A notorious, coke-addicted, quack plastic surgeon yesterday admitted causing the death of his last patient, whose body he tried to hide by burying it under concrete at his New Jersey home.
“Yes, Your Honor,” former fugitive and phony physician Dean Faiello told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro when asked if he wanted to plead guilty to assault in the first degree “under conditions evincing a depraved indifference to human life.”
That life belonged to banker Maria Cruz, 35, who’d gone to Faiello’s Skin Ovations Center on West 16th Street in April 2003 for treatment of a benign growth on her tongue.
She didn’t know her “doctor” didn’t have a license – and was already under indictment for unlicensed practice of medicine.
Faiello, who sported a short-sleeve shirt and jeans for his hearing, told the judge that he was on cocaine as he prepared to perform laser surgery on Cruz’s tongue.
“You gave her an injection?” the judge asked.
“Lidocaine,” Faiello answered, as Cruz’s mom, Irena, sat in the gallery quietly sobbing.
“It had an adverse reaction?” the judge asked.
“Yes, sir,” the phony doc answered.
Cruz went into seizures after the injection, and a panicked Faiello called a friend, Dr. David Goldschmitt, for advice, prosecutors said.
Goldschmitt told him he should immediately get her to a hospital.
“You ignored that advice?” Carro asked.
“Yes,” Faiello answered, admitting that he was scared about the “ramifications” of having continued to see patients while under indictment.
The decision proved fatal for Cruz, a financial analyst who earned a six-figure salary at Barclays Capital.
Faiello said she died in his apartment.
Prosecutors say Faiello then stuffed Cruz’s body into a suitcase and transported it to his home in the upscale Forest Hill section of Newark, where he eventually entombed it in concrete.
Three weeks later, he fled to Costa Rica, where he lived the life of a gay party boy and worked as a go-go dancer in a sleazy bar.
He managed to skirt authorities for more than a year before he was finally busted. After a bitter extradition battle, he was brought back to the United States.
In return for the guilty plea, Faiello, who has told The Post and friends he has AIDS, will get a 20-year term in prison when Carro sentences him next month.
He had been charged with murder, which could have landed him a sentence of 25 years to life behind bars.
Faiello’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, declined comment afterward, as did Cruz’s mother and father, Rodolfo.
The Post first exposed Faiello back in October 2002, revealing that the college dropout was practicing laser surgery without a license in his swank Chelsea clinic on hundreds of patients.
Goldschmitt, the emergency-room medical director at NYU Downtown Hospital, has said that if only Faiello had been smart enough to take his advice when he called him in a panic that fateful night, Cruz might still be alive.
“I could have saved her, somebody could have saved her, if Dean had just called an ambulance,” Goldschmitt told The Post in 2005.