Grisly tales about human organs of dubious origin, illegally harvested in the US, are being heard in a New York court. This shocking story has worrying implications for patients and their families in the UK.
ONCE upon a time it was the glimmer of a hooded lantern and the damp scrape of a shovel in midnight kirkyards, as the "sack-em-up men" went about their grisly business. Today, it is covert dissections behind the discreet facades of funeral parlours i
n New York, Pennsylvania or New Jersey, as latter-day bodysnatchers ply a multi-million dollar illicit trade in human body parts.
In New York's Brooklyn Supreme Court, Michael Mastromarino is expected to plead guilty to leading a ring which illegally removed organs, tissue and other body parts from as many as 1,000 corpses – including that of the BBC correspondent and author Alastair Cooke – and selling them on to the tissue transplant industry.
Mastromarino, a former dentist who took to extracting considerably more than molars, faces up to 54 years in prison if convicted of crimes including body stealing, unlawful dissection, corruption and forgery, but in the hope of reducing that sentence has agreed to speak to investigators about his dealings with companies supplying tissue for transplant surgery across the US and Canada.
He is accused of running a company which paid funeral directors up to $1,000 (£500) per corpse, to access bodies and remove body parts that were then sold to tissue banks and agencies for use in hospitals with forged papers implying families had given permission for the body parts to be taken. Last week a nurse, Lee Cruceta, said to be the "lead cutter" in the illegal body parts ring, told a Philadelphia court that he had removed body parts from 244 cadavers and helped forge paperwork, concealing case records of Aids and cancer, and lowering the recorded ages of the deceased, so that the material could be sold on for use in the treatment of unsuspecting patients.
In the US, the illegal removal and resale of body parts from mortuaries is thought to be worth between $500 million (£255 million) and $1 billion (£510 million) per annum. Mastromarino has yet to make his plea, but his expected disclosures could cause seismic shifts in the industry. "He can certainly tell us things that may lead us in directions we haven't been able to go before," one law enforcement official has said.
Cruceta, pleading guilty to charges including conspiracy, abuse of corpses and 244 counts of theft and forgery, is expected to testify against the other defendants to reduce his sentence. In New York several funeral directors have pleaded guilty to being complicit in the ring's activities, while three Philadelphia directors have pled not guilty and are awaiting trial. Some of the companies that processed tissue stolen by Mastromarino's outfit already face hundreds of civil lawsuits, although they claim that they had no idea the parts supplied had been taken illegally.
The body parts removed by the gang could fetch as much as $10,000 (£5,057) apiece, although, according to Philadelphia's assistant district attorney, Bruce Sagel, the tissue banks would resell them to hospitals for many times that amount. Mastromarino's ghoulish enterprise is thought to have earned him between $6 million (£3.04 million) and $12 million (£6.7 million) since 2001. The activities of these latter-day bodysnatchers first made headlines two years ago, when Mastromarino, 44, who ran a company called Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS), was accused of illicitly dissecting corpses, including the remains of the veteran broadcaster and author Alastair Cooke, who died of lung cancer in March 2004, aged 95. As the deceased broadcaster lay in a mortuary in Upper East Side Manhattan, his arm and leg bones were cut out (he was cremated the following day) and allegedly sold on to Regeneration Technologies of Florida and Tutogen medical of New Jersey, making as much as $7,000 (£3,583). Cooke's pelvis and other tissues were also "harvested" but their ultimate destination remains unknown.
Regeneration, now merged with Tutogen, is thought to have received almost 19,500 tissue items from BTS. When detectives investigated the Manhattan mortuary in December 2005, they found records suggesting that authorisation had been granted for Cooke's organs to be used after death, but members of his family denied that such permission had been given.
Many hundreds of other corpses, in funeral parlours across the north-eastern US, were similarly violated, as BTS operatives covertly dissected them, extracting bone, skin, cardiac valves or tendons and delivering them to companies and non-profit agencies specialising in providing essential organs and tissues. According to one source familiar with these operations, to avoid the dissected bodies arousing suspicion, missing bones could be replaced with convenient lengths of rigid material such as PVC piping or even broomsticks. The stolen body parts and tissue were processed by established companies and found their way into knee and hip replacements, dental implants and many other surgical procedures, with some 10,000 people thought to have unknowingly received tissue procured by Mastromarino's company.
The unsavoury activities of the New York resurrection men emerged after one Robert Nelms purchased the Daniel George Funeral Home in Brooklyn and found documents which suggested illicit dissection had taken place on the premises. Quite apart from distress caused to relatives of the deceased when they find a body has been dissected and parts removed without their consent, there is a risk that cadaver tissues, if not properly screened and checked, may carry infections, including the HIV virus, and as a result of the recent revelations, hundreds of tissue recipients have been suing the companies involved, despite protestations that the parts had been properly sterilised.
Among those pointing the finger at the legitimate companies are Cooke's daughter, Susan Cooke Kittredge, who has said that Regeneration did not check her father's medical records or find out if he had indeed agreed to donate body parts. Kittredge, who described herself as "shocked and saddened" by the case, has accused the companies concerned of being as guilty as Mastromarino: "If you look at it through an ethical lens, they committed the same crimes as Mastromarino. They lied. They committed fraud. They did harm and exhibited reprehensible greed."
Last year Kittredge, a Congregationalist pastor in Vermont, wrote in the New York Times that the revelations had left her "slack-jawed. Just last week I discovered the unsettling detail that it was my father's legs that were cut off and sold," she wrote. "To know his bones were sold was one thing, but to see him standing truncated before me is another entirely." She has also expressed her approval of recent introduction of legislation governing the removal and transference of human tissue in Britain and Europe.
In Scotland, we have the salutary legacy of the bodysnatchers – the "resurrection men" and Edinburgh's favourite serial murderers, Burke and Hare – to remind us of what can happen when the unscrupulous set out to supply a medical market desperate for cadavers. Strictly speaking, of course, Burke and Hare were not bodysnatchers: unlike their hard-working contemporaries, in answering the demands of medical research, they dispensed with the inconvenience of having to dig up the dead by simply murdering their victims.
After a sensational trial, during which Hare turned Queen's evidence, Burke was hanged in 1829 and publicly dissected. Their client, the reviled Dr Knox, was exonerated but left Edinburgh.
It is unlikely that Mastromarino will be dissected for his crimes, but his case has raised the possibility that legislation governing the removal and retention of body parts may be revised in the United States following the case, much as the Anatomy Act of 1832 followed the heyday of the resurrectionists.
"It may well be that this is sufficient of a scandal for people in the US to feel they should look again at the legislation they have in place," says Professor Sheila McLean, director of Glasgow University's Institute of Law and Ethics in Medicine.
"I don't think there's a lot of this going on, however. What you've got here is a maverick, so it means the law must work for most people."
While some of the tissue "harvested" by Mastromarino and company is thought to have found its way to Britain, McLean – who chaired the Independent Review Group on the Retention of Organs at Post Mortem – says that such illegal body-parts harvesting is unlikely to happen here.
She points to recent legislation, both in Scotland and south of the Border, which now covers removal and retention of tissues at post-mortem examination.
"This doesn't specifically relate to, but assumes, that the human body is not something that people can buy and sell parts of.
"Even if somebody was to do a Burke and Hare in this country now and start stealing parts, there just isn't a market for them here because we don't treat the body as a commodity."
A very different situation prevails in the US, she says, "where they tend not to go for broad-brush legislation in medical legal areas, and there's a slightly laissez-faire approach.
"However, having said that, they would not have anticipated this kind of practice. Even in a relatively unregulated society, there are certain assumptions made about the respect due to dead people and to their families."
In the UK, the nearest comparable controversy to the New York affair was the Alder Hey hospital scandal, in which it emerged in 1999 that doctors had been removing the organs of dead children without the consent of their families.
As Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, calls for a national debate on whether all UK citizens should be automatically placed on a donor register unless they formally opt out, in any society the desecration of bodies, whether for profit or otherwise, remains taboo, as Mastromarino and company may find to their cost.
ALASTAIR COOKE is not the only notable deceased to have had his mortal remains rudely disturbed. Fame doesn't necessarily command respect when it comes to one's final resting place.
CHARLIE CHAPLININ 1978, the year after Chaplin's death, his body was stolen from its resting place in Corsier-Sur-Vevey, Switzerland, by a gang of Poles and Bulgarians, in an attempt to extort some of his £12 million inheritance from his family. The grave robbers were caught, however, and the corpse recovered, to be reinterred under two metres of concrete to prevent any further such enterprises.
NAPOLEONAlthough le petit caporal is buried amid extravagantly marbled pomp at Les Invalides, Paris, his remains are not quite as complete as they should be. The emperor's penis is thought to have been sliced from his body after death, allegedly by the priest who administered the last rites, and it emerged in a Christie's auction in 1969, catalogued as "a shrivelled object".
GOETHEIn 1970, in a clumsy attempt to preserve the body for posterity, East German cultural commissars broke into the crypt containing Germany's greatest poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had died in 1832, and boiled the corpse in petrol. The tomb raiders photographed the writer, who couldn't have been looking at his best, and recorded details such as the dimensions of his skull.
EINSTEINThe brain which came up with Theory of Relativity was removed – allegedly with its late owner's prior consent, although the family didn't necessarily agree – after Einstein's death in 1955. Pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey photographed it and cut it into several pieces, which became the subject of much study, not to mention controversy. He preserved the brain sections in alcohol in two jars until they were unearthed in 1978.
OLIVER CROMWELLAfter dying of natural causes in 1658, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth was buried in Westminster Abbey, but following the monarchy's restoration in 1660, his body was disinterred and hanged for regicide, his head mounted on a pole in Westminster Hall. It later disappeared, to supposedly re-emerge in private ownership the 1770s. Scientists examining the alleged Cromwellian head in 1935 concluded it was authentic.
RONNIE KRAYTHE brain behind much East End thuggery was removed by Home Office pathologists – apparently without the permission of his widow, Kate – in 1995, following the criminal's death in hospital. After the Kray's MP, Harry Cohen, raised the issue in the Commons, the offending brain was found in a jar in the hospital and is now buried beside him and his brother Reggie.
ROBERT BURNSThese days we toast his immortal memory, but Burns's mortal remains were rudely knocked about on two occasions. In 1815 his body was dug up from St Michael's kirkyard, Dumfries, to be re-interred in the newly built mausoleum there, then, in 1834, the night before the burial of his widow, Jean Armour, phrenologists took the opportunity of making a plastercast of his skull and assessing the bardic bumps.
The full article contains 2147 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
