Dr. Lillehei checks on a patient

The news on April 13, 1972, was stunning. A federal grand jury in St. Paul, Minn., had indicted Dr. C. Walton Lillehei on charges of evading $125,100 in income taxes. The world-renowned surgeon faced up to 25 years in prison. Even more inconceivably, he faced the loss of his license to practice medicine.

Lillehei had tried to stave this off, but the Internal Revenue Service had no interest in accommodating the person whom some were beginning to call the Father of Open-Heart Surgery. The agency wanted to make an example of him. It wanted to scare would-be scofflaws by sending the message that no target was too big. It wanted coast-to-coast headlines on the eve of Tax Day, and it got them.

Had you visited Walt Lillehei's office back in the hectic 1950s, you might well have predicted tax trouble. The University of Minnesota frowned on doctors using the medical school's secretaries for billing, so Lillehei did his own — or didn't do his own. Bills to patients were late going out, and when the checks came in, Lillehei threw them in a drawer, not cashing them until he needed money. He'd fish around and pull out a check that was about the amount he needed and take it to the bank — if the check hadn't expired. When he finally got around to bookkeeping, Lillehei used index cards in shoeboxes.

And what were taxes, but even more paperwork? Lillehei, legendary procrastinator, was always late filing his returns — by a few months at first, but soon he'd gotten a year or more behind. Initially, he escaped notice by the IRS. Then, on April 27, 1966, he filed returns: not for the preceding year, however, but for 1963 and '64. His income had increased, and this time the IRS took a close look at one C. Walton Lillehei, M.D., of St. Paul.

An inspector concluded that while Lillehei was a procrastinator, he wasn't a crook. ``This guy is clean,'' noted the inspector.

But Lillehei was now on the screen. And after almost two years without another word from him, the IRS wrote:

``Dear Dr. Lillehei: The files of the district director of Internal Revenue, St. Paul, show no record of federal income returns in your name for the years 1965 and 1966. We are assigning this matter to a special agent.''

Lillehei wrote back immediately, promising returns and payment by Jan. 15, 1968. Still, he procrastinated. It was now early in his tenure at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center; his time was scarce, and he didn't file his 1965 return until November 1968 — and offered no trace of his return for 1966 and, now, 1967.

The IRS agent was Ray W. Jackson, a career bureaucrat. He called Lillehei around Christmas of 1968 to ask some pointed questions, but Lillehei was unavailable. Lillehei was transplanting a heart, a liver, and two kidneys.

But surgical heroics did not put Jackson off. He was David after Goliath.

Lillehei was beginning to get the picture. He hired a tax lawyer and, in May 1969, filed returns for all three delinquent years, along with payment of taxes, interest, and penalties. But Jackson was only getting started. Now he burrowed into shoeboxes of index cards, bank microfilms, travel records, expense reports, receipts. He tracked down patients, professors who'd invited Lillehei to lecture, people who'd tended bar at Lillehei's parties.

He found that Lillehei had been leading something of a secret life — a life that included mistresses and even a Las Vegas call girl.

The day in 1972 that his indictment hit the news, Lillehei wrote to Owen Wangensteen, his old mentor at Minnesota's University Hospital:

``I know you must be disturbed by the recent tax publicity, but all I can tell you at this time in this communication is that it is not at all what it appears on the surface.

``I am quite confident that I am going to be acquitted.''

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