Daily News (New York)

November 19, 1996, Tuesday

SHRINK SUSPENDED AFTER FAKE-RX STING

BYLINE: By K.C. BAKER and KIMBERLY SCHAYE

SECTION: News; Pg. 55

LENGTH: 287 words

A Park Ave. psychiatrist, whose neighbors said his office attracted beer-swilling vagrants to their posh neighborhood, had his license suspended yesterday for allegedly selling prescriptions to undercover investigators.
State Health Commissioner Dr. Barbara Ann DeBuono said she used emergency authority to suspend Dr. Mark Moshe Kesten’s license because he “represents an imminent danger to public health.”
Kesten was nabbed in a sting by State Attorney General Dennis Vacco’s office in June after he twice sold prescriptions for Xanax tranquilizers to investigators who posed as patients, authorities said. The investigators told Kesten they planned to resell the drugs on the street, a Vacco spokesman said.
Kesten also had the “patients” falsify questionnaires about why they needed the drugs, and verbally abused one of the undercover investigators, Vacco’s office said.
The probe began after neighbors in Kesten’s upper East Side building complained to Assemblyman John Ravitz (R-Manhattan) that crowds waiting to see the doctor lined up outside the building often drinking alcohol and urinating in the street.
Leslie Boga, a doorman at the building that houses Kesten’s first-floor office, said he wasn’t surprised by the arrest. “I was suspicious, because in three or four hours he would have 60 patients,” Boga said.
Kesten was arrested in June and charged with two felony counts of selling a prescription for a controlled substance. He remains free on $ 5,000 bail.
He now faces 10 counts of professional misconduct, including gross negligence and moral unfitness to practice medicine, and could lose his license permanently after his case is heard by a state review panel next week.