In what seems to be stranger than fiction but is actually appallingly true and affecting at least 244 dead bodies in Philadelphia and hundreds of living loved ones is the body snatching case that will go to trial later this year. Philadelphia Attorney Larry Cohan, shareholder of Anapol Schwartz has been named by the U.S. District Court in Newark, New Jersey, as lead counsel in a class-action lawsuit against all of the defendants in the criminal case as well as the tissue companies, representing so far 900 people nationwide. Along with Attorney Melissa Hague, Cohan is representing 15 families of the unwitting donors in their lawsuits in Philadelphia court.
Like a horror movie gone wrong, dead bodies awaiting cremation and embalming were rapidly cut and destroyed by sadistic body cutters extracting bones and tissues to be sold to human tissue processors to be reused in surgeries as life saving measures.
The culprits were funeral operators Louis Garzone, Gerald Garzone, partner James McCafferty Jr.; numerous cutters who dismembered bodies like butchers on speed, slashing arms and legs at their joints, stripping skin from bones, removing spines with power tools, cross-contaminating everything and everyone. Bodies routinely piled up without refrigeration waiting to be butchered; infections damned.
On forms forwarded to tissue processing companies, the cutters reinvented everything -- new identities, new death certificates, fabricating doctors and next of kin. It didn't matter that half of the people died from cancer, sepsis, HIV, or hepatitis. Everyone was a candidate for human tissue harvesting.
The mastermind behind the entire sickening plot was Michael Mastromarino of Ft. Lee, New Jersey and Lee Cruceta, his right-hand man.
Mastromarino lost his medical license in 2000 due to drug use but regrouped in 2002 by opening Biomedical Tissues Services, or BTS, a cadaver body-parts recovery company. He had knowledge of the business through his experience as a surgeon, when he sometimes transplanted human parts into his patients. While it's illegal in the U.S. to profit from organ and tissue donation, Mastromarino would exploit a loophole that allows companies to charge for handling" and "processing tissue and bone. Bones, skin, tendons, and other tissues are transplanted in operating rooms, in more than a million procedures annually.
With very little governmental oversight plus the extraordinary medical need for human tissue, Mastromarino operated his body-snatching enterprise without question. It was a matter of supply and demand. Mastromarino had the supply and the tissue processing plants had the demand. No questions asked.
But what is the crime? Theft and fraud, but is it criminal? Attorney Cohan has the testimony from witnesses to offer: A 41-year-old man who tested positive for HIV and hepatitis C after receiving BTS bone implants in surgery for degenerative disk disease. A 30-year-old Colorado woman who had to undergo a repeat ACL replacement after her first BTS tendon failed. A 74-year-old widow who received BTS bone for a lower-back surgery then developed syphilis.
http://www.phillymag.com/articles/body_snatchers/
