Stars’ Doctor Profited on Weakness, Records Show

When the California Medical Board revoked Dr. Jules Lusman’s physician’s license earlier this month, he was widely identified as a doctor who catered to celebrities, prescribing drugs to Winona Ryder and other members of the Hollywood elite.

Catering to the needs of stars with an appetite for narcotics, however, was only part of Lusman’s practice. An examination of Medical Board and court records provides a picture of a doctor who also prospered from the weaknesses of the less glamorous -- patients who were mentally unstable, chronically ill or merely frail. He solicited patients through ads in the Yellow Pages and fliers at Westside hotels and took financial advantage of them where he could, the records indicate.

There was, for example, the well-to-do Demerol addict who couldn’t find his Rolex watch. At first, the patient figured the cleaning lady must have put it away. A short time later, though, he found the expensive timepiece in an unexpected place: wrapped around Lusman’s wrist.

When he accused Lusman of stealing the watch, the doctor presented him with a bill of sale, the patient told a Medical Board investigator. The addict concluded that he must have turned over the watch while in a narcotic haze.

Medical Board files show Lusman, 49, practiced largely outside the realm of hospitals, where his habits might have come to the attention of authorities sooner through routine peer reviews. He was a general practitioner who made house and hotel calls. He also ran a hair transplant business out of his Wilshire Boulevard office in Santa Monica, and performed laser skin resurfacing procedures.

The man with the Rolex, identified in Medical Board records as a patient in his 30s with the initials R.V., said he found Lusman in a Yellow Pages ad that offered house calls. An hour after he called, R.V. told Medical Board investigators, Lusman was at his Westside apartment, injecting him with Demerol to relieve a migraine headache.

Lusman began coming to his apartment two to five times a week, injecting R.V. with Demerol and leaving him pre-filled syringes so that he could later inject himself, the patient told investigators.

“He said that Lusman began calling him to say that he was in the area and that he had some ‘medicine,’ ” a Medical Board investigator related. In a period of a week, Lusman sold R.V. approximately 25 pre-filled Demerol syringes, the patient told investigators. Over two months, Lusman charged him about $20,000 for Demerol injections, R.V. said.

Another patient -- a mentally unstable man who later committed suicide -- sued Lusman, saying he was swindled out of $20,000 and a piece of art. The case was settled.

In another case, Lusman borrowed $164,000 from a patient, the Medical Board charged. Lusman allegedly began asking still another patient to co-sign his mortgage after injecting her with Demerol.

A state administrative law judge condemned Lusman this fall for his medical practices, saying that the doctor “routinely resorted to narcotics as his answer to complaints of pain ... while charging hundreds or even thousands of dollars for consultations.” The judge, Joseph D. Montoya, recommended that Lusman’s license to practice medicine be revoked, and the California Medical Board did just that.

‘More of a Car Salesman’

Lusman was “more of a car salesman than a doctor,” said a former employee. “A drug pusher with a medical license,” said the Medical Board’s chief of enforcement. “A predator,” said a lawyer for one of Lusman’s patients.

Lusman, who returned earlier this month to his native South Africa, has asked the courts to set aside the Medical Board ruling. He has said he merely tried to help patients in pain.

The doctor also noted that no testimony was presented at his disciplinary hearing about many of the financial irregularities the Medical Board alleged. The hearing instead focused on Lusman’s patient records, which showed a pattern of prescribing narcotics, often without adequate patient histories or examinations, and without trying other treatments first, the judge found.

Lusman represented himself at the hearings and did not testify, asserting his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. But he was loquacious in an interview with a Times reporter while the hearings were underway early this year.

In the interview, he offered a spirited defense of his narcotic treatments: “Some doctors don’t have any experience with narcotics, so they don’t feel comfortable administering them,” Lusman said. “I am quite experienced. I’ve had a lot of anesthesia training. So I am very comfortable with narcotics. I’ve treated pain. I try other treatments, but when you are dealing with intractable pain, you are dealing with patients who have tried everything and nothing works. The accusations made against me were all fabricated.”

Lusman’s former administrative assistant, Sadie Batres, said in an interview that Lusman sometimes acted like a salesman: A patient would come in with a cold and Lusman would point out a facial blemish, using the opportunity to sell a laser treatment. But Batres said the biggest part of his practice was dispensing drugs.

Lusman marketed himself by distributing brochures to concierges at Westside hotels, Batres said, and got regular referrals to guests wanting medical attention. He saw far more patients outside of his office than in it, she said.

Batres said in a sworn statement to the Medical Board that Lusman had “violent mood swings.” She said he frequently yelled at her and behaved oddly, signing her name to his own business correspondence and once crashing through a parking lot gate when he did not have enough cash to pay an attendant.

Lusman also had problems paying his bills. A review of civil court files revealed that he was sued more than a dozen times over the last decade, often by business associates alleging failures to pay his debts on time -- or at all.

“He was a strange guy,” said Stuart Schneider, a lawyer representing office-building owners whom Lusman owed $10,000 in back rent. “He gave me the impression that even though he owed my client a substantial sum of money, that we should be doing him a favor by allowing him to stay in the suite.”

One of the first complaints the Medical Board received about Lusman involved a frail Pacific Palisades woman in her mid-30s. The patient had a host of medical and psychiatric problems, including chronic migraine headaches that sometimes left her confined to bed in a dark room for days.

Records show that the woman, identified as S.O. in Medical Board files, had tried Demerol and barbiturates before and gotten hooked. The drugs had aggravated her headaches, and she had gone though withdrawal from the drugs at a hospital. Her headaches lessened.

But one day in July 1996, S.O. had a panic attack. Unable to reach her own doctors, she picked up the phone book and found Lusman’s ad.

He showed up promptly and began seeing her almost daily. He gave her Demerol, leaving filled syringes so that she could inject herself. While she was under the influence, the Medical Board charged, Lusman tried to get her to co-sign for his mortgage and introduce him to her husband, with whom he allegedly hoped to develop a business relationship. Eventually, the woman and her husband complained to the Medical Board. But a big fight ensued over access to her medical records.

Complaints Mount

Meanwhile, the patient with the Rolex misadventure complained, and so did an ailing 69-year-old man who met Lusman while staying at the Doubletree Hotel. The man, identified in records as R.H., had an oceanfront apartment in Santa Monica, but had checked into the hotel so he could get room service. Concerned about his blood pressure, he said in a court declaration, he called the concierge to recommend a doctor and “they sent over” Lusman. The doctor prescribed sleeping pills and blood pressure medication. He saw the man again the next day at the hotel. The following day, the man checked out, records show.

R.H. had previously been diagnosed as manic-depressive, but was not taking his prescription medication. He recalled being out of sorts. When Lusman visited him at his apartment the next day, the doctor took the opportunity to sort through R.H.’s financial papers, which had been spread on a bed.

“He said that I was going to be rich because I owned a lot of good stocks,” R.H. said in a court declaration. Lusman left, R.H. said, with a check for $20,000 that he promised to invest for R.H. and an expensive Japanese print that he said he would have appraised. Instead, the doctor put the print on consignment at an art gallery.

“Had my judgment not been impaired, I would never have agreed to write a complete stranger a $20,000 check or to let a complete stranger leave with my Japanese print,” R.H. said. R.H. was so unbalanced that he was found wandering the streets in a daze the next morning and taken to a psychiatric hospital. Lusman eventually returned the money and the print as part of the settlement of a lawsuit.

The final expansion of the Medical Board’s case against Lusman began in May 2001 with a complaint from a source regarding Lusman’s treatment of C.W., a woman in her early 50s who had a history of abusing heroin. Investigators obtained C.W.’s prescription records from about a dozen pharmacies near Lusman’s office. They learned that, over a five-year period, C.W. had received at least 240 prescriptions from Lusman. In one 13-month period alone, she received 157, according to Medical Board files.

The check of pharmacy records led authorities to search Lusman’s office and home. The search turned up evidence of Lusman’s connection to Ryder. In addition, scattered near his bed, investigators found “a number of spent syringes,” according to one source familiar with the investigation. In an interview with The Times earlier this year, Lusman said the syringes had been planted by investigators.

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Times staff writers Chuck Phillips, Kristina Sauerwein and special correspondent Anita M. Busch contributed to this report.