And an Even Worse Husband
(“Bad Medicine,” Forensic Files)
The Forensic Files episode about Dr. Anthony Pignataro isn’t in heavy rotation on TV, so you may not have caught it multiple times.
But really, all one needs is a single viewing to remember it forever.
“Bad Medicine” tells of how a cosmetic surgeon accidentally kills a patient, then deliberately poisons his wife.
Overconfident. And here’s the part that’s pretty much impossible to forget.
Years before his crimes, Anthony Pignataro made a name for himself as the inventor of the snap-on toupee, which attaches to a man’s head via bolts surgically implanted in the skull.
Pignataro started losing his hair at age 23 and was his own first customer.
I’m not sure whether it was the hairpiece or not, but Pignataro thought an awful lot of himself. Once he opened his own plastic surgery facility, he didn’t see the need to hire an anesthesiologist or a qualified nurse to help him.
Those deficiencies eventually led to prison time and the loss of Pignataro’s livelihood. For this week’s post, I looked around to see what Pignataro, who was released in 2013, is doing today.
Summer love. But first, here’s a recap of the episode, along with other information culled from internet research as well as Ann Rule’s book about the case, Last Dance, Last Chance.
Deborah Rago, born in 1957, came from a financially strained family in Williamsville, New York.
In 1978, when Debbie was working as a pharmacy technician, she met Lehigh University student Anthony Pignataro, who Rule described as almost 6 feet tall with classic, balanced features.
One night, they fell in love on the dance floor to the Donna Summer hit “Last Dance.”
Anthony was the son of Ralph Pignataro, a respected surgeon in Buffalo, New York. He wanted to follow his father into the profession. The mainland U.S. medical schools Anthony applied to rejected him, so he enrolled at the San Juan Bautista School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.
None-too-impressive. Debbie waited for him to finish, and they finally married in 1985. Within the first year, a concerned party tipped her off that Anthony was cheating on her.
She took her father’s advice to “forgive once” and decided that Anthony deserved another chance.
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound
The professionals at the hospitals where the young surgeon worked, on the other hand, didn’t think the guy merited any chance as a physician.
They figured out pretty quickly that the arrogant doctor in their midst had some scary gaps in his knowledge.
But incompetent people rarely get kicked out of their fields right away.
Pignataro eventually opened his own plastic surgery practice in the Buffalo suburb of West Seneca, New York.
He made a fortune doing breast implants and other cosmetic procedures.
Moneybags. To widen his profit margin, Pignataro skimped on overhead costs. He hired a licensed practical nurse (instead of a registered nurse) and a high school student to assist him during procedures.
The Pignataros had a son and daughter by this time and lived in a big house in West Seneca. Anthony and his toupee cruised around in a red Lamborghini.
Meanwhile, he made some bad surgical mistakes. After performing an abdominoplasty on a patient named Teri LaMarti, he allegedly left her with open bleeding wounds, then yelled at her when she complained.
But back in those pre-Yelp days, word didn’t get around fast enough, and the practice continued to thrive until tragedy struck.
Utter fraud. In 1996, a 26-year-old mother of two from Depew, New York, stopped breathing during a breast augmentation operation. Pignataro’s facility didn’t have a ventilator, and Sarah Smith died.
The investigation that followed laid bare the incompetence of Anthony Pignataro for all the world to see.
It turned out that he wasn’t a board certified plastic surgeon or even a qualified plastic surgeon. He hadn’t administered Sarah Smith’s anesthetic properly. The New York state health board ended up charging him with 30 counts of professional misconduct.
Anthony pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide and received six months in jail, a $5,000 fine, and community service. He lost his medical license. Judge Ronald H. Tills noted that Pignataro would “never practice medicine again — anywhere in the world.”
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound
And there wasn’t any fancy legal footwork to delay jail time. The judge had Pignataro taken directly from the court room to a prison cell, while Debbie Pignataro “sobbed in the back row,” according to a 1998 AP story.
Loyal wife. After his release, Anthony had trouble finding another job, but Debbie stood by him. His well-to-do mother, Lena Pignataro, helped out the family financially.
Anthony had another affair, and Debbie took him back again.
But soon, emotional anguish was the least of her problems.
In 1999, Debbie started feeling ill with nausea and numbness of the limbs. She had severe pain elsewhere. The symptoms came and went. When they were bad, she had to stay in bed.
Debbie began having memory loss and needed to use a wheelchair at times.
Anthony told her the answer was to have her gall bladder removed, but her doctors vetoed that plan; they said surgery would kill her in her weakened state.
Finally, one of her doctors did a hair test and found Debbie had consumed 29,580 milligrams of arsenic.
Convoluted idea. Anthony suggested that the family of Sarah Smith, the patient who died, was poisoning Debbie to punish him. But the arsenic was traced to some ant insecticide the good doctor had purchased himself.
He was sneaking arsenic into his wife’s food, investigators determined.
The prosecution found evidence suggesting that Anthony hoped the arsenic poisoning would cause Debbie to die during surgery so that the medical establishment would see it was normal for operations to kill people sometimes — and he would thus be absolved for Sarah Smith’s death.
Anthony Pignataro ended up pleading guilty to charges related to the arsenic poisoning. Judge Mario J. Rossetti labeled the former surgeon’s life “a charade of misrepresentation,” called him self-centered and manipulative, and said he showed “disrespect for the value of human life.”
Rossetti gave him 15 years.
Despite his guilty plea, Anthony at various times claimed that Debbie Pignataro poisoned herself in a suicide bid, an idea ridiculed by Erie County District Attorney Frank Sedita.
Back at it. Debbie, who appeared on Forensic Files, remarked without bitterness that a) she would never harm herself and b) her ex-husband should be forced to ingest arsenic himself.
She has also stated that her former spouse will never take responsibility for attempting to kill her.
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound
But universal disdain and a second stint behind razor wire couldn’t crush Pignataro’s ego. Not long after his release in 2013, he returned to the Buffalo area, changed his name to Tony Haute, and opened a business called Tony Haute Cosmetique LLC.
The company sold a line of skin-care creams formulated from “one’s own DNA-derived plasma.” His website referred to him as a doctor.
Log off, dude. The Erie County District Attorney subsequently opened a criminal investigation into Pignataro’s new venture, and the ex-convict ended up taking down his website, according to a Buffalo station WKBW story by Charlie Specht in 2017.
Pignataro responded to WKBW’s report by stating that he changed his name in an effort to make a new start. He apologized to his ex-wife and the Smith family, although he didn’t make any specific admissions about his guilt. Pignataro also said that he works as a delivery driver.
I didn’t have any luck finding out how Debbie Pignataro is faring with the aftereffects of the poisoning today. I didn’t look too hard because she already cooperated with Forensic Files and Ann Rule and probably prefers privacy at this point.
The show stated that much of the damage to Debbie’s health is irreversible. On the bright side, the book said that she has found nice people to help her in her daily life.
Her former husband will probably reinvent himself as something or other, but let’s hope the only person he’ll ever incapacitate is himself.
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
Update: Pignataro’s e-tail skin care site was back up as of February 2018 and included an imitation version of the classic medical logo of two serpents wrapped around a staff. Thanks much to reader Sean K. for discovering it and sending the link.
Update to the update: The site was down again as of July 2018, but you can still see the content via a link to the archived site. Many thanks to reader LC for finding and sending it.
New update: Pignataro is now in Florida, advertising himself as a geriatric-care giver. Many thanks to reader Rosemarie for sending in the link.
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound
Thanks for the story, RR. He seems like the classic psychopath. One thing: I wonder if his wife had life insurance — a potential secondary motive for her murder? We see this so often on FF… I would hope his poor ex-wife would receive a proportion of any future earnings he has as compensation for her continuing suffering if that has not happened in some other form.
Life insurance would be a likely motive — the guy was struggling to find work, and I imagine his mother couldn’t go on supporting that family in their big house forever.
No surprise… Having done a bit of tinterneting since posting (having not seen the episode, and you don’t mention financial motive, so maybe FF didn’t) I found this:
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+disgraced+doctor.-a0284926115
Seems he’d insured the wife’s life for $300k. So two motives seem to have applied, the greater of which we can only speculate about. As said earlier, how many FF stories feature filthy lucre as a grimy motive! She deserves that sum and more for her pain and suffering.
Nice link and scoop about the insurance! I imagine he would have burned through that payout pretty quickly. I hope his wife is getting some financial help too. Maybe she got a cut of the Ann Rule book’s profits.
Wow! What a story and what a treatment by you! As far as incompetent people sticking around is concerned, it’s how I make my living!
Thanks for the kind words! And ditto — I stick around and keep a low profile.
Hmm, it feels like your site ate my first comment (it had been really long) so I figure I will just sum it up what I had composed and say, I am thoroughly enjoying your site. I as well am an aspiring site writer, but I am still new to the whole thing. Have you got some recommendations for website authors that are newbie? I would appreciate it.
Thanks for the kind words about the blog. Have you already started your own site? I was told the best way to attract search traffic is to write long and often and include links.
I agree with Jose. I am new to your site but I love it! Definitely one of my new favorites.
Thanks much, Chi — glad to have you as a reader!
With the Feb ’18 development, this man just can’t ‘cease and desist.’ If he’s at his old game again hopefully the law is on it… What a monster this creature is.
Like child molesters in the US, surely people such as him, pursuing any job that involves potential danger to others and who have significant criminal convictions, should be permanently monitored, with public access to a website detailing all names they have, relevant convictions, and what they aren’t permitted to do. Otherwise those who unwittingly use the ‘cosmetic’ or ‘medical’ services of people with his background would be horrified to discover his history.
The wife should be in prison too
His “assistant”
Listen to what she says on the forensic files
She says only Technically he wasn’t a cosmetic surgeon?
How it affected them all financially, nothing about the dead women or the other botched ” procedures”
No anesthesiologist
No proper equipment at all
Hundreds of victims
Wow
The death could have been avoided if the idiot had just done CPR. He had an LPN who would’ve been certified in it, so the 2 of them could have easily done it while awaiting the ambulance.
This made me curious as to how long people have done CPR and found this on Guinness Records site:
Two teams of two consisting of Ray Edensor and Emma Parker and Paul Gauntlett and Mark Brookes, from the Staffordshire Ambulance Service, completed a CPR marathon (cardiopulmonary resuscitation—15 compressions alternating with two breaths) of 151 hours at Asda Superstore, Stafford, UK from 19–25 January 2004.
Lissa: Hello. Do we know they didn’t try CPR? I’d have thought they would for obvious reasons, and if not this was grossly negligent… but then he *was* so negligent, and his behaviour since has demonstrated his total unfitness to be a doctor. You can’t, of course, suggest that the death could have been avoided as there’s no guarantee CPR would have been successful. In the UK (where I am) and the US, survival of in-hospital CPR such that the person lives to be discharged is c 25%; outside of hospital it’s much less, at c 10% – so the likelihood of someone surviving cardiac arrest with CPR is fairly small (but of course we should attempt it — especially medics! — because there’s some possibility that they’ll be saved).
You may be right that they did CPR. I should mention I have some knowledge based on being an RN with ER and ICU experience, as well as a former CPR instructor.
The doc was doing the procedure in his clinic so it’s hard to say exactly what equipment he had, but one fact I found out that’s not in the FF episode was that he was doing the breast augmentation via the umbilicus, which is a more invasive and therefore dangerous way to do it. In other words, he was pushing the implants up through the belly button, which should have been done in an OR and not as an outpatient. I also read that he couldn’t get into a US med school so he found one in Puerto Rico, and that some former coworkers stated he had “noticeable gaps in knowledge.”
It was stated that he “didn’t have a ventilator” when they talked about the patient dying, which is what made me wonder if they did CPR till the medics got there. Perhaps they did, and what happened was he ruptured a blood vessel on his way up her belly button and she bled to death.
He was convicted of homicide, and there’s obviously stuff left out so we don’t know all the errors he made.
Lissa: Thanks. It was enough for me – and I dare say all – that he was performing a major procedure (hardly removal of an ingrown toenail!) without an anaesthetist. I simply don’t understand how you’d risk the life of the patient and your future by doing something that is illegal and so obviously potentially dangerous, as you as a medic will know. I’m sure surgeons, with their team, always prepare for the worst – the ‘what if’ scenario – such as cardiac arrest, and know exactly what actions to take in those scenarios (not that the actions will always restore the patient).
Sad for the deceased, her family, and appalling of this creature.
The Wayback Machine archived a “Tony Haute Cosmetique” blog entry here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170205010008/http://tonyhautecosmetique.com/blog-three/
The infamy will live on — thanks for sending!
This is great website/blog.
Almost every thing I watch on TV, and most of what I read, is true crime.
Glad to hear it — true crime grabs my attention in a way that the fictionalized version doesn’t. Many thanks for the kind words about the website.
Evidently he moved to Florida and is ‘practicing’ again as Tony Haute.
Yikes — hope he doesn’t hurt anyone in the Sunshine State.
He has a profile on LinkedIn, but it looks like he tried to mark everything as “private.” I was able to find a small snippet on there, looks like a description of the Cosmetics business:
“Our guarantee is –and will always be- that all of our products are formulated to be natural and organic. As our product line expands we appreciate your business and will strive to provide the utmost in customer service. All of our products are…”
Here’s his LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-haute-a506abab/
Sarah Smith’s husband was an innocent individual and Anthony Pignataro tried to frame him for the poisoning of Debbie. He was also the one that spray painted the word “Killer” outside his own house and again he tried blaming it on Mr Smith. Pignataro is a totally selfish individual and he’s never expressed any remorse for his past crimes.
The damage that Debbie suffered from the poisoning had left her maimed for life.
I wanted to offer an update on this. Debbie Pignataro died. It was stated they are not sure it was from the poisoning but I am sure it had something to do with it. It seems she was healthy before all of this.
Thanks for the alert! All I could find was an obituary of a different woman who was related to the Pignataros. What was your source for the news on Debbie? (I’m really hoping she’s still alive!)