By Afsun Qureshi

Mileydi Pimienta, 27, a would-be South Beach model, hoped to jump-start her career with implants. She wound up with uneven, deformed breasts. Through several procedures intended to correct the original damage, Silvestre's work left her even more disfigured. Suspicious, Pimienta discovered too late that he was not licensed. Her police complaint sparked the investigation. "I do feel some responsibility for what happened to me," she says. "I did a very thorough investigation, but by then it was too late."

New mother Jeanette Bernal, 33, wanted to regain her pre-nursing bust line. She was left with what looks like a double mastectomy after several botched procedures, and even had to undergo emergency removal elsewhere of an infection-ridden implant.

"As a woman, to lose my breasts has been very difficult," says Bernal, whose longtime boyfriend left her after the surgeries.

Miami physician John Cassel, chief of plastic surgery at Baptist Hospital, is scheduled to operate today on the three.

Lawyer Spencer Aronfeld has already sued Silvestre and associates on the patients' behalf, hoping to help pay for the upcoming series of reparative surgeries. "This was just mutilation," Aronfeld says.

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