TRICK OR TREATMENT

That's because Stevinson, whose car dealerships and real estate have made him a millionaire more than a hundred times over, has taken the physician-patient relationship to a whole new level. He was so impressed with his oncologist, a Yugoslav named Rajko Medenica whom Stevinson credits with saving his life, that two years ago he built the doctor his own clinic here. The Medenica-Stevinson Center for Cancer and Immunology occupies 60,000 square feet in the Denver West office park, which Stevinson owns.

The clinic currently is fully staffed only several days a month, when Medenica flies into town from his headquarters on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. But it is the focus of grander plans: Stevinson says he hopes it will grow into one of the largest outpatient cancer centers in the country.

Stevinson is not Medenica's only grateful patron with local connections. Anne Coors, wife of Adolph Coors Company vice chairman Joseph Coors, says Medenica has treated her disease with great success. As a result, the Coors family recently approached Mercy Hospital to pitch what oncologist Richard Hankensen, a colleague of Medenica's, says is to become a world-class research center built around Medenica's expertise. Sources say the clinic would occupy the entire tenth floor of Mercy.

Despite the enthusiasm of Medenica's patients, however, some of the rest of Denver's medical community has not exactly embraced the doctor and his attempts to establish a medical beachhead here. At the beginning of this year, for instance, St. Anthony's Hospital, where Medenica admits local patients, granted him permanent privileges to practice medicine at the hospital. But last month St. Anthony's reversed itself and voted to restrict Medenica's practice to no new patients, and to downgrade his privileges to only temporary. In addition, sources say that the local medical community's chilly reception has caused Medenica to back away from the Mercy research project, at least temporarily. "He's not being welcomed out here," says one person familiar with the doctor's attempts to settle in Denver.

That, reply the doctor's supporters, is Denver's loss. "I think the man is a genius," says John West, a former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to Saudi Arabia who is convinced that Medenica saved his daughter-in-law from dying of throat cancer. "If Denver wants to lock out a man who is the stature of Louis Pasteur," adds Hankensen, "then it can do that."

Not surprisingly, Medenica is not your typical doctor. In fact, he has for years been entangled in a ganglion of personal and professional contradictions. They speak volumes about the currents of competition and jealousies that wind through the medical community, the medical and ethical vagaries of how it treats its sickest patients, and the influence money wields in today's financially besieged hospitals.

He is a recognized expert in interferon treatments of cancer--but he has been convicted of fraud in both Yugoslavia and Switzerland, where he pioneered his techniques. And while he has enjoyed the support of nearly every politically connected person in South Carolina, some in the medical community there now hope he will quietly leave the state.

Medenica is on the cutting edge of experimental treatments of cancer and diseases of the immune system, his supporters say--but he still raises eyebrows for his handling of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, whom Medenica diagnosed several years ago as having pesticide poisoning rather than Parkinson's disease, as had been previously diagnosed.

He enjoys a nearly godlike stature among his patients, who to a person fervently believe that he is the only man in the world who can keep them alive. Yet last year his treatments were the focus of a professional review that found his work "scientifically undisciplined" and "pseudo-scientific," and raised ethical questions about his work.

Recently, the contradictory winds swirling about Medenica converged in a South Carolina courthouse. As a result of questions raised about his methods, the board of the Hilton Head Hospital late last year sharply limited the oncologist's practice to more traditional treatments. That didn't sit well with a handful of Medenica's patients, who claim that the restrictions are--literally--killing them. They have sued the doctors who reviewed Medenica's work, charging them with willfully driving him out of business.

The most vigorous of these patients has been Stevinson, who has traveled back and forth between Hilton Head and Denver dozens of times, and who has footed the six-figure legal bill almost single-handedly. "I am very familiar with the histories of many of Dr. Medenica's patients," he wrote in a recent court filing, "and I know without his special treatment many will quickly die as their previous doctors and hospitals predicted they would."

During a recent visit to Denver, Rajko Medenica appears less like a high-profile physician than like an exhausted lounge act. He is dressed in a plaid sport coat and a white shirt unbuttoned at the collar. He wears creased polyester pants and carries a black bag.

His nose is long and curved, and although his body fits his tall frame proportionately, his face is jowly. He is going bald, and his hair rings his head almost like a monk's. He moves in close when he talks, and his words are wrapped in a heavy Slavic accent. His eyes are clear and pale.

He talks for only about ten minutes, most of which time is spent explaining why he doesn't have time for an interview. At the end he agrees to answer questions faxed to him at Hilton Head, and reluctantly poses for a photograph before retreating to his room at the Denver West Marriott.

He writes in four languages. He is said to have little or no interests outside of medicine and to be stubborn to the point of vice. Even West concedes that "Medenica is an arrogant fellow--I wouldn't say he lacks for self-confidence."

To his patients, Medenica's story has taken on the bright sheen of legend. As he has told it, he is kind of a mix between a Yugoslavian Horatio Alger and Albert Schweitzer. He was the youngest of seventeen children born to a ranching family in the country's Montenegro region. When he turned nine, his parents determined he was gifted and sent him to study in Belgrade in the care of his brother.

After his brother was killed by the Nazis, the younger Medenica stayed in Belgrade with a sort of step-aunt. He received a medical degree at the top of his class, and the country's socialist government sent him to Switzerland to study.

"When I was selecting my specialties during residency and internship," Medenica recalls, "I had the deep feeling that there was much to be discovered in the disease process, especially the one called cancer, because there were so many unanswered questions." Several years later he began treating his most famous patient.

"As a young specialist on staff and practicing at the University Hospital in Switzerland, I was requested personally by [Marshal Josip Broz] Tito to consult on his care, as well as some members of his family, because I was well known and respected in the medical field. I treated him until his eventual death many years later and was even credited with saving his daughter's life when she was diagnosed with leukemia."

Tito died in 1980. Stripped of his powerful patron, Medenica was tried in Yugoslavia three years later in absentia and convicted of defrauding the people of Yugoslavia by falsely billing the government's national health insurance system more than a half-million dollars. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

The following year, 1984, he was imprisoned in Switzerland on the same fraud charges. Although he eventually was released and then emigrated to the United States in 1985, a Swiss court tried him in 1989, again in absentia. Once again, he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to a prison term.

Medenica contends he was the victim of politics. He says that Yugoslavia's socialist government orchestrated the billing fraud he was accused of in both countries in an effort to keep secret the illnesses of Tito and other high-ranking officials. This was done by placing treatment fees for the officials on the bills of other Yugoslav patients. "You are told what to do, and you do it, very simply," Medenica explains of his complicity in the scheme.

He says that five of the seven countries that now make up the former Yugoslavia have since exonerated him. And he says that his attorney arranging the Swiss appeal (famous trial lawyer F. Lee Bailey) has assured him that he will be cleared there as well.

"This has been the most unbelievable, demeaning black cloud I've had to endure," he says. "I am absolutely not guilty for the Yugoslav and Swiss authorities' charges of wrongdoing, and I know that I will be finally granted freedom from all charges."

That said, Medenica probably would still be languishing in a Swiss prison today trying to convince authorities of his innocence if it hadn't been for the powerful and politically connected John West.

At the time of Tito's death, West was on his final leg as the ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He had received the posting from President Jimmy Carter, who had been governor of Georgia when West occupied the South Carolina governor's mansion. One of West's friends at the time was a naval engineer who, when the ambassador had last seen him several months earlier, was riddled with cancer.

In June West stopped by to see his friend, expecting to find him near death. "But," West recalls, "he told me, `All my tumors have disappeared, and I'm ready to work.'" The reason, according to West's friend, was that he had discovered a miracle doctor in Switzerland who had cured his cancer.

West retired from the foreign service several months later. He didn't hear from his friend again until he requested West's help in procuring a green card for his Swiss doctor--Medenica--to come work in the United States. West obliged, but declined his friend's offer of payment for the assistance. "I told him that I would just call him if I ever needed help with cancer," recalls West, who now teaches and practices law on Hilton Head. "I didn't know how soon that moment would come."

In the summer of 1981 West learned that his daughter-in-law, Susan, had a tumor in her neck. He took her to nearby Duke University Medical Center, where he recalls being told that she had a rare form of melanoma that was unstoppably fatal. He contacted his friend and called in his debt. The friend called Medenica.

Medenica saw Susan West in Switzerland and phoned John West with the news. West recalls: "He called back and--I'll never forget this--said, `John, do not worry, I can fix it.' As of today, my daughter-in-law is still here, teaching school."

A man whom acquaintances describe as a politician to the core, West was not one to forget a debt. So when Medenica was arrested in Switzerland, the former governor acted quickly. By the end of 1984 he had raised a quarter of a million dollars' bond to spring the doctor from his Swiss prison. In January 1985 he set up Medenica in a clinic at Hilton Head, although the doctor continued to practice in Switzerland as well.

If Medenica ever thought his new South Carolina practice was going to be a step down from treating Yugoslavia's rich and powerful, he was wrong: Many of the doctor's new clients were just as famous as the old, and many followed him from Switzerland. There was another South Carolinian, Richard "Dixie" Walker, the former ambassador to South Korea. There was Muhammad Ali, who first saw Medenica in 1988. And beginning in December 1987, there was a Denver millionaire named Charles Stevinson.

For much of his life, Chuck Stevinson has been blessed by a sense of firm purpose and an unwavering confidence that what he does is, simply, right. "I'm not ashamed of anything I've done," he says. "A lot of people look down on car salesmen. Well, I'm proud of what I do. I've never sold a car to a man who I can't still look in the eye."

For Stevinson's enemies, that purposeful confidence can morph into ruthlessness. When three of his employees filed racial-discrimination charges against him three years ago, Stevinson fought back hard by having an employee file forgery charges against one of the men ("Car Washed," October 7, 1992).

The former employee subsequently won the discrimination suit and was cleared on the fraud (the jury foreman even apologized to him for the trouble Stevinson put him through). Nonetheless, anyone who watched the case came away with the realization that when Chuck Stevinson's interests are threatened, he means business. If anything, his resolve only intensifies when it comes to his own health.

It was during the late 1970s that Stevinson discovered his body had betrayed him. He was diagnosed with Waldenstrom's Syndrome, a progressive cancer-related blood disease. He says he was treated in Denver, Minnesota's Mayo Clinic, UCLA Medical Center and Rutgers University. "They all told me nothing could be done for me," he says, "and I kept getting worse and worse."

By 1987 his health was deteriorating quickly. He began taking monthly blood transfusions from his sons. In November of that year he collapsed in a meeting; blood tests performed at St. Anthony's Hospital showed that the number of cancerous cells in his body was overwhelming. In short, he says, "I was fast coming to the end of my life."

A few months earlier Stevinson's friend Dixie Walker had told him of Medenica. On December 1 Stevinson called the doctor in Switzerland; Medenica told him that he had reversed Waldenstrom's Syndrome and that he was flying to Hilton Head in a couple days. They agreed to meet.

Since that time Stevinson has been Medenica's most aggressive defender, his legal bodyguard and his patron all wrapped into one. When Swiss and Yugoslav authorities pressed to have Medenica extradited, Stevinson fought to keep him in Hilton Head by filing a friendly lawsuit against Medenica. In it, he argued that if Medenica were to leave the country, his--Stevinson's--health would suffer.

In early 1989 a federal judge agreed, and issued a temporary injunction that prevented Medenica from traveling abroad. When the Swiss pressed on with their case, Stevinson, along with Ali, flew to Switzerland to testify on behalf of their physician.

Recently, Stevinson has also led the effort to appeal the ten-year-old Yugoslav verdict against Medenica by calling on political contacts he had secured through his medical relationship to South Carolina. He helped line up letters of support for Medenica's appeal from an impressive phalanx of congressional references, including South Carolina senators Ernest Hollings (who swore in Medenica as a U.S. citizen) and Strom Thurmond, South Carolina representative Floyd Spence (who referred to the doctor as "a valued friend") and then-Colorado senator Tim Wirth.

And when, last year, a handful of Hilton Head physicians began critically scrutinizing Medenica's lengthy resume and patient treatments, it was Chuck Stevinson who once again jumped out to shield the doctor. This time it was from the mounting hostilities of a medical community that was beginning to suggest that the island's most famous doctor was not everything he represented himself to be.

end of part 1