Bernie Salick's Business Is Cancer

Dr. Bernard Salick is an accomplished physician, but his true calling is business. A kidney specialist, Salick parlayed his first medical practice into a string of dialysis centers back in the 1960s. He bought a pony for his three daughters and ended up building one of the largest commercial horse-breeding farms in California. When his middle daughter contracted bone cancer in 1983, Salick stopped practicing medicine and began building a pioneering national chain of cancer clinics under the name Salick Health Care Inc. He sold the business for $480 million in 1995 but continued to run it until last year. "I am incapable of relaxing in the usual ways," he says. "I relax by making deals."

At 58, Dr. Salick is now immersed in the most demanding round of dealmaking in his hyperactive career. In 1997, he set up Bentley Health Care Inc. to develop two more national networks of outpatient clinics--one specializing in cancer and the other in HIV/AIDS. Salick is negotiating deals in a half-dozen cities, crisscrossing the country in his Gulfstream III jet from his base in Los Angeles. But the immediate focus of his ambition is New York City. A native New Yorker, Salick figures that the best way to establish his new company's bonafides nationally is to storm the country's largest and arguably most hidebound health-care market.