An anticoagulated 51-year-old woman with a mechanical mitral prosthesis, which had been implanted 12 years earlier, sustained an acute anterior wall myocardial infarction caused by an embolus in the mid left anterior descending coronary artery. After treatment with tissue-plasminogen activator failed to lyse the obstruction, we performed intracoronary catheter-aspiration embolectomy via a transradial approach, which yielded a favorable result.