Dr. Joseph “Millionpills” Giacchino, the famed pain pill-dispensing doctor, could have walked straight out of an Elmore Leonard novel.
Not “Jackie Brown” exactly, or “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” but something with a Chicago attitude, set in the Viagra Triangle off Rush Street, and in Melrose Park, where Giacchino has an office, and later a movie with characters played by old school actors like Joe Pesci and Samuel L. Jackson.
There’s Dr. Millionpills is his mid-60s, with that crazy earring and the tats and the colorful neon sports coats. And there’s that hot-tempered trophy wife about half his age, the former Playboy centerfold Maria Luisa Gil, who’d formerly been married to the Cuban cocaine lord now doing life in federal prison.
And there’s the mansion in River Forest, the condos in River North and Vegas, the Newport Beach vacation home, the Bentley, the Mercedes, other toys.
But this is a newspaper column, not a novel, and last summer, Maria Luisa was dressed in black, in a court hearing in the State of Illinois Building, a hearing that would determine her husband’s professional future.
A bureaucrat at the hearing didn’t like how Maria Luisa would mock witnesses who claimed her husband traded sex for drugs. The bureaucrat asked if Maria Luisa had been in a courtroom before.
So Maria Luisa explained things to the bureaucrat.
“I can laugh whenever I want to,” declared Maria Luisa, with a toss of her head. “If you don’t like it, you can leave yourself.”
But now, her husband is no longer Dr. Millionpills. He might even have to change his name to Mr. Pills or just plain Joe.
Because in an order released Wednesday, the state stripped Giacchino of his medical licenses. He’d been accused of bartering sex for narcotics and overprescribing heavy-duty painkillers, including OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax, to a number of addicts.
Some of you may remember the columns on the hearings, the matter-of-fact negotiations with female drug addicts, Giacchino’s denial of the allegations and the government recordings of conversations.
“We sought the most severe sanction we could take,” said Sue Hofer, spokeswoman for the state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. “And his license was revoked. … The public is protected.”
Perhaps the public is protected now.
But Wednesday’s action is not the first time Giacchino has been barred from practicing medicine or dispensing script for narcotics.
Back in 1987, state records show, his physician’s and surgeon’s licenses were suspended for “dispensing controlled substances for nontherapeutic purposes.” And his license to dispense controlled substances was suspended as well.
Then Giacchino was placed under a five-year probation, allowed to practice medicine. But he violated terms of the agreement. He failed to complete a medical competency exam as required.
Amazingly, the state extended his probation. And his controlled-substance license — the license that helped give him his nickname — was restored.
This time, I’m told, things are different.
Now there is a new medical licensing board and director. And back then, Giacchino was practicing a different kind of medicine, general surgery and kidney transplants.
“We’re more aggressive in taking emergency action such as we did with Giacchino, when we believe there’s a public threat or the health and safety of patients is in danger,” Hofer said.
He’ll have to wait three years before he can petition the state to have his licenses returned to him. By some measurements, that’s at least 3 million pills worth of time.
I call him Dr. Millionpills for a very simple reason. An agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said so.
“I believe, he was ordering, in a one-year-period, in excess of 1 million pills,” testified Mark Warpness, special agent for the DEA, in one of the state hearings last year.
The DEA said that made him one of the top pain killer dispensers in the country, if not the top dog himself. The DEA picked up Giacchino’s trail a few years ago, began an investigation, wiretapped Giacchino and followed the addicts.
The DEA turned it all over to state regulators, who brought the charges against him. We’ve been at some of the hearings, and those I’ve seen were wrenching.
The women, haggard and gnawed at by their addictions, weeping, offered up accounts of what happened inside the examining room. If you’d been there, it would have turned your stomach.
“I don’t think he’s an angel, nobody’s an angel, but I don’t think he engaged in that kind of conduct,” Giacchino’s former lawyer, James Macchitelli, told me Wednesday. “The administrative law judge determined that every witnesses’ testimony was credible, and that’s how she made her finding.”
Mr. Pills and Maria Luisa don’t like me much. So I asked Shooter — the young reporter and mother-to-be who helps me with the column — to give them a call.
“Somebody told you something wrong,” Maria Luisa told Shooter. Maria Luisa laughed and said Shooter must not know anything and told her to call the state to get the real story.
Then Maria Luisa asked whom Shooter worked with. Shooter replied that she worked with John Kass.
“Ugh,” said Maria Luisa, hanging up. “I hate that guy. Goodbye.”
Goodbye, Maria Luisa. But remember.
You can laugh whenever you want to.
