Cancer Clinic Scam Brings 2-Year Term

The 58-year-old former operator of a controversial Mexican cancer clinic was sentenced Monday to two years in prison after his conviction on 11 counts of fraudulently promising cures to desperate cancer victims.

For years James Gordon Keller operated the Universal Health Center in Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville. The now-defunct clinic drew cancer patients from all over the country--particularly Southern California--who paid up to $3,000 each for the purported cures.

But the government likened Keller to a snake oil salesman and in September, a Texas jury agreed.

Before pronouncing sentence Monday, U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela leaned over the bench and sternly told Keller that he did not believe in Keller’s cancer cures, he did not believe in his L-Arginine serum and he did not believe in his Digitron D Spectometer device.

Vela further said that the Keller case had serious national implications. If he allowed Keller, who is not a doctor, to return to the practice of medicine, the result would be “chaos, disaster, false hopes, deception and deceit.”

“If you are looking for an endorsement of alternative cancer clinics, you are not going to get it from this court,” said Vela, who could have sentenced Keller to 55 years in prison. “I think they are a menace.”

As for the ability of Keller’s Digitron (a kind of biofeedback machine) to diagnose and treat cancer, the judge said, “I think Santa Claus is more real than that.”

At the same time, in response to fervent pleas for leniency from Keller and about 350 friends, relatives and former patients who had written to the judge, Vela said he thought Keller, a former water softener salesman from Baton Rouge, La., was a “compassionate” man who believed in what he did. The judge said there was no doubt that Keller’s treatment brought “comfort and consolation” to terminally ill cancer patients.

“I believe you believe in what you were doing,” Vela said. “I also believe you don’t have a cure for cancer. I wish you did.”

The judge sentenced Keller to 18 years in prison but suspended all but two years of that. With credit for time served and other considerations, Keller could be eligible for parole in seven months or less, said his lawyer, Richard Jaffe of Houston. The judge placed Keller on probation for five years and ordered him to pay a $20,000 fine. Keller also was ordered to refrain from treating cancer patients--or anyone else.

The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. Mervyn Mosbacker, appeared distressed by the sentence.

“The court has more confidence in its ability to modify (Keller’s) behavior than I do,” said Mosbacker. “I don’t think anything is going to keep him out of business unless he’s confined.”

Keller was arrested last spring after Mexican authorities took him to the border at San Diego and turned him over to U.S. authorities, who had charged him with running a profiteering scam via the Matamoros clinic. He also has been associated with an alternative cancer treatment center in Tijuana, but none of the charges stemmed from that operation.

The charges against Keller dated to 1983 when he opened his clinic in Matamoros. Patients underwent three weeks of intensive therapy involving a macrobiotic diet that was heavy on whole grains, along with vitamin injections, live cell therapy and massive daily intravenous injections of the amino acid L-Arginine. Keller also used the so-called Digitron D Spectometer, purportedly to diagnose and treat cancer without the need for blood tests, biopsies or CAT scans--a notion the prosecutor derided as “preposterous.”

Keller conceded that many of his former patients from his Matamoros days have died. But he pointed out that more than 90% were already terminal when they came to Mexico to see him.

“If we had saved just one person it would have been a major miracle,” he said in a jail interview the day before sentencing, “but when we look around we see 30 to 35 people who are still alive and doing well. To me that is 30 major miracles.”