'Quack Doc' Extradited
A quack plastic surgeon, suspected of performing a deadly cosmetic procedure on a New York investment banker - then concealing her corpse in a concrete coffin under his home - was finally extradited back to New York from Costa Rica yesterday.

Disgraced phony doc Dean Faiello, who had spent more than a year in custody in the Costa Rica, looked gaunt and disheveled as local authorities hauled him from his jail cell just outside San José at around dawn.

The HIV-stricken suspect was then taken to the airport, where he was handed over to U.S. marshals for the flight home.

The once-flamboyant suspect is accused of killing well-heeled financial analyst Maria Cruz in a botched surgical procedure in April 2003.

Authorities say Faiello had fled to Costa Rica after Cruz's death and was living the high life as a gay party boy when he was nabbed there in February 2004.

He had been battling extradition on charges of practicing dermatology in New York without a license.

He was arraigned last night in Manhattan Supreme Court on a charge of second-degree murder, but did not enter a plea. He was remanded until Thursday, when he'll plead to that charge and bail will be set.

Faiello will appear today before another judge on the charge of practicing without a license.

Cruz, 35, who lived alone on the Upper West Side, vanished on April 13, 2003.

For months, her desperate family distributed fliers around the city, hoping someone might shed light on her disappearance.

Months later, a pair of city detectives discovered that she had been undergoing treatment for a rare mouth condition, "hairy black tongue," a growth caused by antibiotics. She had been seeing Faiello, who billed himself as a "laser specialist," and bought something in a store near his office the day she disappeared.

Officials soon discovered Faiello had a criminal record. They tried to contact him, only to be told he had vanished.

Then Faiello's longtime companion revealed that he had spotted his pal pouring concrete under the coach house of Faiello's Newark home. Authorities uncovered Cruz's body there in February 2004.

That same month, Faiello was tracked down to Costa Rica and charged with her murder.

Authorities believe that Cruz died from the anesthetic she received during the procedure.

Yesterday, Faiello made his way back to the United States via a Delta flight that first stopped in Atlanta before heading to JFK, where he let out a big sigh upon landing.

Once a well-groomed fixture in New York and Costa Rican gay bars, a dejected Faiello sat on his flight home in baggy blue jeans and a striped, button-down, short-sleeved shirt. He also sported a scruffy beard and gold-rimmed glasses.

The cuffed jailbird, now painfully thin from disease, spent most of the flight staring out the window, reading the action crime novel "Split Second," by David Baldacci, and watching the crime-caper movie "Ocean's Twelve."

He politely declined to talk to a reporter on the plane.

Once in New York, Faiello was handed over to law-enforcement officials, including Brian Ford and Joe Buffalino, investigators for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

It was Spitzer's warrant for illegally practicing medicine without a license that got Faiello extradited.