Michelle Kramer was having the 30th birthday of her dreams— until her life fell apart.
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The Chicago resident was celebrating the milestone in September 2004 on the Greek island of Mykonos with her husband Mark Weinberger when he suddenly disappeared from their yacht.
Weinberger— a popular ear, nose and throat doctor with a thriving sinus surgery center— would never return to the boat. But his mysterious disappearance would ultimately lead Kramer on a years-long quest to discover the truth about the man she thought she loved, according to the“A Wanted Man" episode ofDateline: Secrets Uncovered.
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Who is Mark Weinberger?
Kramer met the dashing doctor, who was 11 years her senior, in 2000 while living in Chicago. "The first date, I drove into the city, he had a bottle of champagne and a candle that was scented like champagne, and you know, I just remember being awestruck by all of this,” Kramer told Dateline.
Weinberger quickly swept the psychology student off her feet. Months later, during a romantic trip to Rome, Weinberger proposed in what Kramer would later describe as a “moment in time that felt perfect.”
The couple tied the knot in 2001 in a series of lavish ceremonies extending from Chicago to Italy. “He liked to do everything in a very grand style,” Kramer recalled.
The life that followed was filled with memorable vacations, expensive gifts, the couple's own plane, a yacht, and hired chauffeurs, maids, boat captains and more ready to meet their every need.
Weinberger — who’d received his medical degree from The University of California, Los Angeles— was able to afford the extravagant lifestyle due to the success of his Merrillville, Indiana sinus clinic, where he typically conducted between 15 and 22 surgeries a week, a staggering number for most surgeons.
Michelle Kramer. Photo: Oxygen
When did Mark Weinberger disappear?
In September of 2004, three years into their marriage, Weinberger whisked his wife away on a lavish trip to celebrate her 30th birthday. They'd planned to take their 80-foot yacht sailing around the islands of Greece.
Kramer told Dateline: “He said, ‘You’re going to have this huge birthday surprise and it’s going to be bigger than... what the stars have. You’re not going to be able to even comprehend what the surprise is.'"
But the surprise — while shocking — turned out to be nothing Kramer would ever want. After enjoying their first night out at a restaurant in Mykonos, she woke up the next morning to find that her husband had suddenly vanished.
At first, she believed he was just out shopping for a last-minute birthday gift, until hours went by without any sign of him. By then, Kramer was terrified her wealthy husband may have been the target of kidnappers or met with foul play.
But when night came, she got a knock on her door from the boat’s captain.
“He says, ‘It’s already dark out, Mark is not coming back, he’s never coming back,’” Kramer told Dateline.
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The worried captain found a taxi driver who insisted that he'd taken the doctor to the airport hours earlier to catch a private jet to some unknown location. Weinberger left his wife on the boat with only her passport and 2,000 euros to help her get home.
“I was brought to my knees by this whole situation,” Kramer said.
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Why did Mark Weinberger go on the run?
A stunned Kramer made her way back to Chicago alone, where she discovered some devastating secrets about her husband's medical practice. At the time of his disappearance,Weinberger was facing a slew of civil lawsuits on behalf of patients, including one brought by the family of Phyllis Barnes.
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Phyllis went to the doctor in 2001 after experiencing difficulty breathing and a hoarse voice. Weinberger told the mom of one that she needed sinus surgery and performed it just weeks later, but her symptoms never improved. When Phyllis relayed this to Weinberger, he told her it would just take time to feel better.
But months later, Phyllis, a regular smoker, went to Dr. Dennis Han, another ear, nose and throat specialist, who quickly diagnosed the problem. Phyllis was suffering from Stage 4 larynx cancer and had two masses on the side of her neck, visible to the naked eye.
“Her cancer would have been obvious to a first-year medical student, so there was no way, unless he had extreme blinders on or didn’t care, that he couldn’t have realized that she had throat cancer,” Han told Dateline.
The late diagnosis delayed her treatment and Phyllis died in 2004, leaving behind her teenage daughter Shawn.
“I don’t think she blamed Dr. Weinberger for her having developed cancer. What Weinberger was responsible for was not catching it and not treating it in a way that would have preserved the quality of her life,” Ken Allen,who represented Phyllis' family in a medical malpractice lawsuit, told Dateline.
Peggy Hood, left, sister of the deceased Phyllis Barnes, discusses the case of Dr. Mark Weinberger as Attorney Kenneth J. Allen, right, listens during a press conference in Valparaiso, Ind., on Thursday, Dec. 17, 2009. Photo: John Smierciak/AP
Phyllis' story was similar to that of Kayla Thomas. Kayla’s mom, Valerie Thomas, took her eight-year-old daughter to see Weinberger after she was experiencing debilitating headaches and nausea.
“She would just cry and say, ‘My head hurts, mommy, my head hurts,’ and she would hold her head,” Valerie told Dateline.
Weinberger told Valerie that Kayla needed emergency sinus surgery and just four days later, he performed the surgery in his state-of-the-art facility. But, like Phyllis, Kayla's symptoms didn’t go away and other doctors would eventually diagnose her with a non-cancerous brain tumor, according to WMAQ, a Chicago-based NBC-owned TV station.
After Kayla’s needless sinus surgery, the child developed scar tissue that prevented doctors from being able to remove the full tumor and she spent years struggling with medical complications.
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When Weinberger left his wife, he also left his practice and nearly a dozen employees behind. Bob Handler, a turnaround specialist called in by a bank to try to save the fledgling practice, learned that in 2003 alone, Weinberger had billed $13 million to insurance companies, an amount far greater than what was normal for a solo practitioner.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Indiana opened a criminal fraud investigation and determined that Weinberger had been billing for procedures he never performed. In 2006, a grand jury indicted him on 22 counts of healthcare fraud and a warrant was issued for his arrest, but Weinberger remained missing. The state also revoked his medical license.
How Mark Weinberger was caught
After discovering his dark secrets, Kramer was determined to bring her now-ex husband to justice and began sharing her story with national television programs, including Dateline. In 2008, she filmed a segment for America’s Most Wanted, but initially nothing came of the appearance.
Then, halfway around the world, Monica Specogna stumbled upon the segment online in 2009 after being warned by a friend about her new boyfriend.
Specogna had started seeing a man going by the name of Mark Stearn after meeting him while working at her parents' grocery store in Courmayeur, a quaint, storybook-like town nestled on the Italian side of the Alps.
She helped him improve his ski skills and the two formed a fast friendship, bonding over their shared love of music and sports. By February of 2009, the relationship had turned romantic.
The new mystery man inSpecogna's life told her he wanted to write a survival book and live in a tent for a year near Mont Blanc, a mountain range on the border of Italy and France. She often biked for hours to deliver him supplies in his remote mountain home.
“I was not thinking, ‘What are you doing Monica?’ It was just because of, yeah, love,” she said.
But after she discovered her boyfriend’s true identity and his status as a wanted man, Specogna was torn about what to do next.
“It was very difficult,” she recalled. “I was fighting with myself.”
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Ultimately, Specogna decided to go to the Carabinieri police in Italy and share what she knew. A specialized team was convened to track Weinberger down on the mountain. After finding his tent on December 15, 2009, they convinced him that they were looking for someone else on the mountain, but told him he’d have to come back to the station to sign some paperwork.
Once there, authorities got a formal arrest warrant from the FBI. But just as they were about to put him in handcuffs, Weinberger asked to use the restroom and slit his throat with a knife. He was taken to a local hospital and treated for the wound before he was extradited back to the United States two months later.
“I started crying," Kramer recalled of hearing of Weinberger's arrest. “It was tears of just joy and feeling like, gosh, they finally caught this person.”
By then, Weinberger was facing hundreds of civil lawsuits and 22 federal charges of healthcare fraud.
He pleaded guilty in 2012 to the federal charges against him and was sentenced to seven years. A massive $55 million settlement was reached in the more than 280 lawsuits filed against him through the Indiana Patient's Compensation Fund. The civil suit brought by Phyllis Barnes' family would end in a $13 million judgment for the patient's daughter, Shawn, but a state law at the time capped medical malpractice awards at $1.25 million.
Allen was able to help Shawn settle for an undisclosed but larger amount through the state’s patient's compensation fund.
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Where is Mark Weinberger today?
Weinberger was released to a Florida halfway house in 2014 after serving less than five years behind bars. Dateline learned he has since dabbled in cryptocurrency, started a marketing business and— at least for a time — was promoting himself online as a “yoga doc,” promising to help people get in shape through his personalized yoga program.
“That’s horrifying, like it’s straight up horrifying,” Shawn said of Weinberger's more recent career endeavors.
According to Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, Weinberger is remarried and living in Florida with his family.
As for Kramer, she went on to get her doctorate in psychology and now works as a psychologist at a major hospital.
