ARNOLD-L Archives

From: Vickie and Tom Travis <>
Subject: [ARNOLD] George Arnold of Glendale, California
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 23:49:15 -0700

George Robert Arnold
born: January 18, 1919
Died: 1997

Georgie was the man on stilts with the original Ice Capades with Sonja
Henie. When Las Vegas was becoming a famous town he took his ice show
there. He was well known as the producer and owner of the Nudes on Ice
show which believe it or not was on Los Angeles television numerous
times. Of course the skaters were dressed for the televised events. He
also was at one time part owner of the original Aladdin Hotel and
Casino. He was a confirmed bachelor and left no family. Georgie was the
last of a generation to pass away.

His parents were:
Frank Norman Arnold - A dentist
Born: February 15, 1876 in Mahoning County, Ohio
and
Edith Rogers a socialite of Pasadena, California

Their children were:
Frank Theodore Arnold
born: January 22, 1911
died: June 1984
He was a Dentist

Richard Thomas Arnold
born: July 30, 1913
died: ca:1970
He was a screenwriter and producer for the film industry

Norman Rogers Arnold
born: February 22, 1917
died: currently unknown

George Robert Arnold
born: January 18, 1919
died: 1997
Las Vegas Ice show producer

The following newspaper article appeared in the Thursday, April 26, 2001
Ventura County Edition of the Los Angeles Times, Front Page. It is
temporarily available at the following link and copied below.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010426/t000035350.html

At Mercy of a Court Abroad
A facial-peel client's death left an American imprisoned in Mexico,
where mounting a defense proves to be far more complicated than in the
U.S.

By JAMES F. SMITH, Times Staff Writer


MEXICO CITY--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."



Copyright 2001 Los
Angeles Times

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• [ARNOLD] George Arnold of Glendale, California by Vickie and Tom Travis <>