USA Africa Dialogue Series - “Macchiarini is the extreme form of a con man. He’s clearly bright and has accomplishments, but he can’t contain himself."

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/celebrity-surgeon-nbc-news-producer-scam

The Celebrity Surgeon Who Used Love, Money, and the Pope to Scam an NBC News Producer

"To understand why someone of considerable stature could construct such elaborate tales and how he could seemingly make others believe them, I turned to Dr. Ronald Schouten, a Harvard professor who directs the Law and Psychiatry Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. "We're taught from an early age that when something is too good to be true, it's not true," he said. "And yet we ignore the signals. People's critical judgment gets suspended. In this case, that happened at both the personal and institutional level." Though he will not diagnose from a distance, Schouten, who is one of the nation's foremost authorities on psychopathy, observed, "Macchiarini is the extreme form of a con man. He's clearly bright and has accomplishments, but he can't contain himself. There's a void in his personality that he seems to want to fill by conning more and more people." When I asked how Macchiarini stacks up to, say, Bernie Madoff, he laughed and said, "Madoff was an ordinary con man with a Ponzi scheme. He never claimed to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve. He didn't suggest he was part of a secret international society of bankers. This guy is really good."

"Macchiarini, 57, is a magnet for superlatives. He is commonly referred to as "world-renowned" and a "super-surgeon." He is credited with medical miracles, including the world's first synthetic organ transplant, which involved fashioning a trachea, or windpipe, out of plastic and then coating it with a patient's own stem cells. That feat, in 2011, appeared to solve two of medicine's more intractable problems—organ rejection and the lack of donor organs—and brought with it major media exposure for Macchiarini and his employer, Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, home of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Macchiarini was now planning another first: a synthetic-trachea transplant on a child, a two-year-old Korean-Canadian girl named Hannah Warren, who had spent her entire life in a Seoul hospital.

In July 2015, Alexander commemorated what should have been her wedding day by flying to Barcelona, where, along with two close friends, she went in search of Macchiarini's residence—and answers. In all her travels with Macchiarini, she had never been to his Barcelona home."There was a lot of nervous energy in the car," Leigh McKenzie, an Australian friend, explained. "We tried to keep it buoyant and convert that nervous energy into humor. But finally the nerves crept in and so we stopped at a supermarket and drank some cheap wine. And none of us drink in the morning." With Alexander wearing a blond wig as a disguise, they set out in search of the house where she had thought she would be starting a new life.

When they arrived at an affluent community in the hills above the city, McKenzie and their other friend, Nancy Cumba-Johnson, left Alexander behind in the car, walked to the gated home, and rang the bell. "There was one of those speakers with a camera," Cumba-Johnson recalled. A woman answered, which took the two friends by surprise. She spoke Spanish. "I spoke Spanish back and asked if Dr. Macchiarini was home," Cumba-Johnson said. "He came to the front door with his dog." Macchiarini evidently recognized Cumba-Johnson, whom he had met over dinner in New York, and moved the conversation out onto the street. That is when a woman came down the steps with two young children.

Alexander's two friends continued to chat with Macchiarini out in the street. They did not ask him about the woman and children. Both of them were struck by the fact that he could not meet their gaze. "When he looked down, his eyeballs were moving superfast," Cumba-Johnson remembered. "He was like an embarrassed schoolboy who had been caught," McKenzie said. "He didn't make like he was in control of his own house. He could have invited us into the house. But he didn't do that." The women presented Macchiarini with a bottle of wine as a gift and told him they were sorry things with Alexander did not turn out as planned. They turned and walked away.

Alexander witnessed the whole encounter from the car. She noted that Macchiarini was wearing clothes that he had worn at her own house. As the two women turned their backs on the doctor and walked toward the car, she saw Macchiarini, seemingly in slow motion, unaware that he was being observed, cross the street with the bottle of wine. He tossed it into a trash can.

Alexander returned to New York to discover that A Leap of Faith had been nominated for an Emmy. "Of all of the things I've worked on that should have been nominated," she said in amazement, "it had to be this one. I wanted to vomit."

Dr. Macchiarini did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Read on: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/01/celebrity-surgeon-nbc-news-producer-scam

Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives. 

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