Loose Talk and Stacked Cadavers

By KURT ANDERSEN

The coroner to the stars fights to stay in office

Stunning revelations, televised press conferences, racy conjecture about the hours before death--all are trademarks of Los Angeles County Medical Examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi. But when Actor John Belushi, 33, was found dead in a Hollywood hotel bungalow, the "coroner to the stars" was uncharacteristically circumspect. He remained silent as the first ugly details of Belushi's .death drifted into print, and finally issued only a terse written announcement of his findings: "The deceased died of an overdose due to intravenous injections of heroin and cocaine. Both cocaine and heroin were found on the premises."

Noguchi's tight-lipped discretion was not the result of a spontaneous personality change. Rather, the five-member Los Angeles County board of supervisors had ordered him two months ago to confine his reports to strictly physiological data and refrain from "sensationalism and editorializing." Three days before Belushi's death, the board expressed its displeasure more firmly and voted unanimously to seek the coroner's resignation. Noguchi refused to quit his $69,000-a-year job, and so the supervisors late last week upped the ante by suspending him for a month. The board seems intent on firing or at least demoting Noguchi from the high-profile job he has held for 15 years.

As the battle to remove him intensified, Noguchi relapsed into his customary loquaciousness with the press. He said that given free rein, he would have hinted days earlier at the unnatural causes of Belushi's death. Noguchi referred to the use of the cocaine-heroin mixture by its street name--speedballing--and said that the dose would have killed Belushi even if he had been less paunchy and dissipated. The comedian's death had its public aftermath in the East as well. Actor Dan Aykroyd led the funeral cortege on Martha's Vineyard astride a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, and later eulogized his friend and co-star before 1,000 mourners at Manhattan's Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.

Noguchi's political overseers have always bridled at the way he seems to bask in the strange, refracted limelight of dead Hollywood celebrities. In fact, Noguchi, 55, was fired once before--13 years ago this week--only to be reinstated by a civil service commission; he may again triumph judicially, but this time the case against him is more scrupulous and substantive. The most shocking charge in 1969--that he was "smiling and dancing" with glee at the prospect of performing the historic autopsy on Robert Kennedy--was never corroborated. The county board muzzled him in January because it thought he had been too quick to speculate about the murky circumstances surrounding the deaths of Natalie Wood and William Holden.

It is clear that Noguchi, a naturalized citizen who emigrated from Tokyo in 1952, is a habitual grandstander. He has been a guest on the Dick Cavett show, and the TV character Quincy is partly modeled on him. "Noguchi is the Salvador Dali of forensic pathology," says a coroner from an East Coast city.

But more than his vivid style is now at issue. A Los Angeles Times expose charged that the 140-member coroner's office is colossally mismanaged. Cadavers are sometimes stacked for lack of space, jewelry is stolen from bodies, broken equipment goes unrepaired, lab tests are botched, and crucial evidence--including the severed hand of a murder victim--has been lost. Noguchi rarely performs autopsies himself. According to the county's chief administrator, the coroner's chronic absences, due to a lucrative lecture and consulting schedule, result in a "lack of adequate central management and control."

Noguchi's lawyer, Godfrey Isaac, suggests that the disarray of the $5 million-a-year operation may be "sabotage." Dr. Leslie Lukash, chief medical examiner of Nassau County, N. Y., whom Los Angeles County commissioned to scrutinize management under Noguchi, believes that the main problem is not the man but insufficient funding. The current annual budget for supplies, for example, was spent in just six months, but even that may be symptomatic of poor planning.

Noguchi has insisted that his performance should be evaluated by a panel of seven big-city forensic specialists, and he might well win vindication from such peers. Says Dr. Robert Stein, chief medical examiner of Cook County, Ill.: "He is one of the outstanding forensic pathologists in the country, if not the world." Rhode Island's chief medical examiner, Dr. William Sturner, says Noguchi is "first-rate," and wonders if racial prejudice may fuel some of the current anti-Noguchi sentiment. So far, however, Los Angeles' large Japanese community has not rallied to defend him as it did in 1969.

Doctors who work under Noguchi agree his technical expertise is beyond question, but are ambivalent about his threatened ouster. Says one: "Noguchi doesn't check on things, so things basically go to hell. But if he did mind the shop, it might be worse." Even if Noguchi's antagonists prevail, the coroner's office would not necessarily function better. "Who do you get to replace him?" wonders a colleague who favors dismissal. "My suspicion is the board couldn't find anyone better." Perhaps not, but Los Angeles authorities seem determined to find someone more prudent.

--By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Russell Leavitt/Los Angeles

With reporting by Russell Leavitt

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