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Cutting ligaments requires a careful touch. If the cut is too shallow the penis will not drop and no length will be added. If the cut is too deep the penis becomes unstable, rotating around like a helicopter blade, according to one patient. Severing the suspensory ligament also affects the angle of an erection, causing it to point down instead of up, making it difficult to have sex. In the very worst cases, a cut that is too deep will damage the nerve and make the man impotent.

Besides length, there is research on width. One of the first surgeons to experiment with penis widening was Ricardo Samitier, a Miami surgeon who was doing lip enlargements before focusing his skills on penises. The earliest technique, and one still used by many surgeons, is to liposuction fat from another part of the body and inject it underneath the skin of the penis. The problem with this method is that the fat can lump together or migrate to the middle, creating a football-shaped penis that is narrow at the ends and wide in the middle. During sex, the fat can also get pushed down to the base of the shaft and sometimes into the scrotum.

Some surgeons say they can avoid the pitfalls of fat injections with dermal fat grafts. Two long, narrow steaks of flesh are removed from either the patient's abdomen or underneath his buttocks. The two strips are sewn together. The flesh, about a half-inch thick and the color of processed meat, is then stuffed underneath the skin from an incision near the penis head. Surgeons who use fat grafts say they create a smoother penis than fat injections, but they can leave thick scars on the penis and the donor sites.

The latest method, favored by Whitehead, is to use tissue harvested from cadavers. Like dermal fat grafts, the tissue is stuffed underneath the skin of the penis. After a few days, blood cells populate the tissue and incorporate it into the body. Although the Food and Drug Administration hasn't approved the use of this harvested tissue, called Alloderm, for penis enlargements, Whitehead says the tissue is disease-free and creates good results without the lumping and body scarring. Other surgeons won't go near the stuff. "A piece of Alloderm is just like a piece of shoe leather," says Dr. Robert Stubbs, a penile enhancement surgeon in Toronto, Canada. "It's dead. Real dead."

While Long and Samitier may have pioneered the surgery, the "penis surgery king," in the words of an attorney who represented many of his patients, was Melvyn Rosenstein. According to records from the Medical Board of California, Rosenstein performed his first penile enhancement operation in 1991 and by 1995 had done 4,500. He ran ads in Penthouse magazine and in the sports sections of newspapers calling himself the world's leading authority on penile surgery and saying that his patients appear as if they have doubled in length.

His surgery center was in Southern California but he had other offices throughout the country where his sales staff worked for a $4,000 fixed salary plus commission based on the number of patients they brought in. He reported revenues of $7.4 million in the first half of 1994, according to the Wall Street Journal, and for a time was performing between eight and 10 operations a day.

He profited, it appears, at the expense of his patients. His staff rarely had more than 15 minutes to clean the operating room before the next man came in. As a result, blood often remained on the floor and liposuctioned fat that had become airborne during previous operations was left sticking to the walls and cabinets. In the later part of 1994, between 90 and 95 percent of his patients developed post-operative infections, butter-colored fluid oozing from their penises. Others walked out with penises that were red and raw, blistered, bent, lumpy, scarred, painful and lifeless. Dozens of men sued. Under pressure from the California attorney general, Rosenstein voluntarily surrendered his medical license in 1996.

Next page | If you want a bigger penis, you'll have to hang weights