At Mercy of a Court Abroad

For nearly two decades, Joseph Pantuso ran the facial-peel business that his grandmother made famous in Hollywood in the 1950s, when she treated stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Gloria Swanson.

Now Pantuso sits in Mexico City’s maximum-security prison, held without bail for the last 14 months, waiting for a verdict in his first-degree murder trial.

Pantuso, 59, and his assistant are accused in the 1997 death of an elderly Las Vegas producer who was undergoing the wrinkle-removing treatment at Pantuso’s Mexico City home. The prosecution first argued that Pantuso killed the man by poisoning him, then changed the accusation to say Pantuso had strangled him. It didn’t present any evidence as to why Pantuso would want him dead. Pantuso says the producer was a longtime friend who must have been felled by a heart attack or some sudden illness.

Pantuso and his assistant, Fernando Martinez, are being tried under Mexico’s Napoleonic justice system, in which suspects, once indicted, are presumed guilty until they prove their innocence. Judge Maria de Jesus Medel Diaz is expected to issue her verdict within a couple of weeks.

Pantuso is one of 400 to 500 U.S. citizens imprisoned in Mexico, the country with the largest share of the estimated 2,000 Americans who are in custody abroad. Like Pantuso, many try to enlist the help of the U.S. Embassy or members of Congress, to very limited effect.

Pantuso’s case is a cautionary tale for anyone forced to mount a criminal defense abroad. Vast and confusing differences between the U.S. and foreign legal systems often complicate the task.

In Mexico, there are no jury trials. The outcome of a case depends as much on legal arguments submitted in affidavits as on oral testimony from witnesses. And whereas the U.S. common law tradition relies on precedents set in past cases, Mexico’s civil law system is built on detailed codes interpreted by legal scholars, giving Mexican judges much less leeway than their U.S. counterparts.

A Mexican judge must rule within 72 hours of an arrest involving a criminal charge on whether the suspect is “probably responsible” for the crime, and bail is automatically denied in cases where the average sentence would be five years or more. That can leave U.S. defendants such as Pantuso stewing for months in Mexico City’s notorious Reclusorio Oriente prison, waiting for the wheels of Mexican justice to turn.

Grandmother Made Name in Facial Peels

Pantuso grew up in Los Angeles during the years his grandmother, Cora Galenti, built up her Hollywood business of facial-peel treatments--guaranteed, she said, to make people look 20 to 40 years younger. She later ran into legal problems herself, including lawsuits involving allegations that she maintained were fabricated by jealous competitors. She moved her business to Mexico City in 1963 and died in 1993 at age 96.

Pantuso came to Mexico in 1979 and took over her clinic in 1981.

The deep peel burns off layers of skin, with what Pantuso called minor discomfort, removing fine wrinkles. Other clinics in the United States and Mexico offer similar peels, and derivations such as laser-based peels have emerged, although that treatment remains controversial.

One devotee of Galenti was George Arnold, a family friend born in Glendale who had been treated by Galenti and Pantuso five times over 30 years. Arnold was something of a celebrity. He produced Las Vegas stage shows, including his trademark “Nudes on Ice.”

Arnold “was a dear, dear friend, almost a member of our family,” Pantuso said in a jailhouse interview. “I would have no interest in doing him any harm. There is absolutely no motive.”

In his testimony during the trial, Pantuso said he would in no way have gained financially from Arnold’s death, nor did he have any dispute with his 76-year-old visitor.

But the prosecutor handling the case, Rolando Sanchez Inda, said in his written summation in March that the medical evidence showed that Pantuso and his assistant held down and fought with Arnold and forced him to ingest one of the chemicals used in the peeling procedure to sedate him and reduce his resistance. Then, the state says, the two men strangled Arnold, asphyxiating him and breaking a vertebra.

The state maintained that it had proved “time, method, place and occasion” of the crime. But the prosecutor did not suggest a motive.

Pantuso, a slender, intense man, has receding light brown hair flecked with gray. His cheeks are smooth, the result of a peel he says he gave himself 10 years ago.

Pantuso recounted his version of what happened:

In December 1997, Arnold came to Mexico City for a “retouching,” or partial treatment, and stayed with Pantuso. The morning of Dec. 26, Pantuso said, he treated Arnold’s cheek in his home. The treatment uses a phenol-based chemical to burn off skin layers, followed by the application of a yellow substance, thymol iodide, on the area to help it heal.

“He was lying in bed, and suddenly jumped out of bed and fell into the wall and collapsed on the floor,” Pantuso said. “He hit the end table and fell. I lifted him up, and I noticed some bleeding from his mouth and nose. . . . I could see he wasn’t breathing.”

Pantuso said he performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation “in a very forceful way” and gave Arnold oxygen with a mask. “He seemed to respond; some kind of breathing began,” he said. “I applied heart massage very rigorously. He was seated against the metal bed frame, but his head was lolling.”

During the rescue attempt, Pantuso contends, Arnold must have swallowed some of the thymol iodide that was on his face.

Pantuso said that his assistant, Martinez, was elsewhere in the house when Arnold collapsed and that he ran to Martinez to tell him to summon help. An ambulance crew arrived a while later but could find no pulse.

The crew noticed the yellow residue on Arnold’s face and alerted police. Pantuso said that, because of the rescue attempt, he had Arnold’s blood on his shirt, which the police collected along with other items.

“I told the police the truth,” Pantuso said. “I told them what happened.”

No Charges Would Be Pressed, Lawyer Told

Pantuso and Martinez were held for 48 hours for questioning, then released. Over the next six weeks, they were questioned further and they reenacted what happened. “We answered hundreds of questions,” Pantuso said.

Their lawyer told them he had been informed that charges would not be pressed.

Pantuso said he was deeply distressed by all that had happened. “It was a shock when a dear friend died in my home,” he said, “and that they could think I was somehow responsible. How could they blame my treatment, after 60 years of success?”

Although the treatment is considered a cosmetic procedure, it requires a license. Pantuso said that as director of his company, he holds the license.

After Arnold’s death, Pantuso said, he couldn’t bear to stay in Mexico City and moved to Guadalajara. There, he set up a new clinic, with Martinez again as his assistant, advertising heavily on the Internet and building up a new clientele.

Pantuso said the business thrived. That, he suspects, angered plastic surgeons whose businesses were threatened by the chemical procedure.

On Feb. 16, 2000, he said, he was arrested and brought to Mexico City, “and I was thrown in this horrible facility.”

“I imagined that at the worst they would try to blame my treatment for provoking the death. But the charge was first-degree murder?” he said. “I just couldn’t believe it. How was this possible?”

The defense challenged Arnold’s autopsy as unprofessional and replete with errors of procedure and interpretation. But the autopsy results remained the basis for much of the case that evolved against Pantuso and Martinez.

Testimony went on for almost a year.

The state’s forensic experts appeared to contradict one another. The early evidence alleged that the thymol iodide had caused the death. In December, however, the judge brought in an independent forensic specialist, Ofelia Amezcua. Her report said that because the levels of thymol iodide in the body weren’t quantified, “it cannot be determined that [thymol iodide] would have caused the death.”

Amezcua said, instead, that the injuries suggested that Arnold had been strangled--a new theory in the trial, which the prosecution adopted in its final argument.

State Had Conflicting Versions of Events

Pantuso’s lawyer, Jorge Vasquez, argued in his summation affidavit that the conflicting state versions of what happened make it impossible to convict Pantuso.

Vasquez maintained that strangulation would have left scars or other damage in the soft tissue of the neck, evidence of which was absent in the autopsy.

“The basic rules of logic must be taken into account,” Vasquez added. “The official experts of the prosecution and the ‘disinterested’ [independent] experts have strayed from the facts of this case. Some maintain the death was caused by intoxication, while others suggest a case of hypersensitivity to a substance (without specifying which one), and another suggests the victim was strangled.”

Pantuso’s legal troubles are not the first for the Cora Galenti face-treatment empire. Galenti, an Italian immigrant, defied the medical establishment with her chemical procedure, which she built into a $10-million-a-year business run out of her 23-room villa in the Hollywood Hills. She charged a then-immense $3,000 for a three-week stay--for the phenol-based treatment and for a pampered period of healing to let the swelling and redness subside.

In 1959, she was charged with practicing medicine without a license, and other lawsuits followed. She won most of them and moved to Las Vegas. Another lawsuit followed, and she moved again, to Mexico City.

Pantuso’s sister, Joanna Herbert, has fought relentlessly to rally people to her brother’s defense over the last year. She and other relatives have repeatedly appealed to the U.S. Embassy and have written to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and even to the White House and Mexican Cabinet members, pleading for their intervention.

Herbert, who lives in Houston, described Pantuso as “a very decent person. He is very artistic; he’s a wonderful painter. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s a very gentle person, very kind, very liberal. That’s how we were brought up, to help everybody.”

Pantuso, who agreed to be interviewed for this article only after months of family pressure, said he’s confident that the court will find him innocent but is worried that the business his family spent decades building will be tainted.

“It’s illogical that I would permit any sort of negligence that would reflect badly on 60 years of good, quality work,” he said. “I’m extremely proud of the work that my grandmother and I have done all these years.”