A Fountain of Trouble : High hopes for Dr. John Zane’s injections made him a hero to some in Palm Springs. Now, he faces trial on various charges--including fraud.

Dr. John Zane arrived in the desert around 1989 with credentials as an attorney and a physician--and a treatment that sounds like something out of the Old West.

He charged up to $1,500 per injection with a serum that would “cure everything from hangnails to cancer,” a deputy state attorney general said in a court brief last year. Zane found dozens of customers from the Palm Springs area, many of them socially prominent, some of whom swear by the doctor and his treatment.

By last December, however, Zane had resigned from the California State Bar and his medical license had been revoked. An expert for the state wrote in a report to the Medical Board of California that Zane had engaged in “charlatanism” by peddling a serum that did little more than fuel a brief high.

The Medical Board’s investigation, in part, led law-enforcement authorities to charge Zane with two counts of fraud related to his claims about the shots. He is also charged with embezzling from three legal clients, with trial on all five felony counts scheduled for April 25. He has pleaded not guilty; if convicted on all counts, he could be sentenced to eight years in prison.

David Kogus, one of Zane’s lawyers, said last week his client had declined a written request for an interview with The Times. “He’s coming up so close to trial he doesn’t want a whole lot of publicity. I think that’s wise,” Kogus said.

Dan Goldsmith, who investigated Zane for the state Medical Board, said the case points up how even in these supposedly wiser times elderly residents of affluent resort communities can be vulnerable to a skilled salesman promising a Fountain of Youth.

“What’s most unique is he was able to convince so many people that this stuff was going to cure so many different things,” Goldsmith said in an interview. “And then they paid so much money for it.”

Zane, 62, is seeking to have his medical license reinstated. “I never promised to cure anyone,” he said in a declaration filed in civil court last year.

“I’m not stupid,” he told The Desert Sun newspaper last May. “I’m not about to tell you what I can cure for you.” Some patients may simply have mistaken his enthusiasm and optimism for a guarantee, he added.

More recently, a psychologist testified at a Medical Board hearing that if Zane had stretched the truth, it was because he was suffering from a mental illness.

Zane’s defenders range from a former congressman and an actor to a bishop and two men who are HIV-positive. They portray him as more New Age than Old West, an advocate of alternative medicine whose treatment really works.

*

Zane, a Polish-American native of Detroit whose real name is Zabinski, sold Cadillacs and storm windows to pay his way through college. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Villanova University and then received his medical training at Wayne State University in Detroit, graduating in 1957.

After moving to California as a urology resident, he built practices in family medicine and general surgery in Los Angeles and Anaheim. In the late 1970s, he obtained a law degree from American College in Brea.

While pursuing the two careers, Zane and his wife, Gertrude, who goes by the name Sunny, lived in the South Bay and joined riding clubs in Rolling Hills. They became co-chairs of the Polonaise Ball, an annual Polish-American charity event held at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.

But in his physician’s role, Zane ran into trouble. In newspaper ads, he promoted a test that could “detect cancer risk far faster and far more accurately than any conventional test.” The test, the ads said, involved taking a blood sample from the earlobe and putting it through a computerized diagnostic machine.

The state Medical Board was not impressed. Ruling that Zane had “engaged in gross negligence and incompetence,” it placed him on probation for seven years, effective in late 1982. Around the time that probation expired, he moved to Palm Springs, where he and Sunny had often spent vacations.

In the desert, he quickly built a legal practice specializing in plaintiffs’ personal-injury cases, airing commercials on local radio and TV that emphasized his dual credentials, according to local lawyers. His Yellow Pages ad shows a logo of the scales of justice superimposed on the insignia of the American Medical Assn.

“That’s the biggest hook he had,” said a former associate who asked not to be identified. “His medical knowledge was supposedly so vast that he could help you on both ends of your case.”

The pitch paid off. According to interviews with local lawyers, he captured about a third of the Coachella Valley’s total caseload of personal-injury cases. But the work was hardly glamorous and he told one associate that he did not care for it.

“Once he asked me, ‘Do you really like this law stuff? . . . I hate it,’ ” Marsha Ciniello, who was a paralegal in Zane’s office, recalled in an interview.

Zane became interested in alternative medicine in the late 1970s after researching the relationship between stress and disease, he told The Desert Sun.

Stress, he said, triggers the secretion of hormones that can cause disease. His goal was to find something that would inhibit that process. “I think by the grace of God I fell into something,” he said.

He said his shots consisted of vitamins, amino acids, zinc, chromium and Xylocaine, a common anesthetic. In Palm Springs, they were his only form of medical practice and patients came from all walks of life.

Some were legal clients, some were clergy--Zane, a devout Catholic, prided himself on attending Mass every day--and others met Zane at parties and charity events.

“He went to all the social functions,” Cindy Dawson-Austin, a Rancho Mirage resident active in local charities, said in an interview. “He didn’t just go to enjoy himself, he went to get business.”

By late 1991, Zane was talking about opening a chain of clinics. Sand-to-Sea, the desert’s social chronicle, featured a photo of him being received in Rome by Pope John Paul II on its November, 1991, cover, and lauded his charitable activities in a profile. “You have to give life to your fellow man as well as taking from it,” Zane was quoted as saying.

Two months later, he vanished from Palm Springs, having closed his office and filed for bankruptcy protection. When he resurfaced in October, 1992, Zane, a burly man who was usually photographed in a tuxedo, was wearing an orange jail jumpsuit. He had been arrested after a routine traffic stop in San Mateo County and sent back to the desert to face a host of troubles.

He was criminally charged with fraud and theft, and also faced civil suits filed by legal clients, and the bid to revoke his license by the state Medical Board.

The criminal case alleges that Zane embezzled $35,000 from three legal clients by pocketing their settlement checks. According to testimony at his preliminary hearing, he forged endorsements on checks. The State Bar, meanwhile, says it has paid $121,000 from its Client Security Fund to compensate more than a dozen clients who claim Zane mishandled their cases.

As for the serum, Zane is charged with defrauding Colin Webster Watson, an internationally known sculptor, and Nelson Cramer, an 83-year-old desert resident who testified that he paid $36,000 for 24 shots, thinking it would be “beautiful” to feel 20 years younger.

The Medical Board complaint listed several other alleged victims and Goldsmith said still more were too embarrassed to come forward.

“My impression was the affluent don’t like the publicity,” the investigator said. “Some of them were very prominent.”

The Medical Board’s case against Zane accused him of acting in an unprofessional manner, while the criminal case alleges an intent to defraud by making unsubstantiated claims for the shots. Patients have testified that he also refused to divulge the formula, telling them it was secret and he was going to sell it to investors for up to $10 million.

According to declarations filed by the Medical Board’s experts, the vitamins in the serum could have generated a “brief high.” But apart from that, the drug likely had little effect and, if it contained Xylocaine, could have been dangerous, the experts said.

In the desert, it may have been a relatively easy sell.

“The thing that was the lure is that people in the Palm Springs area, they want to be young again,” said Medical Board investigator Goldsmith. “What Zane was offering was not an appearance of youth but actually a youth potion.”

Watson, an amiable 68-year-old New Zealander, wasn’t interested when Zane first suggested the shots to him in late 1990. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m a very healthy person, there’s nothing really to cure,’ ” he said in an interview at his Palm Springs home.

But the doctor kept promoting the shots whenever he saw the sculptor at parties, Watson has testified. They could make him feel healthier and younger, clear his bloodstream--even cure his hernia, Watson said Zane told him. In January, 1991, Watson relented. He started taking the serum, paying for 24 shots with his “Leda and the Swan” sculpture, a piece he valued at $25,000.

Watson was partly won over by Zane’s faith. “He was always coming from or going to church,” he said. Moreover, Zane told him he would shortly be moving to Mexico to open a hospital there so the shots would not be available much longer, Watson said.

Even now, Watson gives Zane some benefit of the doubt. “I don’t believe he helped me. But always that one little thing comes up--maybe he did.”

Dr. Janis Neuman, an expert who evaluated Zane’s treatment for the Medical Board, had no doubts. Accusing him of “blatant fraud and charlatanism,” she said in a letter to the board, “I have never been more shocked by such immoral and unethical conduct by a physician.”

Zane has not commented on the legal fraud charges, but he has mounted a vigorous defense of his medical practice.

He got two dozen patients to submit affidavits that testified to the quality of his care and the effectiveness of the shots. They include the Most Rev. Juan Arzube, a former bishop in the San Gabriel Valley, and Kem Dibbs, 76, a Rancho Mirage resident who played Buck Rogers in the 1950s TV series.

A patient who is HIV-positive wrote, “Dr. Zane’s treatment has been a godsend to me.”

Patrick J. Hillings, a Palm Desert attorney and former Republican Congressman from Arcadia, wrote, “I have never met a doctor who was more concerned about his patients.” The shots “may have saved my life,” added Hillings, 71, who was suffering from heart trouble and high blood pressure.

At a hearing in Zane’s Medical Board case in September, there came another twist. A psychologist who examined Zane testified that if the physician had made any grandiose claims for the shots, it was because he was suffering from a form of manic depression that made him manic almost constantly.

“He became so convinced that this was kind of a miracle drug that he didn’t see the failures,” the psychologist, George Demus, recounted later in an interview.

Demus said Zane has responded well to lithium and should be allowed to resume practicing medicine. “This guy has a genius. He is brilliant. He’s got a mind you wouldn’t believe,” Demus said.

A psychologist testifying for the state disputed the diagnosis. “You can account for what he did by his antisocial traits and his narcissism,” H. Gordon Blount said in an interview later summarizing his testimony. He said Demus drew “unwarranted conclusions” from the tests he ran on Zane.

In December, the administrative law judge at the hearing revoked Zane’s medical license, ruling that Zane had exaggerated the benefits of the shots and that such behavior was “not shown to be the exclusive result” of a mental disorder.

Now Zane, who is free on his own recognizance and has been living with relatives in Los Angeles and Palm Springs, faces a criminal trial next month in Riverside County Superior Court in Indio.

The prosecution case has taken some blows. Cramer, one of the alleged victims, died last year, and Watson said he prefers not to testify. “I find this whole thing extremely unpleasant,” he said.

Richard Erwood, supervising deputy district attorney in Indio, said his office had considered a deal in which Zane would avoid jail time in return for pleading guilty to certain counts and agreeing to make restitution to victims.

Some people in Palm Springs think that would be too lenient. “He should be in jail for about five years,” said a former patient who asked not to be identified. Elizabeth Baker, an attorney who represented Cramer, agreed: “I don’t think restitution is appropriate. Who is he to inject people with stuff we don’t even know what’s in it?”

Watson said he has no vindictiveness toward Zane. The artist only cares about one thing. “I don’t mind what happens to him,” he sighed, “if I just get my sculpture back.”