U.S. Operator of Mexican Cancer Clinic Held in S.D.

A 57-year-old former cancer clinic operator in the Mexican border city of Matamoros was ordered held without bail in San Diego Monday after U.S. authorities arrested him as a fugitive in connection with an alleged profiteering scam at the now-defunct clinic.

The suspect, James Gordon Keller, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Tijuana--where he has been involved with another cancer-treatment clinic since 1983--told would-be patients at the former Matamoros facility that they could be cured through unorthodox treatments not approved for use in the United States, according to a federal indictment handed down in 1984.

Among the procedures employed at the Matamoros facility, the indictment said, were the use of crystals, herbal teas, vitamins, massages and injections with an unapproved drug, called “Tumorex,” which purported to “drive the cancer from the body,” the indictment said. Clients from throughout the United States paid $2,500 to 3,000 each for the asserted “treatment and cure of cancer,” the indictment states.

Since December 1983, Keller has been associated with a cancer-treatment center, St. Jude’s Clinic, in Tijuana, according to his attorney, Frank J. Ragen of San Diego. None of the criminal charges stem from his Tijuana activities, but pertain to what supposedly occurred in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville in southeastern Texas. No one answered the telephone Monday at the Tijuana facility.

Many U.S. citizens with cancer and other illnesses regularly travel to Tijuana and other Mexican border cities seeking alternative treatments--such as Laetrile, a derivative of apricot pits--despite warnings from U.S. officials and physicians that the therapies and injections offered in Mexico are often useless, if not dangerous.

Many alternative-treatment clinics have long existed in Mexican border cities, often charging patients more than $1,000 a week for an array of treatments not legally condoned in the United States.

The 1984 indictment charged that Keller and his colleagues “did devise and carry out a scheme to defraud and to obtain money and property by means of false and fraudulent representations, pretenses, and promises.” The defendants informed prospective clients that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Assn. “did not want a cure for cancer because it would bankrupt the medical profession and the Social Security system.”

Keller and his colleagues also used a device called a “Digitron D Spectrometer,” which purportedly could diagnose cancer when a plastic plate attached to the machine was held by a patient or placed over a Polaroid photograph of the person, the indictment stated.

Mexican authorities in Tijuana turned Keller over to U.S. officials along the U.S.-Mexico border at San Diego on March 18, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Keller was handed over at the border after he reported a theft of $200,000 from his safe in Mexico, Assistant U.S. Atty. Peter Sholl said in court. Word of the theft was passed on to San Diego police officers, one of whom recognized Keller’s name from the outstanding federal arrest warrant, Sholl said, leading to his expulsion from Mexico.

In court on Monday, Sholl argued that Keller, who has no license to practice medicine, had raised “false hope” in sick patients, some of whom had forgone more traditional treatments in order to sign up with Keller’s regimen.

“To this day, the defendant is running the same type of clinic and engaging in the same type of activity in Mexico,” Sholl said.

U.S. Magistrate Harry R. McCue, ruling that Keller was a risk to flee the area, ordered that the suspect be held without bond at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego. Keller is expected to be ordered returned to Texas on Friday to face the charges.

The courtroom was filled with relatives and other supporters of the gray-haired, bearded Keller, who says in court papers that successful alternative treatments of his own melanoma had led him to develop considerable “expertise.”

If convicted on all counts, Keller could face up to 63 years in jail and up to $22,000 in fines, federal officials say.

Keller has been a fugitive since October, 1984, when a federal grand jury in Brownsville, Tex., handed down the 13-count indictment alleging that he and nine others--including a son and a brother--had engaged in a conspiracy to defraud prospective patients at the Matamoros-based clinic, which was known as the Universal Health Center. Keller served as executive director.

Still fugitives in the case are two co-defendants--a brother, Ronald J. Keller, and June Aurora Douglas, both one-time clinic employees now believed to be living in Mexico, according to Joseph Hanley, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in San Antonio, Tex.

Keller’s son, David Guy Keller, was convicted on related charges and sentenced to a federal prison term, a fate shared by two other co-defendants, said Mervyn Mosbacker, assistant U.S. attorney in Brownsville. Federal authorities dropped charges against the four others, Mosbacker said.