Gary Kimmel chicago dentist pimp
Left: Robert Lewis Young. Right: Dr. Gary Kimmel

You may have noticed a compelling headline in the Sun-Times today (via Gapers Block): "Dentist who helped pimps wants to work again." Which raises the question: wait, what?

In 2006, Bryan Smith profiled the dentist, Dr. Gary Kimmel, for Chicago. Kimmel wasn't just any dentist: he was a talented, well-trained one, an instructor at his alma mater, Northwestern, and who owned a block of condos in Marina City. Once quite wealthy, not just as dentist but the owner of a trucking company by the age of 30, a spate of bad luck forced him into bankruptcy and divorce. As he rebuilt his finances, Kimmel turned to a life of crime:

According to Kimmel's affidavit, Spears and Young paid cash to Kimmel, who maintained the cars in his own name and used the money to pay off the bank loans taken out to buy the cars. For Kimmel, the arrangement seemed the perfect way to bolster his shaky credit rating. For the pimps, the feds allege, the scheme provided glitzy vehicles that confirmed their "player" bona fides and supplied them with bait to dangle before hooker recruits dazzled by 20-inch rims and hood ornament bling.

It was the cars—not the apartments or dental services Kimmel supplied the pimps with—that did him in. Robert Lewis Young, aka "Blue Diamond," was stopped in Detroit in a car registered to Kimmel, and unwinding the Detroit pimp's relationship to the Chicago dentist uncovered Kimmel's deep involvement on wiretaps, undertaken as part of the nationwide "Innocence Lost" DOJ investigation:

Special agents began wiretapping conversations between Kimmel and Young, including several made by the dentist from his downtown Chicago office. In one series of phone calls in the summer of 2005, the two men griped about a prostitute allegedly working for Young. The woman had apparently taken off with one of Kimmel's cars, a Corvette, and the two men discussed what to do if she refused to return it. Kimmel favored a measured approach. Young spoke along more primitive lines.

"She'll scare straight," Young said, according to a transcript of the conversation.

"She commented that you threatened to kill her or have her killed," Kimmel replied.

"Doc, don't be nice to these girls, man," Young answered. "I'll get the car. I'm going to fly someone up there to get it. I'll pick her up and slam her on her f—–g back. . . . I'll cut all them legs off for you."

Kimmel was sentenced in 2009 to three years and a month on one count of money laundering, but has already been released. Young got one of the longest sentences in the immense Innocence Lost investigation, 25 years after pleading guilty on 26 counts ranging from sex trafficking to sexual exploitation of children to child pornography. The investigation's wiretaps found that Young was just as violent as his conversation with Kimmel suggested, according to investigative journalist Julian Sher in his book Somebody's Daughter:

The wiretaps revealed a particularly gruesome cruelty on Blue Diamond's part toward the women he controlled. He had impregnated one of them, Doll Baby, with twins and then beat her so bady she had to go to the hospital with broken ribs.

Part of Young's guilty plea involved paying $67,000 in child support for his 12 children.