WARWICK — The doctor who was fired by Roger Williams Medical Center after blowing the whistle on then-hospital president Robert Urciuoli’s expense-account abuses and camouflaged hiring of a state senator, yesterday made public a severance agreement offering him $184,994 on the condition that he not criticize the hospital or then-Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse’s handling of the case.

More specifically, the Feb. 17, 2000, agreement brought to light by Dr. Philip O’Dowd at a joint news conference yesterday with U.S. Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee, said:

“Dr. O’Dowd agrees that if the Rhode Island attorney general negotiates or enters into an agreement with Mr. Robert Urciuoli or the Hospital with respect to certain issues … Dr. O’Dowd shall not comment upon or criticize the terms, conditions or circumstances leading to … such an agreement or the conduct of the negotiations.”

Coming to light in the closing days of Democrat Whitehouse’s campaign to unseat Republican Chafee, the don’t-talk clause was immediately seized upon by Chafee as evidence that Whitehouse had “cut a deal” to “muzzle” a whistleblower.

The doctor – and Chafee – called it significant that Whitehouse publicly announced a financial settlement with Urciuoli on March 2, 2000, little more than two weeks after O’Dowd, who had been pressing him to launch a criminal investigation – and threatening to “bark like a dog, and squeal like a pig” if he did not – signed the severance agreement. Neither Chafee nor O’Dowd had proof that Whitehouse had a direct role in crafting the agreement. But Chafee said: “The timeline just supports the allegation that as soon as the whistleblower, the good doctor trying to look out for the nonprofit institution … is muzzled, the attorney general is free to announce his civil settlement.”

After days of ignoring Chafee’s comments about his alleged mishandling of this and other cases – including a judge’s disqualification of the wiretap evidence gathered on Whitehouse’s watch against a former Lincoln town administrator accused of bribery – the Whitehouse campaign issued this statement slamming Chafee for raising what were characterized as false and irrelevant issues in a campaign of national significance:

“We’re at war, seniors are hurting, but Lincoln Chafee refuses to address these issues and instead has chosen to base his campaign on a series of baseless, negative attacks.”

Whitehouse campaign spokeswoman Alex Swartsel cited Whitehouse’s role in getting Urciuoli to repay the hospital the $85,000 cost of an investigation conducted by a private Boston law firm hired by the hospital’s trustees to look into Urciuoli’s expense-account abuses. She also cited a letter in which the hospital board’s six-member executive committee told the attorney general that while Urciuoli used poor judgment, it did not believe criminal prosecution would be “in the hospital’s best interest.”

In other words, Swartsel argued, “the hospital, the alleged victim of Mr. Urciuoli’s misuse of expense account funds, did not intend either to fire Mr. Urciuoli or press charges, effectively disabling any potential criminal prosecution.”

As for the severance agreement, she said confidentiality clauses were “not unusual.”

But, in this case, she said: “The attorney general’s office was not a party to that agreement, did not enter into it, was not involved in creating it, is not bound by it, and has nothing to do with it. The agreement in no way suggests that Sheldon Whitehouse personally is shielded from criticism by Dr. O’Dowd, and for Lincoln Chafee’s campaign to make such an allegation is irresponsible.”

Urciuoli was convicted last month 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, led Chafee to step up his attacks on Whitehouse for not aggressively pursuing the Roger Williams allegations. In response, Whitehouse produced a letter in which the hospital’s executive committee said, in part: “While the committee recognizes that the Department of Attorney General has a distinctly different decision-making process, we respectfully believe that a criminal prosecution of this matter is not in the best interests of the hospital.”

O’Dowd said he went public with his criticism of Whitehouse for the first time earlier this week at risk of losing his severance pay – because Whitehouse “misrepresents the case when he said the hospital told him not to pursue criminal charges. It was the board of cronies that told him that.”

The letter was signed by 6 of the 20 board members. O’Dowd, who was on the board and was president of the medical staff at the time, said the rest of the board never saw the letter or the review by the Boston law firm Goodwin Proctor & Hoar that precipitated it.

The review found that Urciuoli had not only misspent thousands of dollars on golf trips, family dinners and stays in luxurious hotels such as The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., but may have also committed "a serious fraud" upon the hospital, when he billed $5,998 for an eight-day sojourn to the Scottsdale Princess Resort in Arizona for a nonexistent health-care conference.

O’Dowd said he visited Whitehouse three times with folders of evidence. He said 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.

He said Whitehouse listened politely, but “hardly said a word.”

Just before he left the last time, O’Dowd recalled saying: “If you don’t prosecute this in the criminal arena, when you announce your decision, I am going to bark like a dog and squeal like a pig. I am going to try to get every TV camera and every radio person and every print journalist in town and I am going to make the arguments to them that I am making to you. This won’t go away. I’m stubborn. I’m right.”

O’Dowd said his term on the hospital board ended Dec. 31, 1999, and he was fired days later.

He said the cited reason was anger-management problems, but he viewed his dismissal as punishment for pursuing a criminal case against Urciuoli. Asked yesterday whether he had anger issues, he said: “I did have anger-management problems. I was very angry at the management.”

O’Dowd would not identify his lawyer. But state Democratic Party Chairman William Lynch acknowledged yesterday that he represented the doctor at the time.

He would not comment on how the attorney-general shield clause made it into the agreement. But speaking as party chairman, he said: “I think Linc Chafee is doing what he has been increasingly doing as he’s gotten more and more desperate as Election Day approaches – and that is saying or doing anything to try to impugn Sheldon Whitehouse, and at the same time distract people in Rhode Island from the real issue, which is changing who runs the Senate in Washington.”