Undertakers 'made $4.3m from body parts'
Pastor Dale Morgan
Undertakers 'made $4.3m from body parts'*
By Jon Hurdle in Philadelphia
October 05, 2007 10:11am
Article from: Reuters
THREE Philadelphia funeral directors led a scheme in which more than
1000 cadavers were dismembered in dirty surroundings and the parts sold
to doctors who put them in patients, a grand jury has charged.
Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne Abraham released the grand jury's
report alleging the men made $US3.8 million ($4.3m) from the sale of
body parts in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey between February
2004 and September 2005.
Accused are Louis Garzone, his brother Gerald Garzone and James
McCafferty who ran a funeral and crematory business.
The three allowed permitted Michael Mastromarino, a disgraced former
dentist, and a team of so-called cutters to remove body parts such as
bones, skin and tendons in an unsanitary embalming room, the report found.
Thousands of people who needed, for example, to replace broken bones or
repair torn tendons may have received parts from cadavers infected by
HIV, hepatitis, sepsis and other diseases, the report said.
It was not immediately clear if any of the recipients fell ill.
The scheme took tissue from 1077 bodies in New York, New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, including from 244 cadavers in Philadelphia funeral homes
operated by the defendants.
The scheme "took businesses normally associated with compassion and
caring and perverted them into something ghoulish, greedy, dangerous and
criminal," the report said.
In 2006, the Garzones closed their funeral homes and surrendered their
licences after the Pennsylvania Department of State said they may have
permitted body parts to be removed from cadavers. The men did not admit
wrongdoing.
At least five Philadelphia-area hospitals, and 41 across Pennsylvania,
implanted tissue from Biomedical Tissue Services (BTS), the company run
by Mastromarino, according to the report.
Veteran British broadcaster Alistair Cooke, who died in 2004, was among
those whose body parts were sold to BTS.
Bodies at the funeral homes often sat for days without refrigeration
before the tissue was harvested.
One corpse sat for 113 hours after death, violating a medical protocol
that tissue must be harvested within 15 hours of death to be safe for
use in a living person, the report said.
The grand jury urged the strongest prosecution of the conspirators and
recommended a series of measures including banning funeral homes from
performing tissue recovery, making the theft of body parts a felony
crime and requiring all tissue agencies to be licensed by the state.