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document by deception”—fraudulent billing—and paid penalties of $25,599. He sold his mansion in Shadyside and moved back into the smaller mansion in River Oaks, where he still officially resides and where he was served with litigation papers as recently as April. According to Harris County records, he still faces roughly twenty malpractice suits, all filed since 2000. Though he was recently investigated by the FBI for workers’ comp fraud, the agency says that that investigation is now complete. It produced no indictments. In its 2004 complaint, the state medical board also charged Scheffey with practicing medicine with a suspended license, a third-degree felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. According to the complaint, Scheffey had continued to practice medicine even after his 2003 suspension, using his partner Dr. Floyd Hardimon as a front. When the board temporarily suspended Hardimon’s license later in 2003, it did so in part because it found that Hardimon “associated with and aided and abetted [Scheffey] in the practice of medicine after [Scheffey’s] medical license had been suspended.”

In the absence of any criminal charges, Scheffey is, remarkably, free to do everything but practice as a doctor. There is little doubt that he has an enormous amount of money. The talk among the Scheffeys’ old social crowd in River Oaks is that Eric and Kendall have purchased a home in Geneva, Switzerland, where they have moved with their two children. “One day Kendall called me and said, ‘We are moving to Geneva. Here is my number. Please call,’” says one friend who asked not to be identified. “She said, ‘People are so mean-spirited. We are sorry we are leaving on such a negative and sour note.’” But very likely not as sorry as patients like Mary Garcia and Ed Gonzalez. Indeed, one of Scheffey’s hallmarks is his ability to move blithely through his life, as though there were not an enormous trail of human wreckage behind him. And he feels no apparent need to hide or disappear into anonymity. Friends say that he and Kendall rented a big house for the summer in one of the richest and most celebrity-filled resort towns in America: Aspen, Colorado.

S. C. GWYNNE joined Texas Monthly as an executive editor in June of 2000. Prior to that, he was Austin bureau chief for Time magazine, responsible for its coverage of Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and the Mexico border. He moved to Austin in 1994 from Time’s headquarters in New York where he was a senior editor in charge of the business section. He first joined Time in 1988 as a correspondent in the Los Angeles bureau covering California and the western states. He was later Detroit bureau chief and national economics correspondent in Time’s Washington, D.C., bureau. Gwynne was co-author of Time’s first cover story on George W. Bush. Subjects of his Texas Monthly stories include Tom Craddick, Karl Rove, terrorism in Houston, and Big Bend. Gwynne is a 1974 graduate of Princeton University and received a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1977.

Coda

The idea for “Dr. Evil” came out of a short article in the Houston Chronicle that was based on the news that Scheffey’s medical license had been revoked. The reporter recapped the essentials of Scheffey’s career—the lawsuits, the huge settlements. I had never heard of Scheffey before, but I was amazed that he had been able to continue to practice in spite of the huge number of complaints, lawsuits, and patient deaths. The $845,000 fine was impressive but it begged the question: Why hadn’t the state medical board gotten rid of him years before?

Six months of reporting later, I finally had the full answer to that question. Why six months? Mainly because of the volume of legal material that I had to wade through. I have done a lot of investigative stories in my career but none that required as much slogging through depositions, court transcripts, pleadings, summary judgments, administrative law proceedings, and medical records. Scheffey was a monster of litigation. He sued everyone and was sued by everyone. The good part about