It's starting to seem like there's no safe place for your feet these days—not on subway seats, not on the street, and definitely not in the hands of a fraudulent, murderous, calloused podiatrist. Jeffrey Toobin (no stranger to controversy himself lately) details the strange web of criminal podiatry that has spread through the city in the last two decades in this week's New Yorker. Much of it revolves around Citywide Foot Care, a defunct podiatric empire whose doctors were accused of charging patients for unnecessary and non-existent procedures, as well as defrauding Medicare—they targeted 'alta cocka,' "which is an old person of frail mind...these people were easily swayed into having surgery.”

Altogether, 13 Manhattan podiatrists were charged, and eventually sentenced, after much legal wrangling. Another podiatrist in Chicago, Ronald Mikos, is currently on death row for the murder of a witness who was going to testify against him in a Medicare-fraud trial. One Manhattan criminal-defense lawyer, who has represented several podiatrists, summed up the recent wave of podiatry terror: “These are the people who had no hope of getting into medical school,” the lawyer said, echoing “Seinfeld.” “They are three steps below dentistry.”