Body parts replaced with pipes, clothing

By Sarah Childress
Newsweek

March 6, 2006 issue - In November 2004, New York Police Det. Patricia O'Brien went to the Daniel George and Son Funeral Home in Brooklyn to check out what she thought was a routine business dispute. The new owners of the home complained that the man who'd sold them the place, Joseph Nicelli, had walked off with some of their money. But when O'Brien began looking around, she discovered something odd. On the second floor of the funeral parlor, directly above the room where bodies were embalmed, was a sealed space outfitted like an operating room, with a surgical table and bright overhead lights. She also found FedEx receipts with the names of companies that purchase human tissue from cadavers for use in surgical procedures. Something was clearly not right. O'Brien called in the department's Major Case Squad, and went to work unraveling the mystery.

Last week prosecutors charged four men, including Nicelli and the ring's supposed leader, a former Manhattan dentist named Michael Mastromarino, with running a multimillion-dollar body-snatching business that looted bones and tissue from more than a thousand corpses. The men, they say, then sold the body parts to legitimate companies that supplied hospitals around the United States. Hundreds of unsuspecting people have received the tissue, which is used in such procedures as joint and heart-valve replacements, back surgery, dental implants and skin grafts. Many are now rushing to doctors to be tested for tainted tissue. Some have already filed civil lawsuits. (One New Jersey lawyer alone has signed up some 200 clients.)

Kings County District Attorney Charles Hynes didn't try to hide his disgust in announcing the 122-count indictment, which included charges of opening graves, body stealing, forgery, grand larceny and racketeering. "What happened here ... is like something out of a cheap horror movie." (Lawyers for all the men have insisted their clients did nothing illegal.)

Mastromarino, who once had a lucrative dental practice, surrendered his license in 2000 because he was addicted to the painkiller Demerol. He started a new career as a body harvester in nearby New Jersey, opening Biomedical Tissue Services, an FDA-registered company that appeared completely legit. Nicelli allegedly got many of the corpses from funeral directors in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia who had hired him to embalm them in his Brooklyn facility. A single harvested body could yield $7,000. Even after Nicelli sold the funeral home, he allegedly continued to help Mastromarino sneak into the secret operating room at night to dissect corpses. To hide their crimes, prosecutors say, Mastromarino and his cohorts replaced looted bones with plumbing pipes, and stuffed their surgical gloves and gowns into the bodies before stitching them back together. After robbing the bodies, the men allegedly forged death certificates to hide that the tissue had often been stolen from bodies that would have been rejected as donors being too old or sick.

If convicted, Mastromarino and his alleged partners could face 25 years in prison. That's meager comfort to hundreds of transplant recipients all over the country who are living with pilfered, possibly contaminated, tissue inside them. The FDA has tried to calm fears, insisting it is very unlikely that anyone will suffer serious health problems, since processing companies tested and sterilized the tissue before sending it to hospitals for implantation.

The assurances haven't stopped the wave of anxiety among recent transplant patients. When 46-year-old Jeff Reynolds was told by his doctor that the bone fragments used to repair his neck had come from a suspect company, the father of two from Dayton, Minn., took a blood test and came up positive for hepatitis A. Doctors say the bones probably aren't to blame, but Reynolds can't think of anyplace else he could have contracted the disease. When he first found out, he says, "I couldn't sleep. I'd dwell on it. I'd have dreams about it." Reynolds can be forgiven for worrying: because the operation might have made him sick; but also because the bones in his neck should, by all rights, be halfway across the country, six feet under.