Brendan Crawley said the charges against Alex L. Orbito, a “psychic surgeon” who previously treated movie star Shirley MacLaine and John Robert Wood, who was allegedly the fixer who solicited clients for Orbito’s Toronto sessions, were withdrawn on Jan. 20.

“The decision by the Crown to withdraw the charges against Messrs. Wood and Orbito was based on the Crown’s assessment that there was not a reasonable prospect of conviction,” Crawley said.

He could not say why the Crown attorney handling the case felt convictions were unlikely.

Wood declined to comment on the Crown’s decision to drop the charges.

On June 14, 2005, Toronto police charged Orbito, then 65, and Wood, then 62, with one count each of fraud over $5,000 and one count each of possessing the proceeds of crime.

The charges followed a Toronto police raid on a Scarborough hotel where Orbito was alleged to have ministered to between 200 and 500 patients over two days last summer.

Wood was alleged to have arranged the healing sessions for Orbito, who travels the globe practicing spiritual surgery with his bare hands.

Police said they seized $6,000 in Canadian and U.S. cash from the rented room.

Toronto Detective Michael Barsky, the officer who spearheaded the case, declined comment.

Psychic surgeons, including Orbito, claim they reach into the bellies of the sick — without making incisions — and remove the “negative energies” making them ill.

Unbelievers insist the operations are a hoax.

They accuse psychic surgeons of hiding small balloons filled with animal blood in their palms, then popping them just as their hands are supposed to slide into patients’ stomachs.

When psychic surgeons pull their hands back, debunkers say, they pass off chicken hearts and livers buried in the blood balloons as tumors or growths making patients ill.

Barsky told the National Post last summer that Wood lured potential clients to the faith healer by claiming he had cured Wood’s wife of breast cancer, a disease Barsky said investigation revealed she never had.

Wood has since provided documents indicating his wife, Carol Wood, had a cancerous mass removed from her left breast on June 24, 1994, at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto.