Prison Doesn’t Cure Man’s Need to Play Doctor

Gerald Barnes, serving a 12-year term for impersonating a doctor, was such a model inmate that he was given bus fare and allowed to travel unescorted from a federal corrections camp in Taft, Calif., to another minimum security facility in Marion, Ill.

Big mistake.

Barnes never showed up.

After a monthlong search, U.S. marshals tracked him down Wednesday in a North Hollywood medical clinic with a stethoscope draped around his neck, apparently up to his old tricks.

The 67-year-old Barnes, who was trained as a pharmacist, has been imprisoned four times since 1981 for masquerading as a medical doctor.

When last sentenced in 1996, a federal prosecutor described him as incorrigible.

“He’s been living a lie for 20 years,” the prosecutor told U.S. District Judge J. Spencer Letts in Los Angeles. “He’s a serious danger to the community. He’s a pathological liar. He’s someone who can’t stop himself.”

When taken into custody at the North Hollywood medical clinic, he was still going by the name of Gerald Barnes, the same name he lifted from a Northern California physician two decades earlier.

Barnes’ first conviction came in 1981, when he was sentenced to three years in state prison for involuntary manslaughter in the death of a diabetes patient whose condition he misdiagnosed while posing as a doctor at an Irvine clinic.

Released after 18 months behind bars, he resumed practicing medicine at clinics in East Los Angeles and West Covina. His cover was blown when a receptionist who had worked at the Irvine clinic recognized him and tipped off authorities.