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What Went Wrong?
The son of a prominent Boston doctor, David Arndt was on his way to becoming a
leading surgeon in his own right when a bizarre blunder interrupted his climb:
He left his patient on the operating table so he could cash his paycheck. A
series of arrests followed, exposing a life of arrogance, betrayal, and wasted
promise, leaving only one question left to answer:

By Neil Swidey, 3/21/2004

he kid was born into medicine. He was on track to becoming one of Boston's
next great spine surgeons, taking his place alongside his father among the
city's medical elite. But on this day in January, the 43-year-old sits on the
dark bench in the dimly lit gallery of Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge,
watching the parade of career criminals take their familiar positions, wearing
expressions of defiance or boredom. Look in his eyes, however, behind the boxy
glasses, and you can see flashes of bewilderment. How did I get here? He
watches as a paunchy guy charged with conspiring to kill a cop asks the court
officer if he can give the large, weeping woman in the front row "a kiss and
my lottery tickets" before being led away. And then the clerk calls out his
number: "Case number 38 - David Arndt."
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As the prosecutor and the defense lawyer take their positions before the
judge, Arndt advances to his designated spot in front of a tattered computer
printout that reads "DEFENDANT," stooping his 6-foot-2 frame a little so his
right hand can reach the railing. He is wearing a brown pin-striped suit. A
taupe trench coat hangs over his left arm.

His appearance has rebounded from the unshaven, sunken-eyed mess that was on
display in his mug shot last summer, though his physique is still a ways from
the chiseled, rippled showpiece it was before everything fell apart. The
pretrial hearing is over in just a few minutes, and he pulls his trench coat
close to his chest and exits the courtroom.

You follow him into the hallway and call to him, "Dr. Arndt."

The words stop him in his tracks. Dr. Arndt. For the better part of a decade,
that wasn't just his name, it was his identity. The domineering surgeon
cutting his path - loved by some, loathed by others. But respected. That
identity has been confiscated along with everything else he valued so much -
standing, status, power. Now he's just another David standing in a criminal
courtroom wondering what his future holds.

He turns to look when he hears the words. But he recognizes you, throws up his
hands to block his ears, shakes his head, and walks away. You suspect he'll
come back. When you'd met a week earlier, in another court, in another county,
he'd walked away then as well, at his lawyer's instruction, only to return and
demand that you hold off on writing about him. "To do otherwise," he told you
in his sonorous voice, "would be to engage in Murdoch-style journalism." You
found it surprising that this man, given what he so infamously did in his
operating room, not to mention what he's accused of doing in the weeks and
months that followed, would choose to deliver a lecture about professional
standards.

On this day in Cambridge he returns again, and the lecture is more expansive
and comes with a reading list. "Are you familiar with Janet Malcolm's piece in
The New Yorker entitled 'The Journalist and the Murderer'?" he asks. "It was
published in two parts. Do you know her work?"

You shake your head no.

"You should," he says.

You ask him how he came across the article.

"I read," he says, narrowing his eyes. "Didn't you take any journalism courses?"

That's when, for the first time, you begin to understand the experience many
of his former colleagues have described to you. Now you're the lowly scrub
nurse. Or even the seasoned superior whose competence is being so pointedly
challenged by Dr. David Arndt. And, just as they have explained it, he does it
in a way that suggests he has no choice but to do it, and that he is
confident, in the end, you will appreciate being made aware of just how far
you've fallen short of his expectations.

There's an intensity to David Arndt that never seems to slacken, a way in
which he seems both hyper-aware of his very public collapse and oblivious to
it. Overnight, the high-octane, Harvard-trained Arndt became the doctor who
left his patient on the operating table so he could go to the bank to cash a
check. In an instant, that summer of 2002, the news went national. But the
profound professional embarrassment would turn out to be only the beginning.
Within two months, Arndt would be charged with statutory child rape, indecent
assault, and drug possession. He would file a "poverty motion," the surgeon in
one of medicine's most lucrative specialties asking the court to pay his
costs. And then, in a separate case nearly a year later, he would face one
more charge, this one for possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute.

"His downfall is almost operatic in its tragedy," says Grant Colfax, a
Harvard-trained doctor who was once one of Arndt's closest friends.

As Arndt prepares to stand two separate criminal trials, Colfax is like many
of the people who knew him well and are now left scratching their heads. Their
emotions oscillate between two poles: There's the lingering disbelief that
such a brilliant and compassionate doctor - some say the most brilliant and
most compassionate they had ever known - could seem to self-destruct in such a
spectacularly public way. Then, perhaps more troubling, there's that voice
inside them, which had been muffled deep for so long, the one that kept
telling them it was only a matter of time before David Arndt's self-absorption
and sense of invincibility finally got the best of him.

avid Carl Arndt was born on October 10, 1960, in New Haven. Kenneth Arndt was
attending Yale medical school and living in student housing with his wife,
Anne. Many of the other med students weren't even married yet, never mind
parents. The couple's baby became an immediate attraction for Ken's
classmates. "From the time he was extremely small, David was a very bright
guy," says Jack Barchas, one of Ken's good friends at Yale and now chairman of
psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. "And he just radiated
happiness. We'd go over there for brunch - lox and bagels - and here was this
little kid, always interacting."

When David was almost 2, the Arndts packed up for Boston, so Ken could do his
residency in dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. They had another
child, a daughter. Ken would begin climbing the ranks of Boston medicine,
joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School and eventually becoming chief of
dermatology at Beth Israel Hospital. Years later, Anne, a psychologist, would
also join the Harvard Med faculty. Friends describe the couple as charming,
warm, stylish, and smart.

Growing up in Newton, David stood out. Extremely bright, no doubt about that.
Tall, too. Kathy Sias was his neighbor and one of his best friends. She ate
dinner with his family, accompanied them on ski trips to their place in New
Hampshire. Longhaired David was intense and intellectual but fun to be around.
What did they do together? "A lot of drugs," she says, chuckling. "Just about
everybody in our clique did during those days."

She and other friends say David, who attended Weeks Junior High School in
Newton and the private Cambridge School of Weston, was always pushing limits.
(He kept a boa constrictor as a pet, says Sias.) They also say Anne and Ken
seemed hipper and easier for teens to talk to than other parents in the
neighborhood. But Sias says that as she spent more time with the family, she
changed her mind. "They were as unclued-in to teenagers as most parents, but
they thought they were more clued in," she says. "His father was remote. His
mother thought she knew everything because she was