This isn’t an update I had planned to make but I’m quickly learning that if you dig long enough, you will find something useful in the dirt. Bright sparkling gems, in fact.
Firstly, a quick shout out goes to Isabel Vincent, the journalist who decided to write an article a few days ago in the New York Post covering the recent events with Ted Maher.
Her name sounded familiar so I looked her up and refreshed my memory on how I knew her. Vincent wrote a book in 2010 titled Gilded Lily that goes into fascinating detail about Edmond Safra’s widow, Lily Safra. I read the book as part of my research into the Safra family a few months ago. It’s a good book loaded with all the elements of a good scandal.
While it is available to buy and read elsewhere in the world, Vincent’s book was banned in Lily’s home country, Brazil. This was due to a defamation suit brought by Lily’s nephew. Apparently in Brazil, privacy (mostly for the rich) trumps press freedom and freedom of speech. Elon Musk’s recent run-ins with a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice has given us a front row seat into that dynamic.
Anyway, back to Vincent’s recent article on Maher. A lot of the article goes over well-trodden ground, but she does share a couple of new facts:
Maher’s new court date is June 21 (so only a few days away). The inmate record for Maher has been updated with this new timing
Maher is undergoing treatment for late stage throat cancer (ouch)
As with the true crime podcast and other articles I talked about in my first post, it doesn’t appear that Vincent’s article has received much love. It wasn’t promoted by the New York Post on their X account when it was published, nor did Vincent promote it on her own account. I’m not saying that X is everything, but Vincent and NYP are otherwise quite active on the X platform.
It really does seem like the world is done with Ted Maher aka Jon Green.
But I’m increasingly thinking that this is a grave mistake.
Especially when you see his connections to Mad Men, The King, and Dr. Feelgood.
I’ve even discovered a new possible alias name for Maher (be sure to read to the end!)
Mad Men
Perhaps readers will recall the article in which I wrote about Maher working for a certain “Dr. Hamm”. Through that connection, Maher had the opportunity to serve as a nurse to Ole Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra.
I started digging around to find out what more I could learn about this Dr. Hamm. After all, if they connected through the Special Forces medical program, Dr. Hamm could add context to Maher’s time and purpose in Las Vegas beyond what Maher had provided in his book.
Maher writes, “Dr. Hamm was a retired Navy captain, so he knew of me from my success in the Special Forces medical program”. Maher also says that a few years after he started working for Dr. Hamm, the doctor, along with a group of other doctors, opened up a clinic called Redrock Medical Center.
I started searching online through old Las Vegas newspaper articles for mentions of a Dr. Hamm tied to “Red Rock (or Redrock) Medical” and gave it a broad time filter: 1975-1995. I didn’t find anything, which I found a bit odd. If a new medical center was just opening, you’d think that they’d need to advertise pretty heavily to attract business.
Could it be that Maher altered Dr. Hamm’s name in the book to cover up who it really was? Nothing wrong with that - its a relatively common practice when people want to avoid the hassle of having to get permission from the person to give them a pseudonym. If the person isn’t central to an author’s story, it may often be the most practical thing to do.
I changed my search to just look for “Red Rock Medical”. And lo and behold, there it was: a big advertisement for the Associated Podiatry Group with an office in Palm Springs and one in Las Vegas at the Redrock Medical Center.
Any fans of the hit series Mad Men out there? Dr. Hamm > Jon Hamm > Donald Draper?
I believe Maher gave Donald Draper the pseudonym “Dr. Hamm” to camouflage his real identity, but kept enough of a connection so that people who really want to dig could find the doctor.
There are enough connections to make this very likely the case: Dr. Donald S. Draper, is a Podiatrist. Dr. Hamm was treating Sinatra for a heel spur, which is the field of podiatry. One of his offices is in Red Rock Medical Center, the home of Red Rock Medical Group. His second office is in Palm Springs - this would have made it very convenient for Sinatra to use Dr. Draper’s services when he was at home. Finally, the date of the ad also fits with the timing Maher describes in his book - in the early to mid 1980’s.
Now that we have likely found Dr. Hamm aka Dr. Donald S. Draper, let’s explore who he is.
It turns out that Dr. Draper was the person who x-rayed Elvis’ foot after the on-stage “attack” on Elvis Presley at the Las Vegas Hilton on February 18, 1973. The x-ray was ordered by Elvis’ doctor, Elias Ghanem, but the actual x-ray was taken by Dr. Draper as you can see in the below picture. (More on Ghanem later.)
If you search for Donald S. Draper from the time of his birth (1933) to present day, there are a smattering of articles that give a high level picture of his life. He was born in Idaho into the Mormon faith and spent his formative years outside Reno in Fallon, Nevada. He was in the Navy from 1952-53 and attended University of Nevada, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Education in 1958. He enjoyed singing in the local choir, Sierra Singers, and teaching art to students. He was a member of the Freemason-related Demolay organization for young men.
Draper, along with good friend George H. Woodward (also from Fallon and a Mormon), found a job as a teacher. The two lived together in Reno as they taught and studied to receive their Master degrees. Then suddenly George got married in July 1961, with Draper serving as best man. Things changed quickly after that. In April 1962, Draper announced his engagement to Barbara Weddell and they were married in June. Barbara was 19, he was 29.
After that Draper appears to have had a change of heart in terms of his preferred vocation - in 1962 he went back to school, this time to study to be a podiatrist. He found the change in vocation newsworthy enough to advertise it in the newspaper. Oddly, he failed to mention his past career as a teacher, stating instead that he had done “pre-podiatry” at University of Nevada. Don started his degree at the California Podiatry college in San Francisco but finished up at the Ohio College of Podiatry in 1966 - this also warranting an announcement in the newspaper.
Not long after that, he opened his own podiatry practices in the rural border town of Needles, California in 1968. Its not clear when he opened his Las Vegas office but it stands to reason it would have been approximately the same time. It seems Dr. Draper was well regarded in the community as he was appointed by Nevada Governor Mike O’Callaghan to the State Board of Podiatry in 1972. Don and his wife Barbara had two children, but the marriage didn’t last - they divorced in 1978 and he didn’t remarry.
Dr. Draper relocated his Needles office to Laughlin, Nevada in 1979. This move coincided with the completion of the new highway, I-40, which effectively rerouted interstate traffic around Needles. It also coincided with the exponential growth experienced in Laughlin as a result of the opening of a number of casinos, the decommissioning of Route 66 in 1985, and the building of a bridge between Laughlin and Bullhead City, Arizona across the Colorado River. It also coincided with Laughlin increasingly becoming a “center of activity for the sale of controlled substances”.
As we saw in the earlier photo, Dr. Draper announced a new office in Palm Springs in May 1982. Between then and January 1984, he published a large number of articles in the newspaper - part educational, part advertisement around various topics of podiatry. After that point, everything went quiet.
Suddenly, in August 1991, an expose was published by the Las Vegas Sun that involved the good doctor. I have been unable to locate the original article but below is an excerpt from The Desert Sun that talks about it.
The Sun had shared that a Las Vegas podiatrist, Dr. Donald Draper, had been diagnosed with AIDS and, despite this knowledge, had continued to operate on patients until he retired in 1988. To add to the scandal, the county and state podiatry certifying boards were apparently also aware of the diagnosis and continued to allow him to practice and operate without notifying patients, even renewing his license in 1990.
Such news is probably less of an issue for readers these days, but in 1991 it was quite newsworthy as the HIV/AIDS epidemic scare was in full swing. Indeed, the case of Dr. Draper apparently sparked calls for increased disclosure laws for doctors with HIV/AIDS.
I would imagine that wasn’t a pleasant time for Dr. Draper, being sick plus having his name and condition so publicly exposed. Also, with him being a Mormon and this being the late 1980s, it is possible his family would have found it a challenge to support him. The Mormon church’s views on homosexuals and by extension, AIDS, (which the church linked to “sexual adventurism”) was deeply negative at the time.
There is no more news about Dr. Draper after 1991 but, according to Ancestry.com records, he died in Palm Springs in early 1994 at the age of 61.
I hope he was surrounded by loved ones.
I will note that I didn’t find anything that would have tied him to the Special Forces medical training program.
Perhaps this connection was made through a colleague of Dr. Hamm’s.
The King and Dr. Feelgood
Speaking of colleagues, let’s get back to Dr. Elias Ghanem. It turns out he didn’t just treat Elvis on the night of the stage incident, Ghanem was his personal doctor and close friend at the time. Elvis called him “Dr. Feelgood”.
We are all aware of the news Elvis that died in August of 1977 (though some fans are convinced he still lives). The official cause of death given at the time was a heart attack, but speculation and evidence quickly surfaced which showed that Elvis had been taking a toxic mix of prescription drugs. These were prescribed predominantly by Elvis’s other doctor, George Nichopolous, but Ghanem was also accused of contributing to Elvis’ death through various prescriptions and diets he was putting Elvis on to address his various ailments and lose weight.
Eleven years after Ghanem’s death from cancer in 2001, Ghanem’s widow shared new evidence around the type of drugs that Elvis was using at the time of his death. In fact, she put some of the pill bottles with their labels up for auction as Elvis memorabilia alongside the x-rays and other items.
Who was this Dr. Elias Ghanem and how did he come to be the doctor of the King of Rock and Roll?
Elias Ghanem, an Arab Christian, was born in 1939 in the Middle-Eastern port city of Haifa to a high level executive of a Palestinian oil company. A proud citizen of Israel, Ghanem immigrated to the US around 1960. He landed in Charlotte, North Carolina where he attended the Johnson C. Smith University on scholarship. He was active in foreign affairs and human rights topics, particularly regarding Israel.
He graduated in 1965 from Charlotte College with a Bachelors of Arts in French then later attended Duke University on scholarship to gain his degree as a medical doctor.
In between his undergraduate degree and studying at Duke, Ghanem fell into the orbit of Brother Dave Gardner. Brother Dave was a raucous southern comedian who was very popular in the 1950s. In addition to adopting a southern “red-neck” style of comedy, he was apparently unapologetic about discussing drugs, including encouraging the use of new experimental drugs like LSD.
Brother Dave fell from grace after he was arrested in 1962 for possession of marijuana. To make ends meet, he began to ply the university circuit with his comedy act, becoming increasingly fringe and racist in his publicly stated views. He apparently became an acolyte of Texas billionaire, E L Hunt, even taking Hunt’s cues around tax avoidance. This didn’t turn out well for Brother Dave - he was charged with tax evasion in 1975.
Ghanem met Brother Dave in 1966/67 when Dave came to perform at the Charlotte nightclub Ghanem was managing. They became fast friends. Brother Dave was Elias Ghanem’s ticket into the rarified air of the stars. Dave was known to have travelled in Elvis’s social circle, so its likely that this is how Ghanem and Elvis met. It also explains, how Ghanem could have moved so quickly from being a medical student in 1971/72 to being Elvis’s personal doctor in Vegas by February 1973.
Ghanem quickly became the “physician to the stars”. By 1974 he was the doctor of Governor Nick O’Callaghan and he was dating celebrities like Vicki Carr. It wasn’t long before he was treating an astonishing list of big names: Liberace, Frank Sinatra, Tom Jones, Wayne Newton, Ann-Margret, Johnny Cash, Raquel Welch, Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, the list goes on and on. He also treated and was friends with gaming greats like Barron Hilton, William Bennett and Steve Wynn. He became a “close personal friend” of Bill Clinton and in particular with Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, even serving as host to the dying woman’s birthday celebration close to the end of her life.
There is so much more to share about Ghanem and the network he built and the events he was tied to. I will share this in another post - but to stay on track with the purpose of this post I will just share these final facts:
Ghanem opened the Laughlin Medical Center in 1986 with William E. Bannen. At the same time he moved and renamed his Reno Medical Clinic to be Liberty Medical Center in Reno. The announcement of the move was shared in the Reno Gazette Journal on September, 1986. In the announcement was the below picture, showing a graduate student “Edward Lynch” having his blood pressure taken at the clinic.
STOP THE PRESSES.
Wait, is that….? Could it be…?
IS THAT TED MAHER?
If it is Maher, then we have a connection between him and Dr. Elias Ghanem, not just via Dr. Donald Draper, but directly. Is it possible that it was the illustrious Duke graduate Dr. Elias Ghanem who had ties to the Special Forces and not Dr. Hamm?
And, if it is, we have Maher using another name. Why would that be necessary?
Things that make you go “hmmm”.
I said in my second post that I didn’t quite believe Maher’s story about leaving the Special forces in 1979, that there was more to the story.
And as we can see, there is.
What the implications are, I can only speculate but this octopus has the potential to extend in a multitude of directions and conspiracy theories.
Its a shame we can’t ask Maher.
Stay tuned for my next post on Elias Ghanem things that I have unearthed about his network.