Plastic Surgeon to the Stars Jailed for Using Industrial Gel

Los Angeles, the city of youth and beauty, is not a happy place to grow old, which is why it is the capital of America's $15bn (£7.6bn) a year obsession with plastic surgery. So it is no surprise to discover that it was on the slopes of Beverly Hills, that Daniel Tomas Fuente Serrano decided to ply his trade.

Dr Daniel, as his admiring clients called him, was a modern kind of miracle worker. He would offer to end the scourge of wrinkles "permanently" via injections of specially formulated chemicals.

There was a problem, however. The chemical he was using was industrial grade silicone designed to lubricate car parts; and on Monday Serrano was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

The court heard how Serrano would visit his wealthy clients at home, or throw cocktail parties where up to 30 people would be injected at $500 a go. Among his customers were the singer Lionel Richie, his former wife, Diane, and Shawn King, the wife of the CNN presenter Larry King.

He was charming and handsome, and as his business grew, sure enough so did his bank balance, to more than $1m.

The problem was that his medical credentials only extended to the borders of his native Argentina: he was not qualified to practise in the US. And as well as using industrial grade silicone he used medical silicone which is appropriate for some eye procedures but not approved for wrinkle treatment.

Serrano's racket began to unravel when several clients complained of unpleasant side effects. Mrs King, who had paid him $7,000 for injections in 2003, suffered a bump in her lower lip that made it hard to talk, she said.

One patient told the LA Times that her treatment to remove "smile lines" between her nose and mouth had caused an allergic reaction that left her, three years on, still feeling as though she had sand in her eyes.

"He was real friendly, really, really nice. He had a nice bedside manner," she told the paper.

The court heard that he had smuggled the industrial silicone, which is much cheaper than cosmetic surgery fluids, from Argentina. Court papers recounted the evidence of an informant who told the authorities she had seen Serrano filling syringes at home at his kitchen table.

He worked at the uncleaned table with unwashed bottles, filling the syringes with his ungloved hands.