The Bargain Basement

Anthony Pignataro ran a cosmetic surgery practice out of the basement of a former dental office in West Seneca, New York, outside Buffalo. He advertised bargain breast augmentations and drove a red Lamborghini. He was not a board-certified plastic surgeon, he employed no anesthesiologist, and his makeshift operating room had no ventilator. In June 1997 a patient named Terri LaMarti nearly bled to death after surgery there.

On August 25, 1997, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Smith, a mother of two, stopped breathing on his table after he gave her heavy doses of anesthetic drugs. He tried to force an airway open with a bent wire coat hanger. She went into cardiac arrest and died at a hospital on September 1, 1997, of asphyxiation caused by improper ventilation. Pignataro pleaded guilty in June 1998 to criminally negligent homicide, drew six months in jail, a fine and probation, and lost his medical license for good.

He was out by December 1998. The next spring his wife, Deborah, began losing feeling in her hands and feet; testing found the highest arsenic level New York State had ever recorded in a living patient. He pleaded guilty in November 2000 to first-degree assault for poisoning her and was sentenced to fifteen years. Released in December 2013, he legally changed his name to Anthony Haute in 2016.