The doctor who blew the whistle on Robert Urciuoli's expense-account abuses at Roger Williams Medical Center yesterday criticized Sheldon Whitehouse for not doing more to investigate and prosecute the matter.

Dr. Philip O'Dowd said that he met three times with Whitehouse, then the Rhode Island attorney general, in the fall of 1999 and presented him with documents regarding possible crimes by Urciuoli, the hospital's president.

But rather than investigate, O'Dowd said, Whitehouse told him that the matter would best be handled civilly because hospital leaders did not want to press criminal charges.

O'Dowd, who was a Roger Williams board member and president of the medical staff, faults Whitehouse for listening to the hospital's executive committee, whose members he compares to "the foxes saying everything was fine in the henhouse."

Furthermore, O'Dowd says, he suggested that Whitehouse might have a conflict, since Urciuoli was married to the sister of former Providence Mayor Joseph R. Paolino Jr., and a leading Urciuoli defender on the hospital board was former Lt. Gov. Richard A. Licht, another prominent Democrat.

Whitehouse responded that there was no conflict, and that no political influence was ever brought to bear. In an interview yesterday, Whitehouse said that he didn't take sides, or believe O'Dowd over the Roger Williams executive committee. He was merely dealing with a "formidable" hurdle in attempting to pursue a criminal case.

"When [the executive committee] said that they didn't want to press criminal charges, that became a legal fact in the case," said Whitehouse. "Any reasonable prosecutor could have foreseen its effect on disabling a criminal prosecution, by having the purported victim deny that there had been a crime."

The question of whether Whitehouse should have prosecuted Urciuoli has become an issue in the U.S. Senate race between Lincoln D. Chafee, the Republican incumbent, and Whitehouse, the Democratic challenger and a former U.S. Attorney and Rhode Island attorney general.

Earlier this month, Urciuoli was convicted of federal corruption charges that he put a state senator, John A. Celona, on the hospital's payroll for his political influence. The conviction, on the day of the first Chafee-Whitehouse debate, has led Chafee to step up his attacks on Whitehouse for not aggressively pursuing the Roger Williams allegations.

Whitehouse defends his record, saying that career prosecutors determined there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges but that he still forced Urciuoli into a civil settlement in which he repaid the hospital $85,000 the cost of an internal review that the hospital had commissioned by a Boston law firm.

Whitehouse said that the $85,000 is much more than Urciuoli would have had to pay in a criminal case for expenses that Whitehouse said "smelled to high heaven."

"If financial gain and greed was his motive, I decided to whack him where it hurts," said Whitehouse.

Last week, the Whitehouse campaign released a letter to the attorney general's office on June 21, 1999, signed by the six members of the hospital board's executive committee, stating that "a criminal prosecution of this matter is not in the best interests of the hospital."

The letter angered O'Dowd. He said that he met three times with Whitehouse in the fall of 1999, after the letter was sent, and presented him with documents, including checkbook stubs, credit-card receipts, day calendars, letters and vouchers.

"I suggested that professional review might uncover many tens of thousands [of dollars] of additional fraudulent charges," said O'Dowd. "I cited recent felony prosecutions by his office for lesser offenses."

O'Dowd also gave Whitehouse the names of five other former administrators at Roger Williams who could speak to criminal investigators.

"I strongly urged the attorney general to investigate these charges regardless of what opinions other board members may have expressed," said O'Dowd.

Early in 1998, O'Dowd had brought allegations regarding Urciuoli to the Roger Williams board.

A subsequent review by Boston law firm Goodwin Proctor & Hoar found that Urciuoli had misspent thousands of dollars on golf trips, family dinners and stays in luxurious hotels such as The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla.

Urciuoli also may have committed "a serious fraud" upon the hospital, the review concluded, when he billed $5,998 for an eight-day sojourn to the Scottsdale Princess Resort in Arizona for a nonexistent health-care conference.

Urciuoli agreed to repay the hospital $16,000 and kept his job. O'Dowd, who wanted Urciuoli fired, went to the attorney general. Whitehouse inherited the case when he took office in January 1999.

Meanwhile, members of the executive committee were meeting with the attorney general's office. They provided Whitehouse with documents and information, and brought in the Boston lawyer who had led the internal review. But the hospital refused to provide the lawyer's final report, saying that it was protected by attorney-client privilege.

Gerald Coyne, the deputy attorney general, said earlier this year that the hospital's refusal to provide the report hampered a more thorough investigation, and that, in retrospect, he wishes the attorney general's office had had the report.

Albert Gregoire, a former auditor in the attorney general's criminal division, said in an interview Monday that he was asked to review a box of documents that included expense records and Urciuoli's datebooks. Gregoire went through the records, trying to distinguish which expenses were personal, which had been reimbursed by the hospital and which Urciuoli had paid back after he was caught.

Without his work papers, which were turned over to the authorities as part of the Celona investigation, Gregoire said that he couldn't recall his specific findings.

"Urciuoli had short hands and deep pockets he didn't want to spend his own money," said Gregoire, who retired in May. "But did he lie? I can't tell you. I guess it could be criminal it was certainly unethical."

The hospital's Boston law firm "played it close to the vest" in providing information, said Gregoire.

"It was kind of frustrating," he said. "The hospital didn't feel there was a crime. We realized that the hospital wasn't going to pursue it, and we weren't either. So we just moved on to the next case."

Whitehouse says that his office determined that it would have been difficult to prove criminal intent without the hospital's backing. Another former attorney general, James O'Neil, disagrees.

"The man [Urciuoli] went golfing, then came home and reported he had been at a health-care conference when there was no conference," said O'Neil, a Democrat who supports Chafee. "What more do you need? A prosecutor has to infer intent it's not stamped on a document."

Whitehouse counters that the prosecutors that made the call had worked under O'Neil. And Coyne says it wasn't that simple.

"Prior to this taking on political overtones in a Senate campaign, it was not clear that a crime had been committed," Coyne said yesterday. "Then the hospital retains Urciuoli. . . . When we go to the board [in the spring of 1999], they send us this letter . . . which is signed by a bipartisan, well-respected group of people."

Four of the executive committee members who signed the letter to Whitehouse's office in 1999 were asked to address the matter again last year this time under oath.

Subpoenaed to the federal grand jury investigating Roger Williams and Celona, former hospital chairman Herbert W. Cummings and Licht testified that Urciuoli had spent hospital funds inappropriately. Excerpts of their grand-jury testimony were filed in court with pre-trial motions.

When board member Raymond T. Mancini, who runs a liquor-distribution business, was asked if he thought Urciuoli's expense-account abuse was a "theft," he answered, "Well, I guess I would I would say if it happened in my company, I would have fired him."

And board member Raymond F. Murphy, a partner in a Providence accounting firm, said that he was "very angry" with Urciuoli because "he knew better." Asked if he believed Urciuoli's improper expenses had simply been a mistake, Murphy responded, "Probably not."

When pressed, Murphy said, "We gave him a pass."

Nuala Pell is one of the few hospital board members who sided with O'Dowd, and felt that Urciuoli should have been fired. Mrs. Pell, the wife of former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell and a close Whitehouse backer, says that she blames the hospital's executive committee, not Whitehouse.

"Phil was right all along," Mrs. Pell said in an interview Monday, after spending the day campaigning with Whitehouse. "I feel bad for Sheldon. He did what he did, and I'm not surprised it's come up [in the campaign].

"I remember at the time that Sheldon told me he would have been able to pursue [a criminal case] but the hospital didn't want him to. I could see why he didn't pursue it, under the circumstances."