He attained riches, mansions, and fancy cars. He had wives and mistresses, friends and social status. He had charm, and he had dreams. Now, Sullivan sits in a prison cell, his tousled hair a dull gray, his body bent and strained from the burden of age. He has a family he no longer knows, a fortune he cannot spend. His shadow on the prison walls is only the dimmest reminder of that determined boy who played stickball in the street.

Debra Miller Landau is an award-winning travel writer who's penned eight books for Lonely Planet Publications. Born in Canada, she started writing about crime when she researched the lives of Canada's most infamous serial killers. She is a contributing editor at Atlanta magazine.

I get a strange sensation when I think that James Sullivan sits in a jail cell just a few miles from my house. Even with Atlanta traffic, I could get in my car and be there in ten minutes. I'd like to look in his eyes, to see if there's fire, to see if he's still running away from himself, that working-class kid he despised so much it made him lead a life stranger than fiction.

What it would be like to talk to him? Would he be a crushed, aging man? Would he still be charming? Would he feign dignity, and plead innocence? Does he sit alone in the jailhouse yard, or does he have pals, buddies with whom he commiserates?

For a man who fought his whole life for control, how does he stand it, waiting for his lawyers to pass motion after motion, exploring the tiny cracks in the law, those little openings that give him a window of hope?

As the months tick by, with legal acrobatics and new extensions delaying the trial, details of Sullivan's segmented life come slapping him in the face. Just a few months after this article appeared in Atlanta magazine, district attorneys in both Atlanta and Macon announced their intent to exhume the remains of Sullivan's uncle, Frank Bienert, whose death by "heart failure" left Sullivan the liquor distributorship that eventually made him a millionaire. Did Sullivan have a hand in his uncle's death? If so, was it the trigger- the justification for everything that followed?

While combing through old court archives in Florida, reading about Sullivan's life of riches, I wondered how a guy like this could allegedly hire a trucker to kill his wife. It's a desperate story, not about one man's fall from grace, but one man's desperate attempt to get there.

It's past lights-out at the Fulton County Jail as I sit at my desk writing this. In the prison darkness, does Sullivan think about those heady days in the liquor distributorship, does he long to be sipping martinis at the Palm Beach parties? Does he, almost twenty years after her death, remember Lita's face? I wonder, as his death penalty trial approaches, if he fears death, or if his tightly woven cloak of invincibility continues to help him sleep at night.

Neil Swidey

The Self-Destruction of an M.D.

from the Boston Globe Magazine

The kid was born into medicine. He was on track to becoming one of Boston's next great spine surgeons, taking his place alongside his father among the city's medical elite. But on this day in January, the forty-three-year-old sits on the dark bench in the dimly lit gallery of Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge, watching the parade of career criminals take their familiar positions, wearing expressions of defiance or boredom. Look in his eyes, however, behind the boxy glasses, and you can see flashes of bewilderment. How did I get here? He watches as a paunchy guy charged with conspiring to kill a cop asks the court officer if he can give the large, weeping woman in the front row "a kiss and my lottery tickets" before being led away. And then the clerk calls out his number: "Case number thirty-eight-David Arndt."

As the prosecutor and the defense lawyer take their positions before the judge, Arndt advances to his designated spot in front of a tattered computer printout that reads defendant, stooping his six-foot-two frame a little so his right hand can reach the railing. He is wearing a brown pin-striped suit. A taupe trench coat hangs over his left arm.

His appearance has rebounded from the unshaven, sunken-eyed mess that was on display in his mug shot last summer, though his physique is still a ways from the chiseled, rippled showpiece it was before everything fell apart. The pretrial hearing is over in just a few minutes, and he pulls his trench coat close to his chest and exits the courtroom.

You follow him into the hallway and call to him, "Dr. Arndt."

The words stop him in his tracks. Dr. Arndt. For the better part of a decade, that wasn't just his name, it was his identity. The domineering surgeon cutting his path-loved by some, loathed by others. But respected. That identity has been confiscated along with everything else he valued so much-standing, status, power. Now he's just another David standing in a criminal courtroom wondering what his future holds. He turns to look when he hears the words. But he recognizes you, throws up his hands to block his ears, shakes his head, and walks away. You suspect he'll come back. When you'd met a week earlier, in another court, in another county, he'd walked away then as well, at his lawyer's instruction, only to return and demand that you hold off on writing about him. "To do otherwise," he told you in his sonorous voice, "would be to engage in Murdoch-style journalism." You found it surprising that this man, given what he so infamously did in his operating room, not to mention what he's accused of doing in the weeks and months that followed, would choose to deliver a lecture about professional standards.

On this day in Cambridge he returns again, and the lecture is more expansive and comes with a reading list. "Are you familiar with Janet Malcolm's piece in The NewYorker entitled 'The Journalist and the Murderer'?" he asks. "It was published in two parts. Do you know her work?"

You shake your head no.

"You should," he says.

You ask him how he came across the article.

"I read," he says, narrowing his eyes. "Didn't you take any journalism courses?"

That's when, for the first time, you begin to understand the experience many of his former colleagues have described to you. Now you're the lowly scrub nurse-or even the seasoned superior- whose competence is being so pointedly challenged by Dr. David Arndt. And, just as they have explained it, he does it in a way that suggests he has no choice but to do it, and that he is confident, in the end, you will appreciate being made aware of just how far you've fallen short of his expectations.

There's an intensity to David Arndt that never seems to slacken, a way in which he seems both hyper-aware of his very public collapse and oblivious to it. Overnight, the high-octane, Harvard-trained Arndt became the doctor who left his patient on the operating table so he could go to the bank to cash a check. In an instant, that summer of 2002, the news went national. But the profound professional embarrassment would turn out to be only the beginning. Within two months,Arndt would be charged with statutory child rape, indecent assault, and drug possession. He would file a "poverty motion," the surgeon in one of medicine's most lucrative specialties asking the court to pay his costs. And then, in a separate case nearly a year later, he would face one more charge, this one for possessing metham-phetamine with intent to distribute.