‘Slimy’ Shel biz
Nurse: Doc hustled cancer patients for Silver
IT WAS “SLIMY” for a Columbia Medical School doctor to refer his dying cancer patients to former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s law firm, the doctor’s former nurse testified Wednesday at Silver’s corruption trial.
Mary Hesdorffer — who worked with patients in Dr. Robert Taub’s clinical research projects — said one day in 2003, she saw Taub put his arm around cancer patient Catherine O’Leary’s shoulder and ask, “Do you have a lawyer?”
O’Leary already had a personal injury lawyer, according to other evidence in the case. But Taub told O’Leary that her lawyer was “no good,” and suggested he refer her case to Silver, one of he state’s most powerful politicians and a lawyer at Weitz & Luxenberg, which represents people with cancer caused by asbestos.
Hesdorffer said she didn’t see the entire interchange betwen Taub and O’Leary, and was unaware of Taub’s relationship with Silver. But she was furious nonetheless.
“It was a turning point — it was something different,” Hesdorffer testified in Manhattan Federal Court. It was especially surprising, she said, because they worked for a prominent academic institution with high ethical standards.
“I told him it was slimy, it was unbecoming to do. I wanted nothing to do with it,” Hesdorffer said.
She said Taub responded to her in the “usual fashion” of some of their discussions — by “calling me a school teacher, a nun — I was too rigid.”
O’Leary, a New Jersey resident who died in 2006, suffered from mesothelioma, a deadly cancer caused by asbestos exposure. She was the first case Taub referred to Silver and Weitz & Luxenberg.
Over time, Weitz & Luxenberg paid Silver $55,300 as a referral fee, records show. In the decade before Silver’s arrest in 2015, Weitz & Luxenberg paid him $3.3 million for giving its lawyers the names of Taub’s mesothelioma patients, prosecutors say.
Silver (photo) allegedly repaid Taub by steering $500,000 in state taxpayer money to the doctor’s research lab.
Hesdorffer — who did not take the stand at Silver’s first trial — is now executive director of the Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation, which funds research into the disease.
She testified that her foundation over the years rejected all of Taub’s requests for research money.
But Taub got money by referring patients to law firms. An Illinois law firm, Simmons Hanly Conroy, gave him more than $3 million for research, records show.
Hesdorffer and Taub often discussed the ethics of his efforts to get research money from law firms by referring patients to them. “I told him they would take him out (of his clincs) in handcuffs,” she said.
After Silver’s arrest in January 2015, Columbia moved quickly to fire Taub. He ultimately lost his legal fight to keep his job, and is now retired.
Silver’s November 2015 conviction on fraud, extortion and money laundering charges was overturned on appeal. His second trial is proceeding rapidly, and prosecutors say they may rest their case next week.