DOCTOR WITH A DARK SIDE? Will Anesthesiologist Who Allegedly Pimped Women Be Charged?

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Eric Jay Smith, MD, an anesthesiologist from Bellevue, Wash., allegedly led a double life, sedating patients during the day and running a high-end residential brothel at night.

Investigators say Dr. Smith made thousands of dollars by bringing women from Southeast Asia to suburban Seattle and placing them in luxury apartments to work as prostitutes, according to an affidavit filed in federal court July 18. Charges have yet to be filed against Dr. Smith, though he remains under investigation, says a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Seattle. The evidence against the former Overlake Medical Center physician is daunting, including online ads and a money trail that led straight to automatic teller machines around Bellevue. Investigators say Dr. Smith used the ATMs to deposit $426,000 in cash allegedly garnered from the prostitution ring.

Sex or drugs?

An agent at the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) wrote in an affidavit that in November 2012 he learned that Dr. Smith was making multiple large cash deposits into ATMs. After learning that Dr. Smith holds a DEA Controlled Substances Registration, the agent says he obtained Dr. Smith’s bank account records and noted that Dr. Smith was making payments to backpage.com, a site the agent writes is “commonly used by individuals to offer sexual services in exchange for money.”

After getting records from the website of the individual advertisements connected to Dr. Smith’s bank account, the agent believed “the ads paid for by Smith were for prostitution services.”

The agent says the records of backpage.com showed that the advertisements with connections to Dr. Smith’s bank account were also linked to complexes where Dr. Smith either rented or leased apartments or condominiums, and also traced back to computers at Dr. Smith’s home or to facilities he worked at, including Overlake Medical Center.

“The results lead me to believe that Smith was utilizing his personal or professional Internet access to post these commercial-sex advertisements,” writes the agent.

At first, Dr. Smith used his own name while posting the ads, the agent writes, before switching to an alias, “Jesse Blue.” In more than a year, court documents say, he paid around $10,000 to post 116 advertisements on backpage.com.

$426,000 in one year alone

Investigators then say that throughout 2013, several agents used these online advertisements to schedule undercover visits with the women through phone numbers listed online — also linked to Dr. Smith — and meet them at luxury apartments that connected back to Dr. Smith. The affidavit gives no indication that the women were here against their will. Some of the women even seemed happy working as prostitutes, telling undercover agents that they came to find work to support their families back in Asia. One told investigators that her family “was very poor and could live off of $100 per month.”

According to court records, the women were brought to the United States by a close female associate of Dr. Smith, and then put up in several of the ritziest apartments in Bellevue, Wash., where the sex services were allegedly performed.

Dr. Smith is accused of taking money earned from these transactions and depositing the cash in a structured way, using ATMs in an effort to avoid detection. Dr. Smith allegedly broke up large sums of money into smaller cash deposits at ATMs to avoid reporting the large amounts to the IRS and to prevent bank tellers from becoming suspicious.

Investigators say his deposits totaled $426,000 in one year alone, and allege that he used one bank to launder the money and wire payments to Southeast Asia. The court documents also say that he received monthly paychecks between $20,000 and $45,000 from his anesthesiology job.

“Based upon the investigation, I believe that Smith is facilitating a residential prostitution scheme by renting and/or leasing apartments which are used to conduct prostitution,” the DEA agent writes. “I further believe that he is engaging in money laundering by receiving and depositing prostitution proceeds into his personal bank accounts and subsequently transmitting those proceeds to Thai bank accounts.”

Shortly after the court documents were filed, Dr. Smith took a voluntary leave of absence from Matrix Anesthesia, a private-practice anesthesia group in the Puget Sound area, and has since resigned, according to an Overlake Medical Center spokesperson. The center’s administrators declined to comment and referred all questions to Dr. Smith’s attorney, Jeffery Robinson. Mr. Robinson was unavailable for comment. Matrix Anesthesia did not return requests for comment.

The Washington Department of Health said that it has begun an investigation into the allegations, but did not provide further details. When reached for comment after the allegations first came out, Dr. Smith told KOMO-TV, “I don’t know what you’re talking about and if I did, I wouldn’t comment.” Outpatient Surgery’s attempts to reach Dr. Smith for comment were unsuccessful.

— Kendal Gapinski