good doctor. But there’s more to being a doctor than just the technical skill. . . . Every profession has a certain common decency.”

A hearing for Suros has not yet been scheduled but will probably occur sometime after January, Ladendorf said.

Since Suros’ case was not viewed as threatening to the community and because the attorney general’s office has been swamped by its backlog of cases, officials were not able to act earlier on it.

“We had a tremendous backlog of cases and were occupied primarily with the major cases involving sexual abuse or quality of care--they take the first priority with our office,” Ladendorf said. “Slowly but surely we are getting our backlog down.”

Suros, who also uses the name Juan XII, Count of Besalu, was unavailable for comment.

On April 15, 1989, when Suros was arrested, his case rocked the local community. At that time, Suros, a member of the American Numismatic Society, was seized by detectives at the Harvard Club in Manhattan. They searched his briefcase and found 13 stolen coins.

When San Diego police searched Suros’ Coronado home, they seized his private collection of about 2,000 coins. Among those, they found an additional 57 stolen coins.

As a member and frequent donor to the coin society, Suros was allowed to handle the group’s coin trays. Curators, however, began to notice that coins mysteriously disappeared after Suros’ visits.

Suros told New York detectives, according to officials, that he took the coins “because he loved handling them so much he just had to have them.”