Word: ghadiali
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Gold in a Gadget. The Spectro-Chrome (TIME, June 2, 1947) soon became a million-dollar business for white-goateed, bespectacled Dinshah Pestanji Framji Ghadiali, born in Bombay 74 years ago and a naturalized U.S. citizen* since 1917. Since 1920 he has sold at least 10,000 memberships at $90 apiece (recently hiked to $100) in his "Spectro-Chrome Institute." Members got the machine, plus a "favorscope" which tells the best time for starting treatment; for $3.50 a year they could get up-to-date guidance from Ghadiali; for another $10, they could get new panes if the old ones...
Since 1945 the Federal Food & Drug Administration has been trying to douse Ghadiali's lights. Last January, in Camden, Ghadiali was convicted of introducing a misbranded article into interstate commerce; he was fined $8,000, the institute $12,000, and given until the next week to pay. Ghadiali appealed, brought in 112 patients who claimed they felt better. The Government countered with grimmer testimony: a son testified that his father, a diabetic, died after three weeks' treatment; the husband of a woman with tuberculosis said his wife lost 40 pounds, then died; a woman said her son died...
Search for the Gullible. Last week Food & Drug agents moved in on the block-long institute building at Malaga, N.J., impounded every Spectro-Chrome in the place. Then they trucked five tons of Ghadiali's instructions, magazines and correspondence to the Camden city incinerator. The FDA has also filed 25 suits to recover other known machines elsewhere, but has no idea how many others are still...
...Ghadiali dazzled a federal court into believing he was a Parsee-Zoroastrian, thus a Caucasian and therefore eligible for citizenship under the law then in effect...
...prosecute the charlatans who "invent" such gadgets, Food & Drug has to get legal evidence-from clinical tests, from physicians, or from the families of patients who have been harmed or killed. Prosecution is rarely easy. Inventor Ghadiali, for one, escaped with a $20,000 fine and an injunction to get out of business...