Ethics advocate’s public zeal for integrity masked his personal failures

I quoted him over several years when he was the deputy executive director of the Nevada Board of Osteopathic Medicine, helping to build cases against osteopathic doctors facing discipline. He argued for tough punishment of doctors who betray the public’s trust by exploiting or betraying their patients. After a local doctor was found guilty of seven counts of malpractice and five counts of unprofessional and unethical conduct in September 2005, Trey said he was quitting because the board’s punishment of two years probation was too light.

I quoted him in 2004 when UNLV’s Ethics and Policy Studies master’s program ceased taking ethics students for a year. Even though he was obtaining his masters in ethics, he was willing to speak out against what he believed was a weakening of the program.

Once a year, I usually saw him at “We the People.” Like me, he is a regular volunteer in the competition where high school students vie for honors based on their understanding of the U.S. Constitution.

My first contact with him was in 1998, when he was a young Democratic activist, a staffer in Rep. Shelley Berkley’s fundraising department. Trey liked public policy and he was witty.

Trey was one of the good guys.

I thought.

Then Review-Journal reporter Paul Harasim broke the story June 23 that Trey, whose official name is John Delap III, had admitted to being a thief to support his gambling addiction.

He had pleaded guilty in April to felony theft for misappropriating $34,000 from Administrators in Medicine, a small nonprofit that offers training for licensing boards that investigate osteopathic doctors. He was ordered to pay back the money and was placed on probation for five years.

Charges are expected to be filed against him in a pending investigation by the attorney general’s office into whether he also embezzled from the Nevada Board of Osteopathic Medicine, where Trey worked between 2002 and February 2006 when his resignation took effect.

The news story stunned me. Trey was someone I knew and liked. It made me question my judgment of character. I had no idea he gambled, much less was addicted.

Nor did Craig Walton, former head of the Ethics and Policy program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was one of Trey’s advisers and has known him for eight or nine years.

“He was bright, energetic, committed to medical ethics, a person of great promise,” Walton said Friday, calling his graduate student “right up there with the best.”

Walton said, “I had no idea he gambled. … It was a double life.”

We both admitted that despite living in Las Vegas where gambling addiction isn’t exactly a rarity, neither of us saw any signs that Trey had a problem.

My efforts to reach Trey via cell phone and e-mail were unsuccessful, and Walton said he hadn’t tried to contact him yet because “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

Trey was tough on wrongdoers. When 10 students at University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ first graduating class in the School of Dental Medicine used someone else’s password to falsify records, he was adamant. Even though he knew he had embezzled money, he wrote a letter to the Review-Journal in June 2006 saying the school should have no tolerance for the “morally aberrant conduct” of the dental students and the students should lose their degrees. (They didn’t.)

Trey was clearly a hypocrite, demanding ethical behavior from others but not himself.

But Walton hopes people can feel compassion for him. “It’s a heart-rending story and I hope it would be good for him to know that we care about him,” Walton said.

Doctors who faced punishment by the board while Trey was deputy executive director are not so forgiving.

Dr. Michael Jenkins, who couldn’t practice in Nevada after his license expired unless he reapplied, blames Trey for his licensing problems in 2004. “We are currently living in my home state of Montana and are on public assistance programs due to the fallout of the denial by the (osteopathic board),” he wrote.

No question but Trey has exposed himself, and the board, to claims like Jenkins’, who believes he was persecuted by the board.

Just like those doctors he fought so hard to discipline, Trey Delap betrayed people’s trust. But it makes me wonder how many other people I know, and like, might be hiding their addictions.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call 383-0275.