By Matthew Monks
Dean Faiello, 45, who was apprehended by Costa Rican police last year, was flown into Kennedy Airport in the custody of U.S. marshals to face murder charges in the 2003 killing of Maria Cruz, police said. Faiello, who fled the United States two years ago, was charged with murder and practicing medicine without a license, according to the Manhattan district attorney's office. He pleaded not guilty to charges of practicing medicine without a license in New York Criminal Court in Manhattan Tuesday. He was to be arraigned on the murder charge Thursday, a spokeswoman with the DA's office said. Faiello faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted of the homicide charge, the spokeswoman said.He was arrested in October 2002 and charged by state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office with the unlicensed practice of medicine but disappeared before he was to be sentenced in 2003. Cruz, a financial analyst with Barclay's, disappeared in April 2003 after going for laser surgery to remove a black tongue growth at a Manhattan apartment on West 16th Street that Faiello was using as his office, the police said at the time.Cruz went into convulsions and died after Faiello allegedly injected her tongue with an anesthetic, Manhattan prosecutors told the TimesLedger in 2004. “Under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death to Maria Cruz and caused her death,” Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said in a statement in March 2004. The 35-year-old woman had emigrated a decade earlier from the Philippines to study finance at Fordham University. Her Maspeth aunt and uncle engaged in a desperate search after she disappeared, launching a Web site and plastering the city with missing posters offering a $25,000 reward. Cruz's body was found in February 2004 inside a suitcase buried beneath a concrete platform in the garage of Faiello's former Newark home, which he had sold the previous May. Costa Rican authorities arrested him on Feb. 26, 2004. Reach reporter Matt Monks at news@timesledger.com or 718-229-0300, Ext. 156.
