BRIAN TAYLOR
Botched abortions, Viagra prescriptions, fast-food extortion, and steroid trafficking: the illustrious career of Dr. Howard Levine.
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Back in the 1960s, as he put himself through college by playing piano in New York nightclubs, Howard Levine's life was a Gershwin tune. By 2007, it had become a Warren Zevon song: Send lawyers, guns, and money. The shit has hit the fan.
Not that you couldn't have predicted it. The onetime abortion doctor became the Internet's Dr. Viagra, then attempted to extort a half-million dollars from Jack in the Box, and moved on to selling steroids to gay clients at his neighborhood coffee shop.
"If you are available tomorrow (Monday) evening after 5:30," typed one of Levine's Seattle e-mail customers last year, "then we can meet at the regular Starbucks. I can have the cash in an envelope if that works."
Levine's Washington state medical license, which he has held since 1982, has been suspended three times and reinstated twice in the last eight years; among other complaints, some patients said his doubtful surgical skills sent them hurrying to the emergency room for repairs. Yet, with revocation considered something of an electric chair reserved for supremely heinous doctoring, the medical disciplinary commission has yet to pull his physician's license.
But don't call Levine in the morning: The short, bulky, and graying doctor is literally not free to practice at the moment. In February, Levine appeared briefly in handcuffs before Judge James Robart in Seattle's Federal Courthouse, where he was sentenced to prison for almost two years.
Levine had pleaded guilty to a single count of illegal steroid trafficking, one of thousands of mostly Internet-based steroid sales he made to customers across the United States since at least 2004, prosecutors say, including some to undercover bodybuilders from the Drug Enforcement Agency. During that time, the medical watchdogs hadn't been barking, and the feds were especially patient, buying drugs from him for almost two years. Their nearly $7,000 in undercover purchases over 22 months likely helped Levine stay in business until August 2006, when a SWAT team arrived at his Seattle home.
There he was arrested and forced to close his Capitol Hill office—but not indicted. That wouldn't happen until June 2007. In the meantime, as a licensed physician, Levine continued to traffic in steroids and other drugs from his house on a tree-lined street near Seattle University. He was also apparently cooperating with the feds to build a case against his suppliers, and in court records said he had an "agreement" with the DEA to keep his license. Officials at the state Medical Quality Assurance Commission in Olympia say they were aware of the investigation, but didn't suspend Levine's license until he was indicted in June 2007.
It appears no one thought Howard Levine, whether at his office or at home, was much of a threat to society. But when it came time to sentence him this year, federal prosecutors, in court papers, complained he had "no regard for the health of his customers" and had to be locked up immediately to "at least protect the public during the period he is incarcerated."
The DEA doesn't want to talk about the case, while the U.S. Attorney's office claims Levine was an incidental combatant in the war on drugs. "His case was part of a national effort," says prosecutors' spokesperson Emily Langlie. "And as often happens, in order to protect a larger case, you sometimes have to not move in on an individual target as quickly as you might otherwise....It's always a balancing act."
In the end, it appears Levine effectively blew the whistle on himself. That happened last June 17, Shit-Meets-the-Fan Day (also Father's Day), when Levine's 20-year-old son called police to the doctor's drug-strewn house on 14th Avenue, where the 58-year-old Levine was threatening suicide. Officers restrained him, and would later report that when asked how he might kill himself, Levine told them, "I have the means." Indeed, a police inventory turned up thousands of pills and drug vials around the house. He wound up in a mental ward, committed for 14 days at Harborview Medical Center. At the hospital, a toxicology screen showed he'd shot meth and swallowed uppers and downers.
At that point, he'd lost his practice, possibly his mind, likely his freedom, and maybe his house (subject to drug-seizure laws). It began to look like the doctor wasn't much better at crime than he was at medicine.
Levine clearly wasn't putting up much of a front. "Howard did not try to become wealthy from what he was doing," says a friend, Michael J. Hobbs. "Honestly, would a drug kingpin be driving a 1990 Volvo?"
And do real doctors keep a pool table and booze in the exam room?
"I have always found him to be a man of integrity in his dealings with other people," says ex-patient Fred Bard. "Just because he made some judgmental errors, I will not stop being his friend, and I try to support him emotionally at a very bad time in his life."
But, Bard adds, after three decades as a doctor and drug dealer, Howard Levine is finally washed up. Not that he couldn't go to prison and start over. He's donethat before.
His friends could almost see the crash coming, and the doctor might have seen it too but for the haze in which he practiced medicine—induced by pills, powder, needles, alcohol, and severe mood swings. Brooklyn-born, Levine earned a B.A. in biology in 1969 at Queens College, paying his way as a pop pianist at some of Manhattan's top clubs. He completed study at New York Medical College in Valhalla and was first licensed in 1979, practicing in New York and California before opening the Women's Health Care Center in Seattle in the early '80s.
